Nimue Brown's Blog, page 447

Culture and fiction

I’ve been pondering this on the Steampunk side for a few days now, and have started playing compare and contrast with Paganism. What is the relationship between a culture and the fiction about it? The vast majority of fiction featuring Pagans is written by non-pagans and owes more to Buffy the Vampire Slayer than to Gerald Gardner.

Fiction written from within a culture can tend to want to affirm it, highlight its good points, celebrate and promote. This is natural. Whatever cultures we feel kinship with – be they spiritual, social or political, we want to portray in a good light. I’ve been round this one, writing about Paganism. The way we are, the way I want us to be, the way that makes for a good story – they don’t overlap as much as they might. The essence of story, is conflict. In a lovely world where everything is splendid, there aren’t as many tales to tell. Give me corruption and evil deeds, villains to fight, trials to overcome and I can make a more engaging sort of tale. The land of loveliness is not a land of stories. Perfection is an awful lot like stasis.

On the Pagan front, issues like the predators who want to sexually initiate pretty young witches, the swindlers, the power crazed, self important and the downright loopy – a tiny minority, but so laden with plot potential. But if I write about them, will people who read it take that as a representation of the Pagan community as a whole? Would that be responsible? I suspect if we did a count up, I’d turn out to have given more page time to Christian characters than Druids. There’s an odd irony there. But if we don’t write from the inside, the only story representations of Druids, or Pagans are going to be the startling things that show up in paranormal romances.

On the Steampunk side, I’m drawn to all the things I perhaps shouldn’t be. It’s not the splendid innovation and lovely manners that draw me, it’s the places of dysfunction, the historical colonialism, sexism, class prejudice and widespread oppression in many forms. I’m not so much on the inside of Steampunk as a community, which may make it easier to play with the dark stuff, but at the same time, is this what Steampunks want to read? The social culture of Steampunk is inherently celebratory, playful and quite upbeat.  There is an inevitable clash between the culture, and the fiction. Do Pagans want to read about how actual modern Pagan life really is? At a guess, no. I suspect most Pagans would prefer something a tad escapist, whilst wanting something a bit more realistic than Sabrina the teenage witch.

It’s much easier to write stories about a group of people, than for them. Celebrating something in fiction, can make for rather bland, insipid tales. The best way to celebrate is by throwing the good stuff into relief against a backdrop of terrible darkness. Sure, you can have ‘all the nasty people who disagree with us’ as your backdrop of darkness, but that gets tired really quickly and the ‘we’re so lovely and oppressed’ stories can get samey. Black and white tones do not make for a good story. Shades of grey are where it’s at, full of complexity and uncertainty.

I don’t have a clever punch line, or a cunning plan. To be honest, I’m scratching my head over this one. I’ve never read a contemporary fiction that seemed like real life Paganism to me. (Any suggestions?) I dislike fiction written by non-pagans about Pagans, for the greater part. There are a few Pagan authors whose fiction I like, but they aren’t doing contemporary Pagan life. Steampunk, I am getting my toes in the water, trying to see what comes from the inside, and what comes from the outside, what is good, what is liked, how it works.

Is there something about the nature of story that makes it far more comfortable to have them be about some other people, somewhere else, another time? Do we read to escape, or are we looking for reflections?

Druid Community

When we’re all Being Druids, it’s very easy to identify us as a Druid community. In rituals and at camps, armed with books on Druidry, bardic poetry, songs about the land and the Gods, we are clearly ‘Druid’. Many of us then go home, to day jobs that are not purely Druidic. In my case… I don’t just write about Druidry, I’m a fiction author, editor, reviewer, and I’ve done all sorts of other things along the way, too – tutoring, gigging, and the more mundane. We take off the Druid hat and step into physical neighbourhoods where we aren’t surrounded by other Druids, and most of us have family that is outside the Druid tribe too.

