Nimue Brown's Blog, page 444

Druidry at the end of history, part 2

Part 1 is here -

http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/druidry-end-of-history-part-1

I gave up on the formal study of history when I was fourteen. I was sick of the world wars, and due to a shortage of books we had to study them in the wrong order, which made it very confusing. I suspected geography would b both easier and involve less Hitler. History and I parted company for a while, right up until I got to doing my Degree. A horrible truth dawned on me. All books come from a point in history. Many of them don’t make much sense if you don’t know the context. Try doing Shakespeare without understanding any of the history! Istarted swotting up, and during that process another alarming truth occurred to me. That came because I was minoring in psychology, and they taught us initially by teaching the history of the subject. Every subject has its own history. We didn’t do the history of chemistry at school, with its origins in alchemy and magic. How different would that have been? The history of medicine is terrifying. The history of sex really puts an interesting spin on things.  We do not teach children the history of how people have thought about the world. A few minutes with that one is enough to show how fragile and ephemeral out whole culture is. We live in a web of stories held together by ideas about ideas. In time, all of it will probably change or be discarded.

All most of us learn is political history. Every human activity and tradition has a history, be it known or unknown. It all came from somewhere – not that we should assume that means it must also be going somewhere. How much of it do we even know?

What does the end of history mean? It means having no idea where you came from or who you are. It means having no roots, no sense of connection to the enormity of all that went before. How many people are conscious of the roles they have been born into, or the patterns they are living out? How many people repeat history precisely because they have no idea what history is. Not the history of politic and rulers, but the personal history of family and culture.  These are the kinds of history we don’t much talk about.

I ask, how can we be free and capable of self determination if we do not know what shaped us and what might be pulling our strings? The end of history is all around us, in the minds of anyone who is re-enacting all that they are oblivious too. It’s nothing new. I rather suspect this kind of end of history has been with us all along.

Druidry at the end of History part 1

This is roughly what I said at the TDN con this year, I’m going to blog it in stages.

Rumour has it that the Mayans reckoned 2012 would be the end of the world, which is partly, I imagine, why the convention’s theme was ‘druidry in changing times’. There’s nothing quite like the end of the world to change things! The Christians of 2000 years ago were expecting it, with the second coming right after the first. In the civil war, once again people were expecting Christ at the head of an army. The Victorians got all apocalyptic in the 1890s, with looming end of empire. The world war made annihilation seem immanent. If there’s one thing history can teach us, its that the end of history does not turn up anything like as often as advertised. Hardly at all, really. Perhaps though, in times of upheaval, the idea of it all ending helps people make sense of the chaos.

For falling cultures and those who die, the end of history is real enough, but others continue and when we too are gone, history will carry on without us. Actual history. Time history is not the stuff we put in books. It’s an important distinction.

There are times when the changes seem so great people feel history can have nothing to say to the present. What could the past know about our modern, technological lives? Rather a lot. All the fears we have about the internet were also fears people had about the telegraph network. Nothing is as new as we like to think it is.

Every so often some bright political spark will question the teaching of history in schools. It’s not the kind of subject that suggests utility in jobs. Mostly what we learn in school history is that Henry the 8th got through a lot of wives, and Hitler wasn’t a very nice chap. If you’re paying attention, you also learn that mostly we do not learn from history. In wider culture, we have history on the TV that is all costume, drama, sex and violence. It’s not very real either.

History as a subject has tended to be all about Kings and Queens, wars, nations, borders and a handful of very rich men. Most people are edited out of history by those who write it down. Most live are a great silence n the record. Names and opinions vanish, lives quietly washed away by the passing of time. Your ancestors will, for the greater part, belong to the silence. They disappeared. We will all disappear too. If we’re thinking about history in terms of the subject, it’s worth considering that for most of us, it never started. We weren’t there. Our people were not there. Your dead ancestors are not in the history books. It’s a sobering thought. Only the literate left a written record on which history can be based. For most of time, most women and children and poor people of both genders left nothing written about themselves. The wordless so soon become invisible.

