Nimue Brown's Blog, page 453

And they all lived happily ever after

I wonder how many people’s lives have been significantly impaired by that unfortunate fairy tale belief? It implies that once the lovers kiss and the wedding date is set, all will be well. It’s the end of the story, folks, adventures over, happiness guaranteed. And they all lived happily ever after, as though that would be the natural, magical consequence of true love. I’ve met too many people along the way who imagined that finding the right person would fix all their problems like waving a wand. They would be happier, fulfilled, inspired. They would write the best song, the novel, become able, and so forth. What a burden to put on a potential partner! Not only do you want their love, they have to set your world to rights and fix all those thing you couldn’t, or wouldn’t fix for yourself. Not so long back, someone commented here that if I’d found the love of my life, that should cure me of depression. This is the kind of madness I’m talking about.

Relationship is supposed to be a core concept for Druidry. Relationship can be magical, it can bring to us a sense of awen, of divinity, and all manner of other wondrous things. But it is not wise to assume that relationship will sustain itself as if by magic. Love alone is not enough. You need to be paying attention, listening, responding, taking note. People change, and over years people change a lot. Children, status shifts, jobs and other life experiences alter us. The relationship where it is assumed that the all living happily ever after process is under way, is the one that risks losing everything in face of change.

It’s easy to become careless in relationships if we assume they are in the bag. I know of people who invest vast amounts of time, energy, money and attention in setting up relationships, but once they think the other person is secured, they stop making the same effort, imagining that such attention to detail is only necessary at the start. Did they ask if the courted one felt the same way? I doubt it. Will the courted one come to feel ignored and uncared for a few years down the line? Probably. Too busy living happily ever after to do much living, or happiness.

What’s true of our love lives is equally true in friendships, and familial connections. Taking for granted is highly destructive and eats out the roots of whatever you had.

No matter how longstanding a relationship is, or what shape it has, don’t take it for granted. Nurture it. Give it time and attention. Do all the things you would have done when starting out, and things stay fresh and immediate rather than becoming tired and banal.

Also, don’t imagine that love will fix everything. Be prepared to put in some work yourself. Love will not pay the bills, and love will not cure all ailments. What it will do, if you’re lucky, is give you the support and belief of another human being who is willing to work with you, dream with you, share the triumphs with you and cry over the disasters with you. Love can be healing, but only when we let go of old pain. Love can be reassuring, but only when we’re listening to reassuring words from a loved one, or carrying those words with us. There are a great many ways to sabotage what love can do. Asking too much, and putting nothing in are the most reliable.

I have, along the way, been in some good relationships and some lousy ones. I’ve seen a great deal of other people’s love lives, and their hopes for what romantic involvement will give them. I’ve seen people throw away what they have because they’ve lost sight of the value. There may be true love, but refusal to believe in it or nurture it will eventually kill that love off. I also know that where there is mutual support, care and listening, where time is invested in actually having a relationship with another person (or a place, or an art form or whatever else you invest yourself in) good things come. What we get out depends so very much on what we put in. When both people are putting in their hearts, souls and energy, so much more is possible. I spent a lot of years without that, I have it now, and am conscious of the difference of dedication underpinning things.

And they all lived happily ever after is not the end of the story, it’s where a whole new thing has to begin.

Community Cursing

I’ve just read Melusine Draco’s fascinating book By Spellbook & Candle: Cursing, Hexing, Bottling & Binding. (Recommended). It’s a very interesting piece of work which includes all sorts of information about the history of cursing. The one thing that grabbed me particularly was the idea of community cursing. The general image of cursing is more of the solitary, perhaps shameful act of malevolence against another. It’s done alone, in darkness, the evidence carefully hidden so you don’t get burned as a witch. A clichéd image, I know, but I think that’s the more normal association.

Community cursing is a whole other thing, and this book flagged up a number of times and places when its known to have been carried out. The best know example would be the Catholic excommunication, the accompanying language for which is tantamount to cursing somebody. And what could be more damning than removing a person from the presence, and care, of god? When a community gathers to publically throw a curse at someone, this has a totally different vibe from the private cursing image. For a start, normally the one who curses would be the one to face punishment in the event of discovery. Communal cursing, especially religion sanctioned, perhaps even undertaken by your priest or some other figure of authority, keeps power with the majority. It begs the question of why you might choose a curse in that scenario rather than more conventional, physical responses to a problem person.