In this, we are a long way from our Celtic ancestors. Until Christianity came along, if you were a Celt you were going to be in the same world, the same spirituality as the other Celts around you. Community was not defined purely by spirituality, but by history, artisan skills, laws, families, shared relationship to the land. Everything, in fact, would have interconnected.

Our modern Druid community is spread out. In the UK, we’re like a big village that has been sprinkled liberally across the entire country. We depend a lot on the internet as a consequence.

One of the ways we might move towards being more like a real community and less like a bunch of people connected by some shared ideas, is to share more than just the Druidry. If you only see people eight times a year for rituals, are they really your tribe? If we only pay attention to each other’s work when that work comes in a package with ‘Druidic’ stamped on it, how much are we missing? If we’re real in our Druidry, then it permeates all aspects of what we do, and any sharing of anything is relevant.

What brought this to mind, was the novel Stealing into Winter, by Graeme K Talboys. I read it this week, and if I hadn’t known Graeme first as an author of Druid books, I wouldn’t have guessed. This is a fantasy novel. It’s beautifully written, and utterly gripping. I am now as much a fan of his fiction, as I am of his Druid books. I want to review it for The Druid Network, because I think books by Druids ought to be of just as much interest to Druids, as books about Druids. But there is a leap to make there. It’s a shift from a tendency to define our Druidness through overt manifestations of Druidry, towards going, ‘we are Druids and here is some stuff we have been doing’. Can a person be a Druid author and not write a Druidic book, even if there’s no surface resemblance? What does it mean, really, to be a Druid? Is it what we do, or is it who we are?

The more we connect with each other when we’re not Being Druids, the more like a real community we become. There is more to life than ritual and serious books on serious topics. To make spirituality intrinsic to life, it is necessary to also make life intrinsic to spirituality. All of it.

Making peace

For me, the quest for peace, both within and without is a significant part of what Druidry is for. It’s not what we do, it should be where what we do takes us. Harmony in any aspect of life, creates peace. Resolution, restorative justice, understanding and compassion all lead the way to peace as well. The deep contemplative work that has become intrinsic to my daily life enables me to develop understanding, to cultivate inner calm, make my peace with experiences. I’ve learned when to get on the soap-box and shout, as well. The ‘peace’ that comes from ignoring problems, turning a blind eye to injustice and pretending all is well, is no true peace, just a fragile illusion that can be stripped from us at any time. Real inner peace and resilience are realistic things to be cultivating. Peace in the external world is a project that will require everyone to participate. As such, we won’t get there any time soon, but every contribution matters.

I’ve been pondering a lot what to do in the aftermath of conflict. Unconditional forgiveness can be a way of giving people permission to re-offend, so I’m not keen on that. Holding on to anger is not good for the cultivation of inner peace though. I’ve been working on adopting attitudes of pity and compassion that allow me to feel sorry for the other person, where there is unresolved conflict. Functionally, it allows me to be gentle and patient with them, without offering the kind of acceptance that says ‘oh sure, kick me like that any time.’ Tacitly allowing people to mistreat me does no one any good. I suffer, and they do not learn to do any better.

Where the mistake is owned, it’s always a lot easier to move forward. It can be painful, daunting, even humiliating to admit a mistake, and the bigger the error, the more uncomfortable it gets. But, in owning it, it becomes possible to make changes, to ask for guidance and to explore what might have worked better. Of course there are people who will take an apology and use it as a stick to beat you with, but this is not honourable behaviour, it’s aggressive, abusive behaviour. The person who confesses, apologises and is trying to fix things, always deserves the space in which to try and do just that.

I’ve yet to find a conflict situation in which I couldn’t have handled it better. So, even when I feel that on the whole I’m in the right, I’m always looking to see where I could have done a better job, and what I can learn. Just because I think my behaviour isn’t troubling, doesn’t mean, for example, that I can’t push other people’s buttons by accident and cause pain unknowingly. Those lessons I want to learn and those situations need catching, and dealing with. A mistake, based on error or lack of insight is one of those human things, we all do it. The person who won’t look and repeats, is deliberately careless and that’s a whole other thing. There’s always scope to do better. My main area of weakness comes from misunderstanding. I’m sensitive to the nuances of language, and I get into a lot of difficulty with people who use language carelessly and imprecisely, who say what they do not mean, speak ‘off the cuff’. If I could get the hang of spotting those as they happen, I wouldn’t have to mop up after the event, and that would be definite progress.