History as a written subject is a long way from the reality of all the time that led to this moment. When we talk about the end of the world, what we really mean is the end of a human civilization. That’s probably not the end of the species even. Even if it was, for the cockroaches, history would continue to be made. If we eradicated all life on earth, there’s a whole universe out there, full of time. It exists regardless of whether we are around to tell stories about it.

Druid con the follow-up

I’ve spent the weekend in the Lickeys for The Druid Network’s con. While I’ve sung and done story telling at pagan events, I’ve not spoken at one before. Normally I get to feel more confident that I might know more than the audience does! I talked about Druidry at the end of History and will be blogging that through the week. It’s been a good weekend, lots of lovely people, good stalls, great music…

All credit should go to Bish for having figured out a program that allowed scope for pagan time and could still deliver on schedule, that gave plenty of time for informal talking and sharing, and that had some excellent content. For me the most interesting bits were those informal conversations, following on from things said in talks, probing into ideas, chucking things around- it was very creative and productive feeling, and I know I’ve learned a great deal. There was a great atmosphere. My first encounter with Paul Mitchell was entertaining. He’s very much in the style of Billy Bragg. I also got to hear Tallis Kimberly, who sang Tom a spoon song! Photos to follow, I suspect… all very good stuff. I wish I’d been more awake at that point.

For me it’s been a strange, emotional weekend. Last time I was at that centre, I was the previous me, and it made me realise how much I’ve changed as a person. There were people I hadn’t seen in years, and while it was a joy to see them, it also made the pain of long absence sharper. Last night, due to illness there was a gap in the program, and Bish gave me a room and an hour or so of session running. I’ve not run a singaround in over two years. It used to be an integral part of my life. Happy-making to know I can still do it, but again, that knife blade of loss. I miss my folk club.

Then, I persuaded the remaining stalwarts this morning to go up the hill – the views and the trees are stunning and I could hardly visit and not do that. Bards of the Lost Forest used to meet there, and we ended up with a small circle of con-survivors, gathered in the space that had once been my grove, sharing a few awens and saying hello to the trees. That one broke me.

I have cried a lot this weekend. Mostly I did it quietly and privately – I never find it easy to be open with tears, but stood in the space that had been so precious to me for so long broke me right open and I ended up sobbing in a way that usually, I don’t when there are other people about. There’s one thing you can say for Druids, they don’t scare easily! There was patience, kindness, hugs, good words, a sense of being held by community. And that’s a funny thing too. The old me never really felt like a proper part of The Druid Network, just someone who tagged along and tried to be useful. I’ve never felt more part of that than I did this morning, snotty and pathetic though I was. It’s odd how these things go.

Grief. It comes in waves, and not always predictably. So much of who I was died, so much of my old life became lost to me. I go through this process, and the bubbles of pain come up, the missing, the places I was torn and wrenched on the inside. There’s a healing in letting that grief out. I start to feel a bit more like a person, and one who maybe does belong somewhere.

That person to person, real, in the moment, in your face contact of events is so important. I love the internet, I love the floating out and sharing around of ideas, but its not the same as talking, and listening, and walking with people in the mud, and looking at the same view together. It’s been a long time since I last spent a weekend in the company of Druids. Too long. I think the period of much needed retreat is coming to an end, and its time to start building and doing and being in the world again, consciously and with awareness of my skin, as a participant not someone who assumes they can only ever be on the periphery.

So, I want to round off with huge thanks to Bish both for the big, awesome event he’s just pulled off, and for the much needed space he allowed me to do things, and for the good words when I fell apart. And my thanks to Theo, for wisdom and empathy and pointing me at ideas I want to go and explore. To everyone who turned up and did a thing, thank you – and turning up in and of itself is a big deal. Thank you for being there, for talking, listening, asking questions, singing songs, telling stories, being druids, being yourselves, being lovely, and challenging, and inquisitive and very human and real. There are a lot more names I could name, folk who made the weekend rich and interesting with their presences, but I don’t know everyone’s names, and you all deserve recognition for contributing to something that was very good indeed.