If the intended recipient of a communal curse is an outsider, perhaps they will never know. It makes sense to curse the enemies of the tribe, and sociologically speaking, I suppose that’s as much about group identity and making up for a sense of lost power as anything else. When the majority undertakes to curse the lone individual from inside the community, there have to be other reasons, and I am not sure what they are. Punishment by public humiliation? A method for controlling behaviour, akin to the rough music used in some communities to shame those who do not conform to shared standards? Is it an implicit threat that next time action will be more direct? It probably varies across places and times. In the case of Catholic excommunication and other curse exiles, it is about publically removing the person from the community. For a lot of history, being outside the fold was probably a death sentence.

The whole issue flags up for me how contextual most things are. If someone with power, sanctioned by religion, curses another, that’s not evil, it may even get you saint status. When the curse is the only means of revenge or justice available to someone who is largely powerless, then the discovery of it will likely lead to further disempowerment.

Of course some, if not most of the cursing evidenced by folk practice, was all about greed and malice. Much of it won’t have had any decent justification. Cursing is just another way in which humans have sought to get advantages over each other, score points, and get our own way. It’s neither pretty nor excusable. But then there are the curses of the starving beggar, turned away from the rich house in the depths of winter, empty handed and powerless. I’ve encountered a few witch trial stories that start from just such a point. The wronged one powerless to get justice by conventional means, and invoking poetic justice, the wrath of God or their own anger in a quest to balance the books. And oddly enough, as Melusine points out, when someone poor and powerless curses in this way, and the curse comes to pass, no one seems to consider that this might not be evil at all, but a bit of divine intervention on behalf of the aggrieved one.

It had never before occurred to me that curses could be such a loaded, political issue!

The importance of messing it up

Success is not a great teacher. Oh, it’s very pleasing when everything goes smoothly and well. It can be a great sop to self esteem. The ritual that runs perfectly. The project that finishes without hiccup or error. That kind of success can encourage us to feel perhaps more competent and knowledgeable than we really are. Mostly that’s not a problem, although it can mean when we get into trouble, we’re even less prepared for it. It’s not always obvious with success as to why, exactly, it went right. Often, we take success at face value, not analysing why we got it. Failures tend to make us think more. It’s important to consider both.

Mistakes invite consideration. We tend to want to know where it went wrong or why it fell over, and from this, we learn. We also learn about what matters to us. It’s very hard to do anything if you aren’t prepared to risk error. If you don’t have the space to mess up now and then, how can you move out of you comfort zone? If you aren’t allowed, by yourself or others, to be wrong once in a while, or to make mistakes, then where is the scope for growth? I think culturally we push too hard, we don’t give people enough learning spaces, we don’t accept fallibility enough. It’s not just human to make mistakes, it is necessary.

I gather from what psychology I’ve studied that we have a locus of responsibility that we attribute things to in any given situation. Some people view themselves as all powerful, some as entirely powerless. An event happens, and we see the win as entirely of our making, or as pure luck. We get knocked down by life, and we see it as our fault, or as inexplicable misfortune. Of course you can pick and mix. The person able to see every success as proof of their own skill, genius and entitlement, and every setback as pure fluke, will be very happy in themselves, although not well connected to the rest of reality. The person who sees every success as just luck and every failure as deserved will spend their days miserable, and also will be out of touch with reality. In practice all that comes to us, for good and ill, will be a mix of things of our making, and not of our making. Anyone who wants a meaningful relationship with reality needs a nuanced approach to this, not an assumption.

How we understand our mistakes is just as important as what we do with them. If it’s never your fault, then you will never bother to learn or try to change. If you are unassailably perfect, then you have to look for reasons outside, the external locus of responsibility an essential to maintaining your illusions. And equally, if you don’t think you are capable of being better, or getting it right, or you believe the gods are going to punish you no matter what you do then there’s still no reason to bother. Failure does not have to be viewed as punishment or divine judgement. It doesn’t have to be viewed as a one shot deal, either. Most mistakes can be done over. So long as nobody died, it’s usually not insurmountable. Messing up once does not mean it’s pointless to try again. It takes courage to try again, to risk further humiliations, further hard lessons about the limits of our understanding and ability. The person who doesn’t risk those blows will never be more than they currently are. They won’t let themselves.