It’s impossible to make, or hold peace with someone who is always right. Good relationship depends on negotiation, listening, a willingness to compromise and a willingness to seek the solution that works best for everyone. If one person is always right, and everyone else is always wrong, there’s just no space in which to do the essential relationship things. What you have then is tyranny. We all see things differently, have different needs, respond in our own ways and so forth. There is no one right way of being human. Negotiation enables us to find peaceful ways of co-existing. Being right all the time does not.

Just because a thing looks right from my perspective does not make it right for anyone else. If I refuse to consider that I could be wrong, or just not right from another angle, I pass up an opportunity to learn, and grow. To be human is to be less than perfect. Working with a recognition of that can build peace, within and without, but the more right, justified and entitled you think you are, the harder that is to achieve.

Fertility cult and feminism

If I was to go to a convention wearing revealing clothing then, based on what I hear of the experiences of other women, I could expect lecherous advances from total strangers. It would not be unthinkable that some of them would decide it was ok to grope me, as well. If I was raped by a total stranger and got as far as court, I could expect to be questioned about what I was wearing at the time, in case my attire somehow offered a justification for what had been done to me.

Perhaps if a woman went out in a t-shirt that read ‘I would like to have sex with every man who reads this t-shirt’ then there would be some grounds for taking the clothing into account. Otherwise… what on earth are we doing? Clothing might suggest availability or a willingness to be asked, but no woman dresses up with a view to being insulted, assaulted or raped. Why is this such a hard concept for so many people to grasp?

If a man is mugged, do we ask in court whether his clothing suggested that he was inviting it? Did he deserve it for dressing too wealthy? Of course not. If someone is beaten up because of the colour of their skin, do we blame the skin colour, or the sick prejudices of the aggressor? Well, once upon a time we’d have considered that skin colour was a reasonable justification for violence. Go back to Hitler’s Germany and it was deemed a perfectly good reason to harm people. We used to consider gypsies fair game (identified visually), and gay-bashing was the business of the authorities. Western culture has evolved out of something where prejudice-based violence was not unusual. Where women are concerned, we still haven’t got it sorted. Plenty of places it’s not entirely safe to be transgender, either, or black, or some other ethnicity.

We see a surface, and some of us take that as a justification for aggression. It’s back to that dangerous concept of entitlement again. Something about how you look entitles me to behave in a certain way. This is not a healthy thought form.

One of the ones I’ve found on occasion in the pagan scene is a willingness to patronise: Directed at the young, the inexperienced and those we tar with the brush of being ‘just a bunch of fluffy bunnies’. I happen to like bunnies and other fluffy creatures, but there we go. Why is it wrong to be soft, gentle, harmless and well meaning? I think the world could use a bit more of that, and if the price is more dolphin adoration and conversations about Atlantis… I’ll take that over the condescending attitudes and put downs any day. The one thing fluffy bunnies can be relied upon to do, is play nicely and not attack anyone else. That’s a virtue well worth celebrating.

How do we handle gender issues in the pagan community? I’ve seen an awful lot of scantily clad, nubile young women in ‘goddess’ artwork. I’ve got to say that aside from the Neolithic fat women, the Venuses, there are very few western goddess images out there I can identify with. Pagan archetypes are a step up from the starving supermodels of the mainstream, but they’re still a long way from what real women look like as most of them have large, gravity defying breasts only achievable for the rest of us with surgery. I don’t feel comfortable about this.

