Nimue Brown's Blog, page 440

Druidry and Drunkenness

There are some for whom the image of Druidry is inexorably linked to excessive alcohol consumption. I’ve heard plenty of comments, and also Paul Mitchell’s wonderful song ‘I’m a much better Pagan when I am pissed’ but I’ve also never been in a Druid gathering where there’s been anything beyond merriness. It could be that I’m too obviously sober to get invited to that sort of gathering in the first place, of course.

I have no problem with drunkenness as a life experience. Most of us do it some time or another. It’s very hard to discover where your natural boundaries are without testing them. I’ve tested mine. I’ve explored what inebriation does to my mind and body, and seen what it does to other people. I’ve never been prepared to use it as an excuse to behave in ways that I wouldn’t the rest of the time. My suspicion is that many people who claim they were so drunk they didn’t know what they were doing, are lying, to themselves as much as anyone else. I’ve been falling over drunk. I’ve never done anything voluntarily that I wouldn’t have done when sober. Failures of co-ordination don’t count, I think. Starting fights, getting off with people you claim you wouldn’t normally go near, vandalising stuff… if you’re together enough to do any of these things, you are choosing.

I use alcohol in ritual. I particularly like the more Heathen tradition of passing round a mead horn and making toasts. It’s a very easy thing, so long as the horn goes round a couple of times even the most nervous and inexperienced person usually manages to say something. A simple toasting of the company, the gods, the ancestors… it doesn’t take much. I think getting everyone actively involved is an important aspect of ritual, and a little alcoholic toasting can make this happen. It’s also very communal and bonding, sharing the cup, and the diseases… there’s an intimacy to it that has a value. I’ve been in plenty of toasting situations where the non-drivers have become merry, and this has not detracted from the ritual at all. Group rituals, especially open ones, are not the place for very deep and very quiet introspective work anyway, so there’s nothing to lose.

The Greeks had Dionysus, and I’m sure his equivalent crops up in many other cultures too. The God of the vine whose blood is quite literally wine, and who is celebrated with excessive consumption. The traditions of my own lands include periods of misrule and mayhem, a collective letting down of hair and venting of whatever you need to get out of your system. Drunkenness has a place in misrule, in celebration, ritualised rule/taboo breaking. More modest degrees of merriment have a place in social bonding and let’s face it, being slightly drunk in the right context is a lot of fun.

Falling over drunk is not very amusing, although the spectators can get a few laughs at your expense. Yes, I once got so drunk that I fell off my high heels into a book case, and was covered in bruises the next day. I learned from this. I don’t wear stupid shoes any more. I also don’t get that drunk anymore for the very simple reason that it isn’t fun. Throwing up isn’t fun – not done that one, but have helped enough other people deal with booze induced spewing. Being unable to protect yourself from sexual predation isn’t fun and while the onus should not be on anyone to avoid becoming a victim, the sad reality is that when you are off your face, you are desperately vulnerable to violence, theft, sexual abuse and really evil practical jokes.

Changes of perception and brain functioning can make for spiritual experiences. I’ve never felt moved to try and use alcohol this way, but assume it’s feasible. It is after all a manifestation of nature to take within the body, and it has been deemed to be the blood of Gods, so there is justification for exploring the spiritual impact of booze. However, a thing is what you make of it. You’re only likely to get an alcohol induced spiritual experience if you set out in search of one. Rolling out of a bar to vomit in a back alley is unlikely to give you a moment of numinous wonder.

Of course there’s no one tidy answer here. There are times and spaces for all things. There is room in Druidry for times of excess. Balance is not about just holding the safe middle ground. You can create balance through extremes as well. The question to ask is, do your actions serve you? Are you getting something out of them? If alcohol brings merriness, social lubrication and a warm fuzzy feeling of connection to everyone else, then why not? If you are in the business of poisoning yourself and acting out, then there are problems. There’s a Roman motto, that comes out as ‘in wine, truth’. It isn’t the truth of the vine that counts here, it’s the truth of who you are and what you do with it.

The power of senses

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. So reliably true, that one. No matter how much I try to be aware of that which I take for granted, it’s hard to see what has always been there. The lesson of the last couple of weeks has been all about taste and smell. Normally I have a really good sense of smell. Colds of course will take that away, but this is the first time when I’ve been unable to taste properly. There were days when I couldn’t even get mouth tastes.

