Nimue Brown's Blog, page 443

Inner wilderness

I’ve read Women who run with the wolves (Clarissa Pinkola Estes) twice now and the idea of connection between wilderness and inner wilderness has been with me for a long time as a consequence. Mostly as a theory. I let myself become domesticated and mostly tame a long time ago. My creature self chafed at the bit, and frequently tried to misbehave, get off the leash, wanted to run and hide and do all the needful things that would give me my life back. But I wore the leash for a long time, and it was not wholly of my own making.

The last few years have been a time of retreat for me. We’ve lived quietly, close to nature, with not much stuff. Evenings of candlelight and soft talking. A lot of walks and cycling. I’ve not held responsibility for anything much outside my own family, and I’ve been very much caught up in the practical realities of boat life. That might seem like further taming and domestication, but it hasn’t been. I learned how to howl, and how to laugh from my belly. I learned how to grieve, and how to be angry. Bit by bit, I let that animal self express, and breathe.

I know when to turn the computer off and go outside. I know when, and how to say ‘no’ to anything that needs saying no to. As a side effect I’ve come to feel a lot more able to say ‘yes’ as well.

These last few months I’ve been out in the world again, doing events, seeing people I’d not seen for years, re-connecting. In the last week I’ve been invited to a Druid gathering, and to be on standby as a mummer, just in case. Old threads come into the new weave. I’ve worn skirts again – of necessity it’s mostly been trousers. But I’m dressing more like I did in my college days and I feel more like a me I can recognise. It’s a good process.

I can feel, in a really tangible way, the wildness on the inside waking up again. Not like it was before though. This is a wildness that knows where its roots are. The wildness of a forest tree that has deep and stable connections with its soil. The wildness of birds that know how to do all the things that make them birds and keep them alive. The wildness of my communal, sociable friend the badger, pottering about, wide arsed and badgery. Nature comes in many forms. Wildness is not all growly and in your face and shagging everything, necessarily. My wildness runs on its toes, and dances more easily than walking, and has an uncanny knack for spotting rodents. I know what I am. I know who I am, roughly, and the more I test it, the better I feel about things.

It’s been so much about having the space and quiet to get my head straight, and the support of people willing to accept me as I am, and willing to give of themselves. This week I have explored fear, again, but I’ve also stretched my wings a bit, and remembered that I have them, and listened to the owls calling at night. Nature on the inside is just as important as the nature we find outside of us, and if you can’t work with your own animal self, cannot love the mammal skin you are in and the tides of nature as they flow through your body, loving and honouring what lies on the outside of your skin (which incidentally is a fairly arbitrary place to draw a line!) is not easy either. I learned that one the hard way.

Nameless Dread

One of the things I both love and am frustrated by in Lovecraft’s work is that tendency towards ‘things too terrible to describe’. I know from my own experience that he’s right, in that the nameless dreads are always the scariest ones, but as a reader, I want to know a bit more about how dreadful it is, because I want to be entertained, not driven mad with terror.

The craziest forms of terror have so much to do with uncertainty, for me. Give me a problem, a challenge, a wound, anything, and I will endeavour to deal with it. Give me the possibility that in a week’s time I’m going to be put through something awful, and then I really suffer. In face of the uncertainty, I can imagine all kinds of terrible things, and I have a really good imagination. One really terrible thing that I actually have to go through is often less bad than all the imaginary things I am capable of doing to myself.

Name the dread and it’s not quite so scary.

Humans like to be able to name and quantify things. I think it gives us an illusion of control. Once we know what it’s called, or where it came from, a thing feels a bit more manageable. Having terrible weather events? Well, that’s climate change, isn’t it, so we’re all sorted, know what that means. Only we don’t. Calling the nameless dread in the cellar ‘Bob’ does not do much to reduce the chances that it’s going to open a portal to hell and eat your soul. But ‘Bob’ is labelled and feels like it’s under our control, and not really a nameless dread at all.

We stick little labels on the kinds of human behaviour that destroys and defiles. The labels don’t actually do anything, and only come into play after the event. Yes, it’s all well and good calling someone a psychopath after they’ve been out to play with an axe, but it doesn’t change what they’ve done. I think we’re prone to creating illusions of control and influence in this way, and it doesn’t help.