In Druidry this matters a great deal. Those new to ritual need the opportunity to make mistakes, to fluff lines, forget running orders and make all the errors of learners. If there’s no humiliation, no punishment, just encouragement, then there is room to grow. And for anyone leading, there needs to be a sense that perfection is not called for. Perfection in ritual is not possible, the person who has to guard against mistakes will never be as open to the awen, or the flow of the ritual. Fear of failure cuts you off from so many things. In the Bard path, room to mess up is vital. That first, nervous public performance will not be as good as you wanted it to be. They never are. Voices wobble, sweating fingers slide on strings, chords are stumbled over, words forgotten. The two seconds of pause between verses will be an eternity of hell your audience probably doesn’t even notice. But if at this point you say ‘I am a failure’ you’ll not do it again. All the great bards who share their skills at rituals started out the same way, and all of them, at some point, will have messed up in public. It is an unavoidable, and necessary part of the path.

Messing up keeps us human. It keeps us realistic about our less than godlike natures. The fear of messing up keeps us working, practicing, striving. The willingness to mess up keeps us experimenting, creating, and testing the boundaries.

Meditating with crotchet

In my book Druidry and Meditation, I talked a bit about the idea that any activity can be used meditatively. It being a small book, I didn’t explore in detail the many options here. When anything can be a meditation, the potential for discussion is large to the point of being unwieldy. But, this is a more personal one.

I know a lot of Druidy women who work with wool, from spinning it and dyeing to weaving, knitting, crotchet and felt. Working with wool is inherently tactile and it’s an activity that connects us to our ancestors. Especially women. Spinning was so intrinsic to femininity historically, that women were sometimes buried with their distaff, and the female line of descent could be called ‘the distaff line’. There’s a memorable sequence in Marion ZB’s Mists of Avalon, where spinning sends one of the characters into visionary trance states, so it’s not without a magical angle too. Spinning the threads has connotations of fate, and knotted cords are a traditional magical tool. We weave charms too.

I learned a variety of wool and needle crafts as a child, knitting, tapestry and embroidery particularly. I couldn’t get my head around the one needle of crotchet at all. It wasn’t something I took up until after the birth of my son, (ten years ago today). These days crotchet is my preference. I like both the rhythm of it and the total scope for improvising. Any direction possible. New threads always an option, and the third dimension available. I’ve crocheted around pine cones to make woolly squids, for example.

I can get lost in the rhythm of wool passing through my fingers. I find this deeply soothing, and as I am by nature a stressbunny, I frequently need soothing. I take a lot of joy in putting colours together in pleasing combinations. I used to hear all the time that I have no skill with colours, so every time I manage something I like, that’s a very personal kind of victory.

The work is always intended to become something, perhaps with a specific place, use or person in mind, so as I create, I’m also thinking about that intention. I’m contemplating my vision, and around the wool I am often also making a plan, or nurturing a hope. I am crocheting the world as I want it to be. I am knotting together little fragments of dream.

Sometimes I do this consciously and deliberately – which for me defines it as meditation. Sometimes I’m not seeking to discipline my own thoughts, but the rhythm of creating something takes me into a contemplative state. And sometimes making an object is more like making a spell, because the intentions are so strong. A hat for my child to make him smile, and keep him warm on winter bike rides. A blanket to put on a bed that does not yet exist, in a house I have never seen. Dreams and threads tangled together.

Druidry does not have to be about dramatic acts in public places. It can be private, domestic, weaving together strands of creativity and practicality. Magic in living and being, in doing the smallest things.

Signs from nature

I recently read a rather new agey book, which talked a lot about the presence of angels (author William Bloom, if anyone was wondering). It included such notions as nature being the face of spirit and that if we pay attention to nature, it will give messages to us. I’ve also recently read a Ross Heaven book on shamanic healing, and that too offered the idea of messages from nature. Now, on one hand I do divination and the idea of simple things that give inspiration and prompt insight works fine for me. But on the other hand…

I spend a lot of time close to nature. I’m living on a small boat on a large canal, there’s a lot of water, trees and wildlife right outside my window and I’m out there in it every day. I see a lot of nature. I’ve watched the grebes diving at twilight, and seen them enough to know perfectly well that they aren’t there for me; they are there for the spot they like to fish in at sunset. I know when the bats and badgers are likely to come out, which bit of towpath the toads favour, where the owls like to perch, and where to hear a cuckoo in the spring.

Encountering any of these things as a one off, they might feel mystical and magical in the sense of conveying specific meaning to me. Living with them every day, I can’t take them as personal omens. I can see how the weather impacts on some of them, seasons, times of day. I see that all the living things around me have their own needs, communities, habits. I will gasp with the sheer pleasure of seeing a tern, I am delighted by the badgers. I know where to find them, and I know I won’t see any of them so much in really bad weather, or at the season when they are elsewhere. There is a magic in experiencing nature.