Inside the mouth, we perceive sweet, bitter, tangy, salt and hot as basic flavours, but most of the nuance comes from what we can smell of the food as aromas percolate upwards into the nasal passages. I have no idea what went wrong with the mouth tasting, but by Christmas day, everything I put in my mouth was like cardboard, taste wise. It made me highly aware of textures in a way that normally I’m not, because the only way to distinguish between foods at that point, was the feel of it. There’s a startling diversity to the feel of eating different fruits and vegetables, I realised. That was a discovery. I’ve lived thirty five years and never truly appreciated the wonder of food textures before. Hopefully I can hang on to that.

Eating good food is one of life’s pleasures. I became aware of how much is lost when the flavour goes away, how mechanical and grim a process food consumption is when I can’t taste anything. And then the miracle of occasional flashes of flavour. A moment of perceiving something, the sheer relief of chilli or pepper getting through my system to register in my brain. Taste became a source of wild excitement, in tiny, unpredictable bursts. I’m still not quite right.

I also started to realise that I could tell, putting something in my mouth, how much fat content it had. Even though I couldn’t taste anything, on some level I was picking up fat content as a source of interest. I have no idea what the mechanics are, but our bodies are wired to respond to fats. Could I have this awareness all the time and just not have been noticing it? Or is it too subtle a thing to register consciously when all that flavour information is coming in too?

Deprived of my sense of taste, the whole experience of tasting has become something of a holy grail for me. The value of it is elevated in my mind where probably I wouldn’t have thought about it before – I just took it for granted.

I’ve learned to be grateful for the awkward life lessons that allow me to rethink things and understand anew. For me this is part of my Druidry, that learning how to take a setback or a problem and turning it into something useful, or meaningful. It makes it easier to take the knocks. I spend less time saying ‘bloody hell that was not something I deserved’ and more time going ‘I wonder what I can make that into?’ so there are practical advantages, and I do sometimes learn a thing or two.

New year plottings

I’ve kept a diary since I was eleven, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Each year, the New Year’s resolutions have gone in, and for most of my life that’s been a yearly ritual of beating myself up a bit. For most of the way the intention to become thin and somehow attractive has underpinned my intentions every year. I did not have a good body image in my teens, I can’t say my twenties represented a vast improvement, while pregnancy left me with a lot of bulk. I’m nothing very unusual in any of those things. The standard New Year’s resolution to get fit, thin and healthy, is mostly about the thin bit. I’ve also made an abundance of worthy resolutions, to do more, try harder, achieve something. In essence these are all ways of reminding myself that I’m not really good enough as I am.

Over the last few years I’ve become more conscious of the ways in which I beat myself up. It helps that I have no external encouragement to do that anymore. I’m working on not doing that. I’ve also learned, via some self help and New Age books, the rather important truth that negative statements don’t work. “I will get thinner” is in so many ways a negative statement. “I will have a healthier lifestyle,” is a better way to be thinking. Positive affirmations are easier to work with and fulfil, and encourage warm thoughts about the self. Very few of us are going to benefit from having a stick to beat ourselves with.

Still, as the New Year rolls round and the arbitrary calendar date approaches, I still get the inclination to make resolutions. Old habits die hard. Plus its traditional, and I’m a total sucker for that. 2012 was a really hard year for me. For most of it there was just one horrible challenge after another, with a lot to stress over, a lot that did not go smoothly, the pressure of constant scrutiny (now mercifully at an end) and some legacy mental health issues that have been painful to face, much less fix. A bloody hard year, made harder by the incessant rain. I’m hoping 2013 will be gentler with us, although there are several big challenges ahead that I know are going to demand a lot of me.

Resolutions then. No diets. No worthy, virtuous try to turn into a much better person sort of projects. I’m a work in progress, and I accept that. What I really want for myself for this next year is to get the depression and anxiety under control so that they stop sucking the marrow out of me. To this end, it is my resolution to devote more time and energy to fun things. This will include getting to more events, where I get to meet cool people, travelling to see friends, taking time off, and making more time for the good things in life. I expect there will be a lot of work along the way, but this next year is going to have some play time in it as well.

Becoming a druid

Every now and then I get a message from someone who wants to become a Druid, and feels the need for input. I’ve also noticed that search terms around getting into Druidry bring a lot of people to this blog, so clearly it’s a question plenty of people are asking. Although I think there are two distinct things going on.