There are a lot of nameless dreads out there. The unknown, unimaginable things that might be waiting to tear your life apart. You don’t need Lovecraft’s Ancient Ones to drive yourself mad with fear. An hour or two of listening to and thinking about news broadcasting really should be sufficient.

What scares me most about people is how complacent we get. We name our nameless dreads and then we just assume they’re going to play nicely. Climate change. Global warming. Extinction. Deforestation. Pollution. They are bigger than we like to think. Nastier. Less understood, less known than we like to believe. We might be better off imagining that we have indeed unleashed a horde of ravening elder gods upon the world, at least that way we might be frightened into action rather than doing our best impression of a zombie apocalypse.

The importance of hope

Life is full of challenges. Not just my life, looking around its obvious that most of the people I know get more than what seems like a fair share of crap. Life is just not easy. I’ve lived for more years than I can count in survival mode. Just holding together, keeping going, dealing with each new setback as it rolls in, and trying to make the best of the good things. Moments when the sun shines, the streak of electric blue that is a kingfisher. A not working weekend where I can snuggle with my bloke for a bit. The small things have been what I live for.

What I’ve not had, for a long time, is any real hope. Any serious belief that I could do more than survive, and frequently doubts that even survival would be possible. One day at a time, sometimes one breath at a time, I have pushed onwards, waiting for the thing that would finally put me down in a way I could not get up from. That hasn’t happened yet.

I’m getting feedback about the Druid books, and people, your words stun me. I’ve been awed and humbled by the words people have offered back in response to what I’ve written. It makes me want to go further, and do more and it gives me a sense that I can do some useful work in the world. In the last few days, the reviews have been coming in for Hopeless Maine, as well. It’s getting a bit unreal. Big comics websites talking about us. More importantly, people getting the work, grasping what we meant, and responding to all the little details. I never dared to imagine that we’d get to this sort of point. I start to feel that we could get somewhere.

A life of survival, a life without hope is not an easy or happy one. Even the most irrational hope is remarkably sustaining if you can hang on to it. Living day to day waiting for the universe to finish off and crush you properly – I can’t say I recommend it. Tom and I have held on to each other through the hard times, and to the knowledge that whatever else we might not have, we have what we feel. Bearing in mind that because of the international angle, we have not had the same guarantees of being able to be together or stay together that most couples take for granted. The tiny threads of hope that have kept us going have been hard to hang onto in face of some of the things we’ve had to deal with. And here we are, getting somewhere, watching the good reviews roll in and thinking that we can go further and do more.

We make a promise, one that we have made to each other repeatedly for years now. If this works, if the books sell, if there is money to spare, we will take that money and do good stuff with it, and try to share that goodness as widely as we can. I daydream about all kinds of things that I think would help brighten life for people, add to the good stuff, help the planet. I want a device that turns poo into burnable fuel, for a start. Bringing a whole new meaning to the term ‘log pile’. I want to be able to reach out and enable other people to follow their hearts, to make opportunities. I swear, if this book flies, I will use that as a jumping board to make more good stuff happen.

Thank you, everyone who has come this far with us, everyone who has supported us with words of encouragement, and practical aid. And by buying the books.

The trouble with animism

This is a history of ideas thing, I have nothing negative to say about animism at all, just to be clear. The trouble with animism is the way it seems to be classified in a particular kind of story about human progress. Druidry and the Ancestors has a lot of material in it about the kinds of stories we invent about history. This isn’t in the book, but is an example of how problematic those stories can be.

I’m currently reading K.M Sen’s book on Hinduism – which is fascinating, but includes as a statement of fact the idea that primitive people have primitive, animist beliefs and that advancing civilization goes with more sophisticated polytheism, moving towards monotheism. It’s not a new theory, I have seen it other places. I’m pretty sure it’s in The Golden Bough, and that it goes with more 19th century attitudes to ‘primitive’ people and ‘primitive’ belief. (Pile in if you know more than me or have your sources to hand, please!)