From experience, I don’t like the kind of male attention I get if I flaunt my cleavage in public. I’ve not been molested by strangers, but I’ve had plenty of comments that have made me feel uncomfortable, and a bit like an object. My response has been to mostly cover up. I feel more secure out in the world when I’m dressed very deliberately not to draw attention. I very much like the fact that the man I’m with fell in love with my mind first. Flirtation can be fun and playful, but it so often isn’t. It can be threatening, invasive, and then it paves the way to much darker things.

Once you start relating to someone else as not a proper person, but a bit of pleasing meat that exists to entertain you, then it’s a slippery slope. A culture that condones verbal harassment and minor assaults is hardly equipped to deal with rape or domestic abuse. These are not separate issues. It all comes down to looking at a surface and imagining that something we see entitles us to do what we should not.

In the meantime, someone, please, point me at a feminist goddess, because I’m sick of the babes and beauty queens who seem to be far more about male fantasy than female power.

How to offend a fundamentalist

Every tradition, every human endeavour has a little cluster of fundamentalists. Some more vocal and obvious than others, but all of them having, in my experience, a fairly similar outlook. It goes like this: Standards must be maintained. There should be rules (determined by them) to exclude the unsuitable (people not like them). There must be no dabbling, no half hearted, partial involvement. Everyone must be very serious, hardcore, totally dedicated and involved. Wisdom, longstanding involvement and knowing how it all works are the keys to authority, and it is the fundamentalists, who, in their own eyes, are always the people best qualified to lead, inform, dictate and define.

My experience of running things has also taught me this. There are people who come in to all activities with little experience and a lot of enthusiasm. They bring energy, new visions, they don’t always respect the established form because they can see how to do it better. They are often young, opinionated idealists. If you set the fundamentalists on them, they just go away again, but the vibrant newbie and the conservative fundamentalist never combine to good effect.

I grew up in the folk tradition. I understand and value tradition. If you do not sing the old songs, there is no real folk. If all you do is new innovation, you do not have the trad that has to be the essence of folk. What you have instead is a bunch of singer songwriters with acoustic instruments. At the same time, if all you have is the tradition, and all you are allowed to do is the things that have been done, in the way in which they have always been done, the results are boring and sterile. You get a museum piece, not a living tradition. Ultimately, it dies. Given a choice, I’ll take the vibrant new thing over the stale old thing every time, because even though I love tradition, sterility is death and innovation is life.

I’ll take the dabblers, because people who dabble, learn and most people won’t make a deep commitment without having time to see how it all works first. You only need a small percentage of your dabblers to become serious for that to really pay off. It also gives you time to see if they fit, and what you might do with them. Dabblers and people from outside bring ideas and challenges, they do not always recognise, much less respect your status quo. They keep you real and alive. I’d rather, for example, that people came to druidry and learned something that enriched their lives, than that they stayed away because they couldn’t make a total dedication.

I don’t like authority. Fundamentalists are always interested in authority, in who has the right to dictate (them, or people they approve of) and who is in control. To be a fundamentalist is to want things done your way, and to be much less open to alternatives. Now, I know that I have yet to discover the one true way. I’m not all knowing, I’m not wholly at ease with the breadth of my wisdom. I’m a work in progress. I learn from other people, and the people I have learned most from have not, for the greater part, been self important rule makers. They’ve been experimentalists, testing the edges and sending back reports. They’ve been people who made mistakes, too. We learn from each other, none of us assuming that we have it all pegged. That’s the kind of Druid community I want to be part of. It doesn’t denigrate expertise and experience, nor does it denigrate the questioning mind and new ideas of someone who has just turned up.

In any tradition or endeavour, you need balance. You need the voices of experience if you’re lucky enough to have them, if they aren’t in your circle its worth seeking them out. Experience spares you from reinventing the wheel. You also need responsive, creative energy. A tradition that replicates the past will just stagnate. A deep understanding of a tradition makes it possible to recognise where the essence of it lies, what is surface and can be safely tinkered with, what is absolutely vital and must be left alone. You can put a modern drum kit under and ancient folk song and it’s still folk. You can play a reel on a saxophone and it’s still folk, there’s a lot of room to manoeuvre. You can write folk songs about modern life, and it’s still folk. Ask me to define what makes it so, and I’d struggle, but I know it in my bones, and so do plenty of other people. I feel much the same way about Druidry.