One is the practical side. People hear something about Druidry, it interests them and they want to know more. What do we do? How does it work? The question of how to get started is part and parcel of that enquiry. It’s not the easiest thing to answer because where you need to start depends on who you are, where you are and what you want. If there’s a group meeting near you then going along and meeting some actual Druids and doing a bit of ritual may be a good way in. Perhaps you’re academically orientated and need a study course – OBOD at http://www.druidry.org would be my first suggestion, but ADF and Henge of Keltria also inform, and there are plenty of smaller groups and informal teaching materials out there. Budget, desire to join, relationship with authority – these also inform where you might want to go to start off. Are you an urban proto-Druid working with culture or social justice? Are you a rural proto-Druid out planting trees? The answer may not be simply about where you live.

Working out what kind of person you are and what kind of Druidry you want to do is really important when looking for courses, mentors etc. Of course until you have some exposure it’s not always obvious what it was that you needed to be looking for. Druidry is a broad, diverse tradition, so poke around, explore, experiment, ask questions and see what feels right. There’s no point doing things that feel weird, silly or wrong. If there’s no resonance in your heart, the practice is not for you, try some other group, or teacher, or Order or aspect.

No sane person will expect you to be able to dive right in and Be A Druid from the start. You aren’t supposed to magically and intuitively know how to do it all. You will find there are things that you do magically and intuitively know, though, and these are the ones to run with. Give yourself permission to make mistakes, take wrong turnings, change your mind and then get out there and see what happens. Don’t expect perfection from yourself, or from anyone else. Teachers are also human, Orders are made by humans, it’s all a work in progress and some of it is going to be flawed. This is not something to get cross about, just something to deal with as you learn to flex and find your own way.

Alongside the practical information search there is an issue of permission. This has been visible in a lot of the queries I’ve had. People tell me about who they are, what they do, what they know, and sound me out to see if I think they’ve got the makings of being a Druid. I’ve never said ‘no’. As I see it, it’s not about whether a person is qualified to be a Druid, but whether they want to be a Druid. If you want it enough, you will put in the work that will take you forward to the point where you feel entitled to call yourself a Druid, and to a place where other Druids will recognise you as being one. No one can give you that, or do it for you.

We have a culture where qualifications and certificates are the norm, where vetting and examining are a given. If you want to be almost anything in this life, you can expect to be scrutinised, judged, assessed, and you may be found lacking. You may not know enough or have the right bit of paper. Doors will shut for you.

Druidry can be academic and intellectual, and it can be highly skills based. However, there s no one with the power to say that you are, or are not a Druid. This is a spiritual path, and really what happens on it is between you and whatever you engage with. I can’t make you into a Druid. I can’t give you Druidry like a diploma. But I can say this. You are a human being and therefore you have all the necessary qualifications to study Druidry. You are drawn to Druidry and therefore you have the potential to become a Druid. You have every right to explore as you wish.

Now you need to give yourself permission, and take your own steps down your own path.

Escapist Druid

In the last week, I’ve spent time in Middle Earth, visited Japan with Arriety, wandered Wonderland and seen something of the surreal world of Professor Elemental. In the physical world, I’ve not been more than ten miles from my usual haunts. This combination is not unusual for me. I travel more in thought than in body. The mind can go anywhere, unhampered by cost, timetables or physical health. I always was a daydreamer.

In my imagination and meditations, I can go to Stonehenge or Avebury. I can go back to scenes and places of abject wounding to try and reclaim parts of my soul. There are otherworlds to explore, imaginatively, even if I’m not confident of my ability to make real journeying. (How do you tell?) As an author I’ve always lived a lot in my own imagination.

It’s grey, wet and cold here. Yet another rainy day, but at least the wind has dropped. It’s so wet underfoot that walking and cycling are miserable, and I don’t have a car. I have nowhere to go, and am still ill. The imagination calls. I’m surrounded by books, each one of them a doorway into another world, or time, or location. My childhood was full of books, and this sort of escape. Life always seemed too narrow, dreams could take me anywhere, and usually those dreams were shaped by books. Aged 11, I wrote quite a long story for a school project that was supposed to be “how I became famous”. I pictured myself as a successful author, so involved with the fictional world I’d created that I became unable to function in the real world, and was only able to re-engage after a train crash allowed me to fake my own death and start over. That was the future I saw for myself, aged eleven. Lost in my own imagination, isolated, a bit mad, but writing books. However rich the dreamworlds might be, there was always that skein of darkness in the mix.