The grand blog-crawl

This is a bit of a cheat blog, because I won’t be posting a proper one today – I’m at the druid network conference in Birmingham, and anticipate being very busy and probably not having any internet to speak of. So, it seemed like a good day to tout about the links for a heap of other things I’ve been doing. I did a shout out for people who were willing to take blogs from me, helping get the word out about new books. The response has been great, and I’ve still got more blogs to write. These are not promo posts, exactly. Each one is unique, and each has actual content. This isn’t all of them, I’ve not managed to be organised enough about stashing links… (If I wrote for you and haven’t listed it, please, please stick the links into the comments section) Graphic novel romance http://tonivsweeney.com/tvsweeney@ton... – about the history of myself and Tom and love via a graphic novel! Interview http://towriteawrong.blogspot.com/201... Thoughts on the process of writing about Druidry… http://ravenwillowrunesroost.blogspot... Ancestors of land for those whose land is not, historically speaking, Celtic. http://ditzydruid.com/2012/10/23/ance... I also blogged for http://earthshineephemeris.blogspot.c... and did not leave myself a note as to the topic. Yes, it’s been a long month… Words for Iva’s blog about the origins of Hopeless Maine… http://bornforcopper.wordpress.com/20... Marc Vun Kannon lent me his blog where I talked about having more than one ‘me’ for writing and the chaos this causes… http://authorguy.wordpress.com/2012/1... I talked about ancestors of kitchen for the Kitchen Witch blog… http://www.kitchenwitchuk.blogspot.co... I’m entirely open to requests. No site to small, no topic too weird (probably). If you fancy having something from me tailored to your site, or publication, or anything really, do ask. It’s a shameless bid to build the readership, but it does mean I’ll be sending people your way – spread the love and all that – and I like the challenge. Writing content for people is something I enjoy doing. And, to everyone whose links I did not manage to add to my file of links… I am really sorry, but I did tout you on facebook the day the blog went up, and I am a bear of limited brain….

Hopelessly Happy

Yesterday, author copies of Hopeless Maine book 1 found their way to us. Now, I thought I’d done enough of this paper malarkey to be able to be passably grownup about it. Apparently not. The urge to run round making random ‘squee’ noises and show it to everyone was huge. I resisted though, mostly. This is not just a book, this is a moment in an epic journey. It’s a bit like the moment in a very long and sometimes quite challenging walk, when you find a pub and they turn out to do good beer.

This is the project that really cemented the friendship and working relationship I have with Tom. This is the project we were working on when we fell in love with each other. There are pages he was doing when I visited in America all those years ago. There are pages drawn after Tom moved to the UK. Whole swathes of our lives are wrapped up in these pages, and this is the first time either of us has seen them on paper like this. It’s also the first book with both our names on the cover, and that makes me feel fuzzy and emotional.

Tom and I have both travelled a long way to get to this point. I shared his story back in September, of medically induced nervous breakdown, homelessness, a total loss of everything and a slow, hard rebuild. To go from there, to here, is epic. My own journey from lost soul to new self was not on the same scale, but it’s been plenty dramatic enough. Then there was the crossing of the Atlantic a physical journey alongside the creative one.

We’ve made some amazing friends along the way. We’ve both learned a huge amount too about our craft, and ourselves and each other and life… This is a milestone. Getting here makes it seem like a lot more things are possible than I would previously have dared to hope. We got this far, we can go a lot further.

Thus far, online reviews have been really encouraging. Not just that people are saying nice things, but there are deeper observations coming through about what it means, what it’s for, and that makes me very happy indeed.

So, we’re off to Druid con this weekend, to launch a graphic novel, and wave Druid books at people and talk about the end of the world whilst wearing spoons.

To everyone who has supported, encouraged, and enabled Hopeless Maine, Tom and I offer heartfelt thanks. We would not have got this far had it not been for everyone else who believed in the project. Thank you.