It seems a touch arrogant, to me, to imagine that the natural world has nothing better to do than run round bringing us messages about whether to apply for that job, or whether to ditch a lover. My honest impression is that unless I am directly interacting with it in some way, the rest of nature couldn’t care less whether I live or die, succeed or fail. If I have bread crusts, the swans will love me, for a little while. If I am noisy, the birds will fly away from me. The more time I spend with them, the less able I am to see patterns of meaning in nature that do not pertain to the other living entities. I am also ever more conscious that these are spirits too, all of them from the tiniest bug on my finger tip to the big fish that occasionally leap at dusk. They are all spirits. They all have their own paths to follow. Do any of them taking my coming and going for an omen?

Olympic aftermath

I noticed during the Olympics a fair distribution of druid opinions both for and against the event, for all kinds of reasons. Concerns about the meaningless noise, the fake-feel-good, the corporate angle – all those unhealthy food and drink sponsors seemed a bit odd. There were political issues, social justice issues – it’s hard to see the Olympics as a single event, because there’s so much other stuff going on around the sport.

Mostly, I can do without the other stuff. So for the sake of not writing a small epic, I’m going to skip thinking about anything not sport related.

I have mixed feeling about competitions. That’s as true of bardic contests as it is of running. On one hand, that competitive spirit can beget divisions and enmity, bring feelings of failure and cause misery. On the other, competitions drive us towards excellence, push us beyond our boundaries and enable us to celebrate success and brilliance. I think in an ideal world, both competitive and non-competitive spaces are needed for true flourishing.

Winning is great. Knowing how to win and lose gracefully are even better. The person who can win without crushing and the person who can lose without feeling bitterness, are giants. When personal excellence is more important to you than whether you won, and when doing all that you can is all that you ask of yourself… then you may be onto something.

I wonder how many people have sat on their sofas around the world, swigging beer and feeling an achievement based on the actions of others. I wonder how many people have been inspired to try something. Here in the UK, I rather expect bike sales will go up this summer. And how many of those aspirations to physical fitness will fade away once the extent of the work called for becomes apparent? But even if only a handful of extra people make it onto a path of personal excellence, this will be a win.

Excellence is not the same as winning. It does not have to be competitive, although it can be. It doesn’t even need recognition. Its just about giving everything you have, passionately, repeatedly, for the sake of being the very best that you can be. That might not mean running at high speeds. It may mean making the best cakes, or saving abandoned dogs. It may be all about the compassion you show in daily life, or the beauty you bring into the world. We can, as Bill and Ted so finely put it, be totally excellent to each other, as well.

So, what happens next? Will we carry on with our sporting heroes, or will we saunter back to the celebrities who are famous mostly for being celebrities, and to whom the term ‘excellent’ cannot really be applied? Will we be inspired to acts of excellence in our own lives, or will the moment pass? Are the Olympics just a cheerful distraction and a fad, or will we undertake to make a meaningful Olympic legacy here in the UK? I shall try not to be too cynical….

In search of a culture shift

I’m following on from a review I’ve posted today about a Book called Overcoming Depression. http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

When I was a kid, people thought it was no big deal to drink and drive. Awareness of the consequences has led to a culture shift and it’s now sufficiently shameful that people do it less, and are less likely to claim a right to do it. It used to be culturally fine for smokers to subject non-smokers to smoke, and not culturally ok to object to this. The police would not, until relatively recently, come out for a wife beating, much less seek to prosecute. We used to beat children, we used to bait bears. Cultures change when the people in them reject a behaviour, or a way of being.

Here’s the culture shift I want: That mental cruelty and abuse should be seen as just as damaging, unnecessary and despicable as physical abuse. If someone takes a hammer to me and breaks my bones, they will go to prison. If someone takes words to me and causes me to have a nervous breakdown, destroying my mind, there will be no consequences for them. The bones would heal. The mind often doesn’t. We need to treat psychological violence as a serious issue.

One of the things I noticed reading the Overcoming Depression book, is the number of case histories where the sufferer had been the victim of psychological abuse – often in childhood, but also in the workplace and at the hands of lovers. While we find destructive criticism socially acceptable, while it’s fine to put down, harass, demoralise, nit pick, devalue, publicly humiliate, patronise, and so forth, this is not going to change. Depression, it should be noted, is widespread and on the increase. Do we want a culture of people who are so miserable and messed up that all we do is wound each other, or do we want to fix it? We have the knowledge in our culture about how good relationship works, how to build self esteem, how to increase happiness. We just aren’t using it.