I’ve been doing this for long enough not to really count as one of those bright young things anymore. I’m blowed if I’m going to turn into a fundy. I’m trying to walk the balance between the old and the new, respect for the past and the energy of innovation. I seek out those whose wisdom, knowledge and experience exceeds mine, so that I can learn from them, and I also seek out the bright young visionaries who want to shake things up. The one set of people I don’t tend to look for, are the ones who want to hold on to their own, precise and regulated way of doing things. I keep an ear out because it’s always useful to know things, but there’s no point even trying to talk to someone who knows it all, and knows they are right, and knows you are wrong. On the whole, you’re better off talking to rocks and trees, they tend to be more flexible.

It’s endlessly difficult trying to work out how to include people who do not want to include others – it’s as true for folk as for Druidry. I think the best thing to do is let them go their own way, and try not to take them personally. Treat them politely, listen to them because they are often well read and know things, but do not let their desire for authority result in actual authority unless you are indeed happy to do everything their way.

A personal wheel of the year

I spent a number of years celebrating the 8 standard wiccan/druid festivals. It gives the cycle of seasons a shape, and for people new to the idea of engaging with the wheel of the year, this is important. The ‘Fire’ festivals have all kinds of history and folklore so are also a way into a lot of traditional material, stories and ideas, making them a great teaching tool. They’re also rather a blunt instrument. The precise date of the equinoxes and solstices vary, and in practice most groups don’t celebrate the event. They celebrate the weekend most convenient to the event, and the idea of the event. As for the other four, they may be tied to natural events, but in any given year those events don’t all correspond to the dates. Arguably they are festivals of ancestral connection more than fertility festivals or part of the cycle of the seasons.

Whatever we do in terms of public and collective ritual, there’s also scope for creating a personal calendar. Our own responses to the seasons can create personal cycles. It’s autumn, and I can see the winter people getting all excited and gearing up joyfully for the dark while the summer people face SAD and feel out of sorts. People whose season is autumn are of course in their element just now. We’re all different. For some, autumn means returning to school or the education cycles. This time of year is very different for a student, teacher or parent, than it is for someone not connected to the education process. For many, this is a time of new beginnings. For others, the tax year commencing in April will be more significant. Many forms of work will have their own seasons too, and we’re all affected by those. Times of quiet, times of industry, not all of them connected at all to the solar year.

Historical events can be a big part of the personal calendar, too. Birthdays, deathdays, anniversaries of rites of passage. Over time, some fade away and don’t need re-celebrating, while others acquire greater significance.  Today is the third anniversary of my landing in America for the first time, and along with the date of Tom’s coming to the UK, and our wedding day, has become part of the calendar. Those kinds of dates can be powerful in affirming relationship, and also give an opportunity to reflect. Where are we now? Where have we been? Where do we want to be, three years hence? Where personal dates are forgotten or ignored, it can be a symptom of an ailing relationship. Where too much money is spent on anniversaries, too much attention paid at the few key points it can flag up how threadbare things are the rest of the time. I’m glad to say this is nothing like that!

Sometimes personal events become meaningful to a whole community. An annually reaffirmed handfasting can become a regular party and get together. The date of an event can become a definitive moment that stays in the local calendar, or the national calendar. Armistice day. Columbus Day. Martin Luther King Day.  Or at a more local level, strange remnants like Hunting the Earl of Rhone or the one about finding a mediaeval lady’s hood – something lingers on even when the meaning gets a bit vague. These rituals and rememberances can become part of a communal identity.