Cover story

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There’s something utterly lovely about having a book with my name and Tom’s art on the cover. Druidry and the Ancestors is the first paperback to land with this setup. We’ve done ebooks before, and there is Lost Bards and Dreamers – but that’s self published, which is different.

When we started contemplating the cover, we knew there would have to be a tree. You can’t have a Druid book without some kind of plant life on the cover!  The tree in question lives fairly near the canal. We knew there were some good, gnarly trees in the area, and I like ivy, so the pair of us went out with a camera, and came back with images for Tom to play with. I like willows. I know an oak says ‘druid’ more obviously, but the area in which I wrote the book is all willow and alder, oaks aren’t so partial to the damp. I love the capacity of willow to regenerate, and its beautiful flexible wood is wonderful to craft with. I have a wicker man in my history.

How to represent the idea of the ancestors? I didn’t want anything too obvious, so that ruled out standing stones and the like. I also didn’t want to peg it to one period. So we settled on a sort of charm bracelet, each individual image representing something I find meaningful.

Up at the top there’s a pentagram – which probably doesn’t need much explaining. This is a book I feel is as much for the wider pagan community as it is for Druids, even though I’ve come in from a Druidy angle. Then below to the right, we have a Celtic cross, because I’m very conscious that plenty of my ancestors were Christian, and their presence in the mix is important to me. Next down is a Pictish boar. Now, I’m not aware of being ethnically Pictish but I love the art style, and it also gave us a creature because I have a broader definition of ancestry than just immediate human bloodline stuff.

Then, going down the left side, there’s an awen symbol, not just for the Druidry, but for the crazy revival folk who invented so much and who I have a real love-hate thing going on with. Below that, an oak leaf, not just for the obvious Druid reference, but to include plant life in my depiction of ancestry. Then a skull. Because we like dead people, and skulls evoke all sorts of useful things, and we like skulls and I’m a bit of a goth at heart still.

Right at the bottom is a symbol Tom created for me years ago. Squint closely, and you’ll see it also features on this blog, and on the cover of Lost Bards and Dreamers. One of these days I shall get it tattooed onto my person. It’s a purple poppy, for dreams and visions, but the leaves are arranged in the style of a triskel, picking up on the Celts again, on all things that come in threes. This is my image of self, constructed from things historical, very much me, dangling off the bottom of the chain.

Peer at the background and you’ll see a hill that could well be Cam Peak or Silbury, or Glastonbury Tor, and some houses that could be Celtic roundhouses, or then again might not be.

There isn’t much that I do that doesn’t get thought about a lot. There’s a wonderful, magical process going from ideas in my head to things Tom creates. They never look how I expect them to. They always look better.

 

Being broken

The most lovely beach pebbles have been rubbed and battered into smoothness. It’s not the most gentle process. Lovely things so often pass through fire, through radical change. Carved out of their original rock, or beaten and cut into shape, the process of becoming is so often a process of breaking as well.

This can be some consolation when life kicks you about. Just as the blade, or for that matter the ploughshare endures the heat of the forge, so to the mind becomes more than it was, through challenge, endurance, erosion, sculpting and other invasive experiences.

It’s not a one off thing, either. Some people seem to get more experience of being crafted by the universe than others, but it’s hard to tell from the outside. One man’s mountain is another man’s molehill, but without a few molehills, the chances of surviving the mountain unscathed are rather slim. What knocks one person down is merely a trial for another. We’re all different. Some of us show the process of being tested more than others.

There’s always the temptation to not go there. To buy off the problem, do the thing that would be easy, but intrinsically wrong. There is so often a smooth, simple path that lets us carry on as we were. Of course sometimes that one leads right up to a precipice, as we increase the size of the trial by trying to duck it. There’s only so much cheating of system any of us can do of course because in the end we die, everyone dies, the piper is paid and you can’t avoid that one forever.