I didn’t get that life, for which I am grateful. I’ve learned a thing or two about the escapism and the lands of dream and fiction, too. They only work when they hold real life resonance and relevance. Go too far into fantasy and you get nonsense. Alice in Wonderland may be surface nonsense, but it’s the existential crisis of Alice that makes it compelling. How do any of us know who we are, after all? Or what the rules really are? Wonderland is also the insanity of this world.

I escape into books and films looking for inspiration, wonder and enchantment. When life seems grey, or I’m ill, those escapes give me back a sense of possibility and magic. The trick is to bring that with me, back to here and now, and do something about the greyness, or my perception of it, or share a flicker of possibility with someone else.

Two years ago to the day, I married a fellow dreamer. Someone with whom I can make the journeys to those other places, and come back again. It’s the dreams we make for our own shared life that are the most powerful, though. Daring to imagine better ways of living and more potent things to be doing. Refusing to become banal, resisting mediocrity and the insipid norms of the consensus reality. If fantasy tells you that you can’t have those dreams as real things in this life, then the fantasy itself is doing it wrong, and exists to trap you, not to set you free.

If, as my younger self imagined, the journey into creativity is a one way ticket to madness and isolation, you’ve missed the point. It’s not the going there, it’s the coming back, and what you bring with you from the journey. Because if you bring it back and make it shareable, it becomes real. At eleven I didn’t understand the power of a story told, the magic of sharing a daydream. It’s not the lonely place I thought it would be, and out of those dreams, all kind of real things are born.

The quest for self

I follow Jo’s blog http://www.octopusdance.wordpress.com with a mix of fascination and bemusement. I’ve blogged here in response to her writing a few times now. I think Jo is a brilliant blogger, and I am intrigued by the reflections that come from her blending Zen and Druidry. I’m also very conscious that I’m reaching for something entirely different, but that often means I find her words very helpful, enabling me to get some sense of where I’m not going.

I’ve come to realise that the loss of self and the endeavour to live wholly in the moment are not for me. I do strive to be present, but am aware that my life exists very much between past and future in a way that I am not inclined to relinquish. Rather than wanting to relinquish self, I’m working to know and understand who I am with a view to developing and growing into something more like who I want to be. As Paul Newman said in the comments on my last post, “Who am I?” is the most important question to ask, from this perspective.

I’m engaged in an ongoing process of picking apart my beliefs, assumptions and habits, to find out what they are made of, whether they make sense and if I want to keep them. In parallel I keep experimenting to try and find out, based on what I actually do, what kind of person I am. If this sounds in any way weird, self referential, navel-gazey, and rather an odd way to go around thinking about myself… well, it is. But, I’ve had my perceptions and sense of self messed with so badly that the only sane way forward I can see is to try and dismantle what I can and rebuild.

I came to believe that I was an unreasonable, aggressive, demanding, ungrateful, lazy sort of person, irrational, fond of emotional blackmail, manipulative, dishonourable, perpetually dishonest, a lousy parent, sexually cold and more… I came to a place, some years ago where I either had to reject this entirely, or the depth of self loathing and feelings of worthlessness this had engendered would have driven me to suicide. I had no sense of self worth in those days and an increasing suspicion that the only positive contribution I could make to the world would be my death. This is not, I must observe, a very good place to live. Retrospectively I am a lot more suspicious about the way those feelings were engendered in me. But I still have the fallout to deal with, and a sense of self woven through with misinformation, fear and wounding. I don’t want to be that person any more.

Now, perhaps there are ways of releasing and melting the self, zen-style, that would solve this for me, but I’ve no idea how to do that. I get the impression that in zen, the act of letting go of the self would solve all this. It doesn’t speak to me. Even the promise of relief from pain is not tempting enough, it turns out. I don’t want to let go. I want to understand.

As with the recent illness example, there’s a process. Slowly, I get some sense of why I feel as I do, where beliefs have come from and what holds them together. That enables me to consider how useful they are and whether they are supported by good evidence. Where I can see, rationally, that I’ve been led to think in certain ways because it served someone else, I can consider trying to think differently. Emotions are slower to shift but I’ve been told they will follow the thoughts in time and that I can use my rational thinking to re-craft my emotional self. So I’m trying to do just that. Thinking, experimenting, trying to work out what is intrinsically ‘me’ as opposed to things that were inflicted on me from the outside. Much of who I am owes to my environment, but is there an intrinsic self? Are there qualities or attributes, preferences, feelings that are ‘me’ and not about external influence?