The moral of this story is, don’t be afraid to add new things. The day of the founding of your grove might be an event to reflect on every year. The day of your becoming a fully fledged OBOD druid might be one you want to earmark for druidic reflection in years to come. There are no wrong answers here, it’s just a way of being alert to the resonant things in your life and making a space for them, honouring what they mean. It’s also important to let them go when they cease to have resonance, moving on to new ideas, new celebrations.

Honour and deserving

Every now and then I run across someone who justifies their behaviour in terms of the action of another person. She did this thing that irritated me and therefore she deserved to be shouted at. He annoyed me and I had to… It’s a curious process, that puts power over your actions into the hands of another person, arguably. If someone irritating you means that you have to shout at them, you have no self control and can only react to what you experience. I’m suspicious that in a lot of cases, this isn’t it at all and that it’s just an excuse for acting out.

I think there are also some very interesting issues to ask around questions of honour and deserving. What happens if we treat people in the manner they deserve? Well, firstly we have to define ‘deserve’. Does that mean ‘do unto others as others do unto you’? If it does then we respond to violence with violence and anger with anger. We can only be nice to people who are nice to us first, but if they’re working to the same rules, and have already seen our angry and violent responses giving other people what they ‘deserve’ then are they going to be nice? Or are they going to get in the first blow, just to be on the safe side?

Honourable behaviour has very little to do with what the other person has, or has not done.

Now, I’m entirely in favour of self defence, and restorative justice. If someone punches me in the face, what do I restore by punching them back? Nothing. If I allow my anger to rule me, shouting when I am irritated, punching when I am offended, what I am doing is being ruled by my anger. Pain, fear and grief reactions can be immediate, as can the feeling of anger, but what we experience emotionally and how we express it always involves a degree of choice, and the more time is involved, the more choice we tend to have.

I think the first requirement for honourable behaviour, is that it is considered behaviour, not just a knee-jerk reaction. If you are behaving without thinking, you aren’t considering the rights and wrongs of a situation, your own emotional state, the reasons for what is happening or anything else that may have a bearing. Allowing the first rush of emotional response to direct behaviour pretty much precludes doing anything more complex. Perhaps there are people who are so innately right, wise and good that their spur of the moment reaction is bound to be superb, but we lesser mortals cannot afford to be quite so self assured. A moment or two to think and question is surely the better way to go.

Honourable behaviour is, more than anything, what we do for ourselves. It is an expression of self and integrity. It is therefore, behaviour that we own. If I act, I’m going to do so for a reason, not as some kind of reflex action, if I can possibly help it. Any action or word that has to be justified in terms of what the other person did, is an action that needs a good, hard look. Honourable behaviour of course depends on the situation. What is called for in face of a mugger is not what is required when dealing with an angry child, and so forth.

Ask not what the other person deserves. Ask what you deserve, and how you wish to treat yourself, because every off the cuff, out of control, ill considered word or deed, is ultimately a manifestation of our failure to respect and value ourselves. The person who cannot control themselves enough to choose their own behaviour, arguably doesn’t have a very high opinion of themselves at all.

Nightmares

I’ve long been fascinated with the science of dreaming, the psychology of it, and the more mystical takes as well. There are interesting overlaps between the three. Generally my own dreaming is the basis from which I explore this, although I had a long stretch when my dream life was so barren and limited that I had little to work with. If I’d been honest with myself, I would have been quicker to recognise the barren dream phase as indicative that much was wrong in my life.

I’ve never been keen to accept the idea of dream interpretation guides, where one thing can be safely interpreted as meaning another. We’re all unique, and we all use our own symbolic language. That said, the idea of self as house has been with me for some time.

When I was a child, the house I dreamed about was a beautiful cottage where a couple of warm and welcoming old people lived. By my teens, the house had become a threatening place, full of rooms I didn’t dare go into. In my twenties, the house was derelict, and usually had squatters in it, more often than not I would have the same nightmare of being chased through my house until I eventually jumped out of a window in desperation to escape. What I needed to do in my waking life, was jump and escape.