I’ve met people for whom life has been – either by choice or accident – a pretty easy stroll so far. I also know people who have, out of necessity, and out of love, walked through hell. Sometimes more than once. The people who do it of their own free will, for the sake of something that needs to be done, are awe inspiring. They don’t tend to announce themselves or make a big deal out of what they do, but they work in places of pain, misery and horror, and they keep working, keep facing the hardest things in order to help, to make better. Somehow, the more it breaks them, the more they shine and the more powerful they become.

I recall reading a blog post months back (can’t remember where) talking about how, when you’re broken on the floor and sobbing such that snot comes out of your nose, you are also as powerful as it is possible to be. Because you care enough to be going through that. The only real insulation from pain, is apathy, and that’s a hideous, soul destroying price to pay for the illusion of comfort.

No snot-laden weeping here today. Just pausing to look at the strange and winding path I’ve travelled in these last few years, and to think about the burning beacons along the way. The people who were not afraid to weep. The people who walk into hell on a regular basis because life asks it of them. There’s this collective belief that strength is the absence of tears, the absence of breaking. It’s a brittle sort of strength, a cold strength at best and it can’t do much. The strength that comes in breaking, the power of being snapped open and having bits torn off… is terrifying. But on the dark days, its important to remember this stuff.

When to celebrate?

This question came up on one of the Druid groups I’m on – when do you celebrate festivals? Does it have to be on the day? Is the nearest weekend good enough? Or something else?

As I see it, the calendar has been mangled a few times, so that dates, the 31st October for example, may be more about the tradition of a number than an exact time of year. Solstices and equinoxes present their own challenges too. When, exactly, do they happen? When is that moment of balance at the equinox? And at a solstice, are you celebrating the night, or the day? The dawn? Midday? There’s plenty of choices and clearly no one right answer. If you can’t celebrate the exact moment, does it make sense to celebrate the gist of the changing times at the nearest convenient date? I think, if it works for you, then the answer to that one is ‘yes’ and if it feels wrong, the answer is ‘no’.

What are we celebrating, with the four non-solar festivals that turn up in so many calendars? Are we celebrating a specific date, or the state of the seasons? If it’s the latter… seasons are not fixed and often don’t tie in to dates. With Druids in the southern hemisphere these days as well, the dates and the seasons are in mirror image of each other, and that calls for some proper consideration.

I think there’s a lot to be said for figuring out what seasonal cues in your immediate environment you associate with traditional festivals. For a start, that takes you out of standard format and into thinking about your locality, and what is meaningful to you. The arrival and departure of migrant bids might be a consideration here. The appearance of seasonal flowers or leaves on trees might be another. The shedding of leaves, the first snow, or other things may present themselves.

If you’re living somewhere that doesn’t have four seasons, why not consider what you do have, and make up your own ritual calendar to reflect it? You may feel that nature as it exists around you is more resonant than sticking to dates that relate to another place entirely. And then again, the ancestral connection might be more important. There are no right answers, but, think about what works for you and why, don’t just take a ‘one size fits all’ ritual calendar and adapt your own feelings to fit it, that’s about the only wrong way there is!

There are still green leaves on the trees here, so for me, it is not yet Samhain.

Can a personality be disordered?

Prompted by a friend on facebook, I spent some time at the weekend looking at what Mind (a UK mental health charity) www.mind.org.uk has to say about the subject of personality disorders. It’s not a thing I’d given much thought to before. Just the name suggests that there are things to be uncomfortable with here –what is more personal to any of us than our personalities, and what could be more damning than to be told that there is something wrong with yours? Much of the additional language around specific disorders, is pejorative, and I imagine, demoralising for anyone diagnosed.

One of the things that defines a person as ‘unwell’ in this way, is that other people have a problem with them. I was talking last week about the pathologizing of difference (which is how I came round to this issue via facebook.) To what extent is the idea of personality disorder quite exactly this? To what degree do we need to be inoffensive to others in order to not be labelled as ill? It’s a very interesting question. Social functioning is a useful life skill, we generally do need to be able to deal with other people effectively. But how acceptable do we have to be? And is the bar set in the same place for all of us? I’d be prepared to bet that the more money and power you have, the less antisocial people will find you, be you ever so paranoid and aggressive. Can we pause and think about the kinds of opinions politicians and religious leaders sometimes spout. Disordered, at all?