This is in essence a story about progress, in which moving towards ever more complicated ways of living is seen as a good thing. It’s a whole line of thinking that exists to prop up the status quo, to let us tell ourselves how much better we are than people of ages past, and of course ‘primitive’ people whose land we would like to appropriate. Progress theory is pretty much inherent in colonial attitudes and is underpinned by ideas about economic growth being an unquestionable good, industrialisation being an unquestionable good, and monotheism being also an unquestionable good.

Except that nothing works like that anyway. Hinduism seems to be a fine example of a complex dance between polytheism and monotheism, including turns with agnosticism and materialism. Once you get to a great big monotheistic belief then it’s very easy to go pantheistic. The one big all powerful all present God, is everywhere! So God is in everything. So everything has spirit, and suddenly you’ve gone round a great big loop and come back to animism again. It’s not a line of progress, it’s a circle, or a spiral, or a big mush of interconnected things, depending on who you are and how you do it. The only way you get a line is if you take atheism as some sort of exit trajectory. Then what you get is the idea that we only have what exists materially. At which point treasuring and honouring those material realities can start to make a lot of sense. At which point…yes… you’ve spotted the punch line.

The trouble with animism is what happens when you try and talk about it using the outmoded language of people with bloody stupid ideas and a very narrow view of the world. If you engage with people who use the language of separation and difference, mind body dualism, matter and spirit, us and them, the object and the subject, and you talk on their terms, you talk about animism in a language that by its nature, deconstructs animism and makes a nonsense of it. It can be tempting to want those mainstream languages of science, reason and philosophy, except that they make you fit. Which for animism, means make you into small, dysfunctional pieces of wrong.

Which leaves me wondering quite what we do with that.

Handling the evil ancestors

Thanks to a prompt on yesterday’s blog, Evil Ancestors, I realise I need to keep going with this issue. Some of it is in the book, but I shall avoid replicating material, as much to stop me from getting bored as for any other reason.

By whatever means, we’ve identified one or more ancestor we’re not okay with. Now what? Knowing is an important personal issue, but when you step into a ritual space and say ‘hail blessed ancestors’ what happens about the not-so blessed and the total bastards? As I said yesterday, odds are, we all have them.

The easiest wriggle is to just assume that when you’re talking about the blessed ancestors, you’re talking to the nice ones. The trouble with people, though, is that tendency to be complicated. One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist, and all that. People can change, and do. One act does not necessarily define the whole of a person. Often, the worst things people do can be motivated by a belief that they are doing the best possible things for the best possible reasons. Look at every religiously inspired act of violence, each one rooted in a belief that they’re burning /stoning hanging/ you for the good of your own soul. Think of the parents who try so hard to protect their children that they end up crushing all the spirit out of them. And of course there is the issue that we would not be here at all were it not for those direct ancestors, no matter how awful they were.

Silverbear made some lovely points in the comments yesterday, (do go and read them). Holding our own separateness, knowing what we are not responsible for – these things all help when it comes to dealing with the legacies of the dead.

I think that we can honour the ancestors in the sense of recognising that we would not be here without them. I begin to feel that if we’re inviting people into circle, there’s something to be said for qualifying that a bit. I wouldn’t want all of my immediate ancestors in the same circle – they don’t all get on, the same might be reasonably assumed of the departed. Perhaps it would make sense to call upon the peaceful ancestors, the kindly ancestors, much of the time. Blessed ought to be a good start. I’ve never tried to do a ritual approach to the unquiet dead or the troubling dead, but it strikes me as being an interesting idea. One for a closed group though, not a random public gathering!

I find what I want to face the evil ancestors with, is compassion. This is easier for me because none of my most immediate and nameable ancestors were total bastards, so my evil ancestors are more hypothetical and distant. I don’t have specific identities and actions to work with. For someone who does – I don’t feel qualified to make any suggestions beyond do whatever makes sense to you. I think one of the biggest reasons people mess up, is they act out of fear. Hanging on to what should be let go of, taking things they aren’t entitled to, doing things for which there can be no justification. You can’t be in a truly good, happy, healthy mental state and be out there abusing. With the safety of distance, I can respond to that with pity, towards both victims and aggressors. Victims who became aggressors. People who were so frightened they did terrible things. People who believed they were doing it for all the right reasons. I can honour the fact that we are all flawed, and there but for the grace of… what? Good teaching? A decent sort of culture? Sheer blind luck? There but for some kind of grace, goes any of us. How few choices different would have turned me into one of the dark ones, a skeleton for future closets?