After that, the house dreams changed. I stopped having reoccurring nightmares about needing to run away from usually unspecified threats.

Some of my house dreams at the moment are explicitly about house hunting. In a more pragmatic way, that has to do with the knowledge that I’ll be moving again in less than a year, there is actual house hunting in my future, and a new life to build around that. It’s also about the ongoing process of redefining me, reimagining me. I’m very much a work in progress, and have been for several years now. I have a feeling the next geographical change will go alongside some dramatic lifestyle changes, and no doubt changes to my sense of self. And so at night, I am looking for a new house.

I had a classic old-style house nightmare last night though – big house, and not one that I owned. I never did have proper ownership of the nightmare houses, but I think that went with not feeling like I had proper ownership of myself, really. For the first time, the fear source, the thing hunting me wasn’t vague. I knew exactly what I was running away from. In the dream, they were animals that had been kept in captivity and escaped, and went mad for human flesh. Actually, I blame Jonathan Green’s fiction entirely for this, with his escaping dinosaurs and marauding monsters.

There’s a lot of practical difference between a nameless dread, and a troublesome thing you can point at. So much horror depends upon the uncanny and unknowable nature of the threat. That which we do not understand is always more scary. That’s why the first Alien film remains so powerful. What we don’t see, and have to imagine has far more power to scare us, than the known.

Sometimes the answer to a nameless dread, is to name it. Even if you don’t know what it is, naming confines it, makes it more manageable. Apparently somewhere deep in the murky layers of my unconscious mind, I have given a name to the nameless fears. Right now they look like familiar things gone predatory – I’m sure we could do some entertaining Freudian-style analysis there. A known fear can be fought, faced and conquered.

One day, I’m going to find that cottage again, or somewhere a lot like it. If I can’t dream it, I shall make it, in the waking world, out of my own actions and intent. A safe place that feels like me. A place where the nameless dreads do not get any kind of space.

The mystery of brains

Most of the time, parenting isn’t excessively difficult. Children progress in coherent, predictable ways from one day to the next as skills evolve, understanding grows, bodies adapt and so forth. Every so often there’s a sudden leap, and the impossible becomes easy, the unthinkable becomes the thought. These are always startling and tend to come without any kind of warning.

A lot of it has to do with how the human brain develops when we’re young. My grasp of the technicals isn’t superb but the gist is that the brain has physical structures, and the way in which paths are formed between brain cells shapes how we are able to think. Child development psychology flags up that there are some things young children just aren’t capable of thinking about. Then the brain changes, and *ping* you’re on a new level. It can be startling to watch. Some of the manifestations are simple – going from sky as blue line across the top of a picture to a sense of how objects exist in relation to each other is one of those transitions, but not a challenging one.

Sudden shifts in the way a child is capable of thinking are also very exciting times. As adults we tend to get this less, our brain growth has mostly settled. Perhaps more importantly, we don’t seek it. When allowed to develop naturally, children are voracious in their quest for information. They want to know everything about everything. How we support and teach them inform whether than continues or not. A child who hears ‘because I said so’ and ‘because it just is’ will learn not to bother to ask. The child for whom learning is turned into a miserable chore won’t stay inspired to learn, that natural hunger squashed. And of course children whose hunger for input is fed by television and computer games, who get a steady diet of empty noise and meaningless drivel by way of content, cannot develop much. I recognise that there is educational content out there, but when the aim is to pacify the child and make them easy to look after, the effect is…. Pacification.

From what I can tell by observing my son, and what I remember of the process myself, the sudden brain leaps don’t really register. You forget that you couldn’t think that way before, the new way becomes natural so quickly and there’s not much incentive to question it. Sometimes, you don’t notice how much your own capacity to think has changed. As adults, we’re both less likely to change, and more likely to notice it. Revolution between the ears is a very big deal once you’re physically mature. It is possible, though.