If those core things exist, I want to know what they are so that I can build on them, confident of my foundations, and get on with trying to figure out how to be a person. I suspect, if the unpicking process simply unpicks, and only ever finds new knots to unravel then there will come a morning when the quest for self, becomes, all by itself, a more zen-like quest for no self. I’ll keep reading Jo’s blogs not least so that I’ll have some sense of how to proceed if that happens. And if it doesn’t, if I find a core that I believe is intrinsic to me, essential to me… if I find a sense of my own soul and identity in a way I can talk about, I’ll come back and talk about it.

Everything you know may be wrong

One of the things about learning, in any subject, discipline or aspect of being, is that the information changes. This year’s splendid insight becomes next year’s embarrassing mistake. To learn in an ongoing way, it becomes necessary to be willing to challenge, poke, reinvent and sometimes entirely throw away beliefs and ideas to move on. Deciding whether the new information is rubbish, or the old idea is outdated is never easy. I’m no more in favour of the philosophy that old is wrong than I am of clinging at all costs to what we think we already know.

The act of quitting the mainstream for any alternative view of the world, requires a person to ditch a lot of assumptions. Druidry calls for this. You have to reconsider your relationship with the land, your ancestry, the future, and everything you interact with. This takes a while, and there’s a lot of pressure to go back to the familiar old ways, to the life of TV, commute, work pointlessly, and consume.

Shifting towards a life of contemplation, meaning, minimal consumption and looking for work that has innate worth, is demanding and challenging in so many ways. It also rewards us in ways we could not have imagined before we started.

Of course I did all of that years ago. It would be very easy to get smug and comfortable with what I have now, to assume that I know it all, have it all figured out, am living in the best way possible. That would be a druidfail of significant proportions. The thing about learning is that you don’t get to do it once and have that be it. Learning is a process and a way of life, not an event. There are always new things to learn, deeper truths to find, insights to explore and changes to make. I can always aspire to do better than I have done, to go further. I can always challenge myself. The day I decide I’m good enough and can stop trying is the day I cease to be a Druid.

I’m currently wrestling with perceptions about my own body and identity. I have long carried the belief that I’m a bit of a hypochondriac. I’ve been told I have a low pain threshold, make a fuss about nothing. I also fear that I’m lazy and that if I don’t feel like doing something that has more to do with idleness than illness. And so last week when I started feeling ill, I just kept pushing to carry on as normal. Unless a fever actually puts me in bed, that’s what I always do, to make sure I’m not acting out of hypochondria or laziness. What’s happened is that I’ve progressively got more ill, to the point whereby I have to consider that I’m not making a mountain out of a molehill and that I really do need to stop.

This has been hard for me. It takes me deep into some long held beliefs about myself. Those are safe, familiar beliefs and I know how they work. They go with a bunch of other beliefs about worth and ability to judge. Even though these beliefs are having the effect of making me more ill than I evidently was, I still want to cling to them. I don’t think that’s unusual. This is my reality, my sense of self. If I relinquish that, who am I? What have I got? What do I know? Scary stuff. I would have to start from scratch and figure a lot of things out again. I’d have to admit how many years I’ve been going round holding a wrong belief, and I’d have to feel a bit stupid for having done that, which is also threatening. It would be easier to carry on being who I had been, holding my beliefs, doing what I’ve always done. Except there’s a real possibility that if I keep disbelieving my own body, one of these days it’s going to kill me.

Letting go of belief and assumption is not easy. Just recognising that these are ideas and opinions, not unassailable facts is a pretty hard process. Changing beliefs that I’ve held for years is alarming, and difficult. But here I am, in the duvet, and I’m trying to think differently.

Everything I thought I knew could be wrong. Every day is a new opportunity to reinvent both myself and my entire understanding of everything. It’s both liberating and intimidating.

Other people’s festivals

I’m not really working today, here is a thing that tom made for your entertainment…

Surreal season’s greetings

So were going to get the Queen in 3d on Christmas day. For those outside the UK, I feel the need to mention that thus far, the Queen’s speech has never been a high octain event renowned for action sequences. It’ just a woman with a posh voice talking to a camera. Now, all the queenly excitement, in 3d. What is going on?