What really got my attention though, was the discovery that ‘personality disorders’ can be treated with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Now, CBT is all about changing how you think. A disorder that can be treated with CBT, is a thinking disorder, pretty much by definition. Not a personality disorder. Not some kind of failure as a human being, but a learned, acquired or induced pattern of thinking that does not work and can be changed.

Would it make a difference if we called them thinking disorders? Paranoid thinking disorder sounds very different from paranoid personality disorder. The former implies hope for change, for a start. Dependant thinking disorder, narcissistic thinking disorder… my feeling is that a change of word there makes a lot of odds and may be more accurate.

Now, if people are getting mental health issues to the kind of degree ‘personality disorder’ implies, with issues that can be treated with CBT… we’re back to how we raise and teach people in the first place. How much suffering could we avoid if we routinely taught thinking skills to young people? If we taught coping mechanisms that won’t render you dysfunctional, if we did more to support self esteem, embrace difference and diversity, to encourage rational thinking, to teach people how not to be eaten alive by fear or to become convinced that they’re the be all and end all. We have the tools. We could not be using CBT restoratively if we did not have the tools. Why are we not using what we know in a more active, preventative way to nurture good mental health?

Of course if people know how to think, they can question the status quo, and that might not suit some people very well at all… call me paranoid…

Ancestors of style

Finding a voice as an author isn’t easy. How formal are you going to be? Academic style? Objective third person narrator, authority laden and confident? Are you going to be present as a person? And then, what form are you going to write? Poetry? Non-fiction? Fantasy? Literature? Conventional wisdom will tell you that to make it as an author you have to do one thing (usually a rather narrow thing) and stick to it so that readers know what to expect. That never felt comfortable to me. I get bored too easily.

I’ve been working on trying to find my own voice for a lot of years, but ended up tending to have different voices for different jobs, not one, coherent sort of me. However, there are two authors who have been increasingly influential when it comes to how I’ve developed on the style front: Kevan Manwaring and Robin Herne. If you aren’t familiar with them, I heartily recommend checking out their books. Both are of a pagan persuasion, and both are awesome.

There are a number of things about their work that hold true for both chaps, so I’m going to talk about them collectively. Both Kevan and Robin mix things up in a way that conventional wisdom has it, you shouldn’t. Books of poetry that also are about poetry. Mixing the academic and the experiential, the personal and the objective. They range widely, both writing fiction and non-fiction work – Robin’s fiction tends more towards the story telling. Kevan writes adult and YA. Their books aren’t easy to pigeon hole because they ignore where convention sets the boundaries, so that the intensely personal can sit alongside deep literary analysis, and other wonderful juxtapositions. Both men write with humour, and expose their thoughts and feelings in a way that I find utterly compelling. Last but not least, neither seems averse to irritating the hell out of people! If they feel or think something, neither tends to pull any punches with the delivery.

I don’t want to write academic style books. It’s not a style that comes easily to me and I think it puts off more people than it turns on. I also don’t want to write fluffy, lightweight content. I’ve learned through this blog and other teaching work that writing from personal experience is the strongest way to go. I’ve learned to work with my own doubt. In terms of how I present my thoughts to the world, the two writers I am especially keen to emulate, would be Kevan and Robin. Both in terms of the diversity of work, and the tones they strike. I want that blend of intimate, erudite, playful and confident. I have a LOT of reading to do if I mean to get anywhere near either of them for eruditeness… erudicity…. Eruditude…? It’s good to have something to aspire to, though.

So, picking through influences on current work, I thought of Kevan Manwaring and Robin Herne. There are a lot of people who have influenced what I do, over the years, but no one else I have set out quite so deliberately to follow. I think both of them have a great deal of style, and not only in their writing. It may be a bit much calling them ‘ancestors’ though, because neither is that much older than me. Although that’s one of the great joys in picking your ancestors of tradition… anyone is fair game!