How we think, and the structures we have physically in our brains, develops over time and with use. The person who devotes a lot of time to music does, I gather, have a visibly different brain structure to someone who doesn’t. What we do with our brains shapes what we are able to do, informs what comes easily, determines where we might go next. Anyone who dedicates themselves to a spiritual path, or a path of personal growth, is very precisely working to keep their brain developing.

There are a great many people out there I could wish a mental revolution upon. I wish they could change with the sudden explosion of insight that hits my child every now and then. There are so many people who seem to have stopped thinking, questioning, wondering and growing far too early, settling into the comfort of their own narrow world view and filtering out everything that doesn’t fit. Far too many of them have also taken up careers in politics. But in adults, Road to Damascus moments are few and far between. Grand epiphanies don’t turn up unsought, eureka moments will not come to the person who wasn’t looking for an answer in the first place.

Brains are such fabulous, mysterious, exciting things. I just wish people would notice that more, celebrate the wonder that is us a bit more, think a bit more…

Costume Druid

Following on from yesterday then, and some of the feedback about costumes and Druidry on facebook. All clothes are artifice. Natural humans are naked humans, after all! As soon as we start wrapping anything from fig leaves and animal skins through to bits of cloth around ourselves, we’re engaged in a kind of art form. One that inevitably says something to other people about who we are, or who we want them to think we are. We put on uniforms to announce conformity, roles and authority. We put on kits to show allegiance – to teams, politics, countries… we dress to announce who we are. I’m single, notice my cleavage. I’m professional, see my suit. I’m fashionable, I’m counter culture…

Clothing creates archetypes, images, things people rally to. If you picture the Klu Klux Klan, you’ll picture the clothes. If I say ‘Wall Street’ you’ll see the suits. If I say Nazi, you’ll see the black shirts. Iconic gear can be a tool for conformity. Maoist China used uniforms in just this way. Arguably many schools and employers do the same. Make someone conform to a visual standard and you make them part of the team, you own them, you control them. I hate uniforms.

In wanting to belong, we can put ourselves into uniforms all too easily. Teenagers do it all the time, their clothes signalling clan allegiance, musical affiliations, identities. You dress to match your tribe. In some ways this can create community bonding and cohesion, too. It’s a double edged sword to say the least.

If I stand up in public as a Druid, then people are going to notice what I’m wearing, and make something of it. (I dread to think what!)

The archetypal witch images help draw people into witchcraft. Now, I’m not a big fan of surface and superficialness, but at the same time, its so much easier to work with a thing, explain it, share it, if you have strong images. Call them symbols, if you will. Things that have strong symbols are more easily put into the general consciousness. This is why I’m curious about what Druidry looks like, or about how we might shape it to look. Because it does need to look like something. I’m not imagining one fixed image, there would have to be diversity, but icons are good and we can have icons without having uniforms, I think.

We all dress up, every day of our lives (apart from the naturists). We all wear costumes, even if we don’t think of them that way. Your look, your style, is designed to tell the world something. Maybe you have one style for work and another for play. Maybe you like dressing up as a pagan at the weekend, or as a steampunk, or a live roleplayer… We dress up to construct ourselves, and to express ourselves.

So, what does a Druid look like? There can’t be one answer.

Bards of the Lost Forest used to look like a bunch of people going for a walk or a picnic. We were light on visual drama, highly practical, but we looked discernibly like a group of people, not a bunch of disparate individuals.

Here’s some thoughts…

A druid will be wearing the kind of footwear you can walk in, or may be barefoot, but will be able to head off and explore. They may already have a smear of mud around the ankles, or a grass stain. Whatever the style of clothes, it doesn’t get in the way, it allows you to do stuff. It probably isn’t all new and shiny though, because reuse is good, and recycling is good, and throwing clothes away isn’t, and buying new gear all the time isn’t environmentally friendly. It’ll probably be durable, some of it may be handmade. It won’t scream ‘look at me’ but at the same time it will quietly announce that the wearer is not a clone, not one to follow the pack all the time. There will also be things worn for beauty, for the loveliness of them, for joy.