Wish them opportunity to learn and heal, wish them a chance to redress the balance or to do better. And as Graeme pointed out this week, if you believe in reincarnation, we were some of those ancestors, and odds are at some point we were the evil bastards, so spare a bit of compassion for yourself as well, because that way lies healing and hope.

The evil ancestors

One of the things that made me want to look at the issue of ancestry, is the problem of how we deal with the difficult ones. I can’t think of a single family that I know well, where there isn’t a problem person tucked away in the not too distant history. Not necessarily entirely ‘evil’ people, but points in the family tree where bits have broken off and things have gone badly wrong. I have a few.

I never knew my maternal grandfather, even though he lived just a few miles away. It’s only in recent years that I’ve been able to make any connection with that side of my family. It feels odd. My grandmother has been dead for some time now but I still worry about whether she would have been hurt by my wanting to know, would have felt betrayed.

Go back far enough and we’re all going to have tricky ancestors, whether we know their names or not. Modern witches descended from the sorts of people who would, a few centuries back, have been very keen on hanging or burning. Sometimes it’s not that distant, either. The raping, pillaging, looting, land stealing and genocide is in our history, and we’ve all got a bit of it somewhere, odds are.

What do we do, as modern Druids, with the ancestors who would have hated everything we believe and feel, and who would have been ready to kill us for our own good? Where are they when we hail the blessed ancestors? What do we do with the more immediate ancestry? The tyrants and curmudgeons, the drunken, violent, angry, abusive, incestuous, mad and otherwise inevitable that seem to be hidden in so many skeleton closets. The legacies of fear, and victims, the ones who never dared to be true to themselves, and  who hammered that fear into later generations. The ones who failed, and expect everyone else to fail too. The ones who lived through a world war, and were changed, and could not speak of it. We all have them I think.

Ancestry can be a deeply uncomfortable topic. But this is where we came from, our genes and our heritage. This is the stuff we are made of. To carry a fear of turning into one of your parents, or becoming too much like the mad uncle no one likes to talk about, can make it that bit harder to figure out who we are in ourselves. How much of identity is unique to us, and how much is the replaying of genetic history, and exactly how many crazy people do I have in my family tree anyway?

It’s important to know, I think, and to face up to what we do know. Skeletons in closets are only useful to authors, because they make such wonderful plot devices. In real life they’re nothing but trouble. Best to get them out and name them, and give them a proper burial.

We choose who we are. This has been very much the underlying thought form in the last week of blogging. We can only do a good job of that choice when we know what we’re choosing. It’s very hard to avoid repeating a pattern you won’t admit exists. It’s much easier to change things after you’ve acknowledged them.

All families are a bit mad and a bit dysfunctional in places because all people are a bit mad and a bit dysfunctional too. Some hide it better than others. Some manage to channel it in good ways, and some, like one of my distant ancestors by the name of Octavia, lose the plot entirely and have to be taken away. Some lose the plot a little bit and just go to bed for the rest of their lives. Some pass as normal.

I have a fair idea where I’ve come from, and some of it is good, and some of it isn’t. I’m trying to replicate the good bits and step away from the things I don’t think are so good. Coming from three generations of women who did not hold the first marriage together, I’m conscious that many of my mistakes are not very original. But I think I can move beyond that. It’s got to be worth a try, at any rate.

Druidry at the end of history part 6

Conventional history, in schools and on our televisions encourages us to focus on the named and famous whilst imagining ourselves insignificant. There’s no reason to think one small person’s one small action makes any odds at all. You have to have money and power to change the world, don’t you? An army might help, or being one of the ultra-clever who invents something life changing. Everyone knows that, and we know if because we are primarily taught the history of power and wealth. We are not formally taught about the evolution of ideas behaviours and cultures that belongs to the many. We perpetuate the stories of our own insignificance.