The pop charts are full of old hits, a strange phenomena that owes everything to internet downloading. Apparently we’re all getting nostalgic for cheesy 80s pop. Not that there’s any shortage of new cheese available for pop music fans, but a lot of that turns out to be covers of old cheese.

This morning brought 160ish flood warnings for the UK, and yes, to use the proper meteorological term, it’s well and truly pissing it down here. Roads and trains are in chaos, supermarkets are packed and high street shops are failing to make ends meet. Right outside the window, right now, climate change is strutting its stuff, and very loudly and moistly announcing its presence. No doubt a great many Christmases are going to be wrecked by the weather, with flooded houses, cancelled travel, and we’ll get a sprinkling of tragedies too, I expect. Cornwall has enough flood risk to put life in danger.

But we’ve got the Queen in 3d.

The government are going to help struggling businesses by making it easier to sack people. Because we all know that nothing improves growth like laying people off, and the one thing you really want to be able to do at this time of year, is get rid of all the pesky people who actually did the work. It’s another random, pointless gesture that won’t help anyone. The politics of fiddling while Rome burns. Their borrowing goes up, and their ideas get ever smaller and less helpful. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, would be an apt description. As the country slowly floods and drowns, not one of them has dared to suggest that this unprecedented, nightmarish flooding might have anything to do with climate change. That might require them to do something, although at current rate, they’ll probably ‘help’ us by adding extra tax to umbrella sales and rationing wellie boots.

The end of civilization did not come with a bang this week, but we’re going out with a slow, pathetic whimper.

But in the meantime, pull up a chair, if you still have one, because the Queen’s on the telly in 3d. Only, no one’s got any glasses.

Innate Paganism

I wanted to offer this as a counterpoint to yesterday’s Channelling the Folk. I am sure there are the odd ancient Pagan remnants floating about out there – I’m just very wary of over interpretation, another theme I’ve been banging on about lately. However, there is the issue of innate Paganism, that which ‘bubbles up’ (as Theo put it so evocatively at Druidcon).

I’ve long believed in the idea of innate Paganism. It goes like this. The realities of life – the weather, seasons, agricultural cycle, landscape etc impact on us, if we’re paying any kind of attention at all. When we respond to those things, we may well end up doing what people do – it’s not like there are an infinite number of potential responses. Get to the cold, dark time of the year and a desire for warm fires and a bit of colour is pretty natural. Get the main harvest in, whatever it is in your part of the world, and some celebrating is called for. Music, dancing, and drinking tend to feature because these are the happy things we’ve had widest access to for longest.

You don’t need any shared origins or much beyond the whole ‘being human’ thing to get to the cold, dark, damp days and think ‘bloody hell, I could use cheering up’. And so we invent stories and rituals, celebrations, costumes, colourful things and happy music, reasons to feast and special cakes to feast upon, to cheer ourselves up. It is an innately human response to an innately natural experience.

For me that’s the absolute essence of what Paganism means. It responds to the intrinsic parts of life – sex and death, food and farming, the wheel of the year, the cycles of our lives, the mysteries of existence as we experience it, the wonder of sun, moon and stars, the power of water, the secrets of soil. It recognises these essential, life giving things and wants to respond to them. The Pagans of old may well have been seeking control over a hostile world. We still try and do that with science but may have to learn it won’t work either. Where we seek to understand, to honour, and celebrate, what we get is going to look a lot like Paganism.

You do not need insight into the thinking of the ancients for this. You don’t even need to know that there is such a thing as Paganism, or have any kind of conscious creed. You just need to be living on the earth with awareness and, as Mary Oliver puts it ‘Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves’.

It doesn’t give us right answers. If you get to midwinter and, like the bear want to embrace the darkness, go into the cave, dream the long dream of winter, then fine. If, like the tree, you are bare and still, waiting for the spring, so be it. If you are struggling to survive, hunting and foraging and trying to keep warm, it’s a grim season. If you need the camp fire and the story teller to get you through the long nights, that’s a perfectly natural reaction too. Even the people who head off to warmer climes are enacting something natural enough, migrating like the swallows.

We are natural. What we do comes from our own natures. The only time we get this ‘wrong’ is when we’re so busy trying to be modern and separate that we ignore what our own natures are telling us, and so disconnect ourselves from the rest of nature too.

Be alive. Be human. Be present in the world. If you respond to that experience with love and gratitude, with respect and honour then what comes will be Pagan, and will probably have more in common with what other Pagans do, than not.