Most of the time in our history, most people have bought into the ideas of their own powerlessness. History also shows us what can happen when we collectively realise our own power and potential. Revolution happens. Emancipation and equal rights get on the agenda. Peasants demand the vote. Uprisings happens. Cultural shifts take place. It must be terrifying for those who want to be in power and I’m sure they would much rather we used that collective energy to vote on which TV celebrity gets to be considered especially important this year. That kind of power, to topple nations and make change, is frightening for the majority too, because we’re encouraged to think, and we encourage ourselves to think that we couldn’t handle the responsibility. We can. We do, it’s just most of it happens unconsciously, which is not ideal.

We are society. We are culture. We are the ancestors of the future and the inheritors of the past. We are the life blood of tradition and, whether we do so consciously or not, we all contribute to shaping the present and crafting the direction the future will take. If we do that obliviously, we don’t get to do anything with our power. We let history and habit shape us and we leave ourselves open to being herded around by others. The politicians. The corporations. The media. Anyone with an agenda and the will to lure us into serving it, potentially. If we know who we are, if we think about where we want to be going and make our choices accordingly, then we do have power ad who knows what we might achieve, as individuals and as part of traditions.

Today is the end of history. The entirety of the past has been building towards this moment. Tomorrow is the future. It always was, and always will be. There is nowhere for us to stand but at the end of history. However, we have a great many options over what we might undertake to do with that.

 

(This is the final part of my regurgitating roughly what I said at the Druid Network’s convention last weekend. Part one is here – http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/druidry-end-of-history-part-1 . I am entirely open to speaking at pagan events, moots etc, in the UK. This piece was written to match the conference theme – Druidry in changing times, and with an eye to the Mayan 2012 malarkey. I’m always happy to contribute in line with a theme or topic. Queries are always welcome and if at all technically possible, I will say yes.)

Druidry at the end of history part 5

You can be an ancestor of tradition, sending thoughts and actions into the world that will live on into the future. I think people tend to assume that being a future ancestor of tradition means being famous and influential in both your lifetime and beyond. After all, without fame, how are your ideas going to spread? This way of thinking owes everything to celebrity orientated culture and nothing to the nature of tradition. A famous person is just that, but the effect of their influence is limited to their lifespan unless they have followers. That means either belong to, or founding a tradition. The life blood of tradition is not big names though. Traditions do not require famous people to keep them going. They need participants. Regular people. Us. Consider the St John’s Ambulance Brigade, or Oxfam. Organisations only outlive their originator if there are many participants to keep the project alive.

We all get to be part of that. In every ritual and moot, in every blog post and conversation we choose what to pass on, what to discard, what to tinker with. The act of sharing, one person to another, is the essence of a living tradition. Every time you interact with a tradition, you are helping to carry if forward, and you are being a future ancestor of that tradition.

I come from a folk background. While the writer’s name is attached to a song, it isn’t folk. Only when the originator cases to be visible, is it truly a folk song. All folk was once written by someone, and has been through a lot of hands. To be truly a part of the tradition is to have disappeared into it merging with the flow. Without individuals, there can be no great flow of tradition, either. We shape traditions and are shaped by them.

Most of history was not made out of famous names. Every big event, every new movement and cultural shift was not just about the famous few, but involved the hidden many. The invisible ones whose many hands and voices decide what is kept and what is discarded. When the invisible many at together, we get results. It may be Brian May who is remembered for Team Badger, but on his own, h wouldn’t have managed much.

 

(For anyne who missed what’s going on here, this is the talk I gave at the Druid Network con last weekend in bits, and the first installment is here – http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/druidry-end-of-history-part-1 )

Druidry at the end of history – part 4

First one is here, http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/1... are on the blog so if you landed on this one first, the history category is your friend!

Now we finally get round to the Druid bit of the title. At this point it would be nice if I could tell you how Druidry is the magic cure for everything and the solution to any risk of ending the world. It isn’t. Not on its own, at any rate. However, there is one concept from Druidry that I think could make a big contribution here, and that’s the concept of ancestry. Mostly because ancestry carries within it the idea that we too will eventually be ancestors. The answer to the end of history, is to be an ancestor of the future. In fact, if we don’t implode for 2012, we are bound to be ancestors of the future.

Even if we choose to have children, they might not reproduce. There are no guarantees that our blood lines will carry us forwards. Think about how much you know of your own blood ancestors. History teaches us that blood ancestry gets forgotten, unless you’re a King. Famous people may be remembered by their descendents, but that’s all about the being famous. Generations of quiet, uneventful lives disappear, forgotten. Staking your immortality on blood descendents is a dead loss. However, in terms of future impact, bloodlines should be the least of our concerns. That whole business with kinds and inheritance has slewed our culture towards prioritising blood ancestry and directed our perspective away from where the real influence lies.

We are all going to be ancestors of land. Every last one of us.  We’re making a future landscape every day out of our choices. The things we send to landfill. The roads that are built for us. The buildings we live and work in. The power stations we demand. Ancestors of waste and pollution. Ancestors of nuclear dumps and widespread extinctions. Ancestors of poisoned rivers and toxic farming methods. We are all part of this. It is our culture, our society, our motorways and our poison. Future generations will be hard put to forget us, because they’re going to have to live with our rubbish piles, depressing architecture and al the long term consequences of our short term thinking. Ancestors of land. What will the future make of us?

Take up that title, and the full horror of what it means should, if you are paying attention, put you on your knees and break your heart. Ours is the generation that has lost the Chinese river dolphins. We are not going to be the beloved ancestors of future Druids at this rate. We’re going to be the villains of the story.

I offer this not to demoralise you, but as a challenge. The enormity of all that is wrong out there can make action seem futile. It isn’t. The most important thing is to believe that your bit makes a difference. It does. Even the smallest choice counts. Every round of doing more and taking less, every move towards greater sustainability, helps. Be part of the solution. Be a heroic ancestor of the future.

Druidry at the end of history part 3

Part 1 is here http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/1...

and this is part 2

http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/druidry-end-of-history-part-2

The apparent obliviousness of the majority is one of the things that drives me crazy about people. Look at us, the way we consume and destroy, the rampant expansion of our species. We’re like a cancer, and less use than wasps. What we clearly need is a ice, big apocalypse to clear the air. Then, when we’ve torn everything down there will be room to rebuild, better. We can get it right, there will be utopia. I’m prepared to bet it’s a fantasy most people entertain now and then. Of course that one big apocalypse won’t affect me, or you. The people destined to die will all be somewhere else, somewhere I don’t care about full of people I never met. A tidy apocalypse that selectively takes out things and people I don’t like, leaving only the good stuff. We are, of course, intrinsic to the good stuff.

It’s probably quite natural to want all the bad stuff to disappear, it would be an easy solution. I think we all know that the fantasy of a lovely apocalypse, is at best, totally bonkers. It’s impossible. A real, full blown apocalypse would be awful, and we know that. For too many people though, it is the plan. People whose response to history is to want to end it. These are not people whose ears I am going to get to bend. But even so, we do need to challenge nice big apocalypse theory, because it’s lazy.

The world is people. Society is people. The human future is going to be people. We’re not going to get a magically clean slate to work with, there is no re-boot reality button. Imagining what we would do if only it were made very, very easy, it a waste of time. The only way to make a future, is by starting from here, with what we have, and knowing that we can start here and get to somewhere. We don’t need epic scale drama to jump start us, but realistic visions of things we can achieve and the will to make a start. Evolution ore than revolution, building not destroying.  Knowing where we’ve come from and where we want to go.  Knowing, we will be better placed to make changes. If that all sounds like a huge and daunting task, well, it is. But it’s not impossible.

You’ll notice I’ve been talking about process, not aims. I believe that if you really understand who you are and where you’ve come from, you can make better choices. People not thinking enough is the root of most if not all problems. So I preach a doctrine of thinking about stuff. If we thought more, we’d at least make new and interesting mistakes. You don’t need a nice big apocalypse for that, just a lot of people thinking about what, and how and why, ad what if?