We have ideas like might is right. Survival of the fittest. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Keep em lean, keep em keen. Being nice or polite is just political correctness and worthless. Revenge is a good thing. Winning is everything. Law of the jungle. Do unto others before they do unto you. And many, many more. All of these thought forms are basically about justifying greed, aggression, and acting like a total shit. They are denials of social responsibility and they tell us that if we can get away with it, then it’s fine, and if we didn’t someone else would, or they’d do it to us. NONE OF THIS IS NECESSARY OR INEVITABLE.

And in that law of the jungle world view, you never get to relax, or draw breath. You’ve always got to watch out for the faster, smarter predator who is going to take you down. You can’t enjoy anything. You can’t trust anyone. You know it’s all conditional on what you earn, on status, power. When you lose, they’ll cut you to shreds. This is not conducive to happiness. It is about as far as you can get from being happy without having a painful and terminal disease, at a guess. With the game set up this way, nobody wins. Remind me about the intelligent ape bit again. This is intelligent?

Criticism is good. Pointing out the flaws is good. You can’t learn if you cannot make mistakes and recognise them. Success is not much of a teacher. However ‘you are rubbish’ is not teaching anyone. “You will never get anything right” is of no use. Broad, negative statements designed to denigrate, are just forms of attack. They need treating as such, and the people who dish them out need treating as aggressive and antisocial. In terms of jungle law, abusive people need identifying as social dinosaurs. And we know what happened to dinosaurs. Time to consider some evolution.

People did not get to current civilized status by trying to dominate each other. Most real progress owes more to co-operation than competition. We do most, and best, and happiest when we play as a team. We need to stop socially reinforcing the people who trade on insults and criticism. We need to stop seeing anything clever or macho about aggression and tyrannical behaviour. Culture shifts all start somewhere. Or probably, they all start a lot of places in small ways and gradually converge. Racism used to be a fact of life. Sexism used to be entirely institutionalised and on the statute books. Mistreating LGBT folk used to be considered normal, if not a legal requirement. We’ve come a long way. We’ve still got a lot of work to do. We need to recognise that psychological violence destroys lives, and we need to stop pretending that this is somehow less of an issue than hitting people about the head with blunt objects.

Voices in our heads

Most of us hear voices. I don’t mean this in some kind of needing to take pills sense. It’s about the way in which we process, and often internalise the voices of other people. For example, a person who has grown up hearing that they are loved and valued, who has been treated with compassion and respect and encouraged to feel good about themselves, will probably hear a kind and helpful little voice. The voice that says ‘you can do this’. “You are worth it.” “You are lovely and you will pull through.” That kind of inner voice is incredibly sustaining, reinforces good self esteem and encourages feelings of hope even in hard times. It’s not proof against every setback, but it will give you a fighting chance. But what about the other voices? The ones that criticise and condemn. Now, we all hear plenty of criticism going through our lives, and we all need to be able to hear it, but every now and then, one of those comments gets in and sticks, and becomes part of the inner landscape. You are bound to fail. You cannot sing. You’re just an emotional blackmailer. You’re a waste of space. No one will ever love you. Things we fear may be true. Things too vague for us to readily disprove them. This kind of little voice can sit inside your head, eternally critical and demoralising. Forever undermining achievements, mocking emotions or otherwise eroding self esteem. Many people who seem compassionate with others, are veritable sadists when it comes to how they treat themselves. And it’s very much about what the inner voices are telling us to do. It’s worth taking some time to reflect on the voices you hear. The ones that turn up late at night, or that wait at the bottom of bottles, or that show up when things go wrong. The ones that snipe and destroy. Simply identifying them is helpful. Notice what they say and that this is not you saying it. The odds are you know perfectly well whose voice you have internalised. You may well remember when the words in question were thrown at you. What makes you think you’re so special? Why should anyone care what you think? It’s not your voice. It’s the voice of someone else. You’ve given it free bed and board. It may be that if you have the mental focus, you can tell it to pack and leave. Kick it out of your head space. Resisting the inner voices is otherwise a slow and painful process, and I think the only real answer is, keep recognising where it comes from, and keep resisting. Good criticism is helpful, it shows us something we need to know or learn and by acting on it, we have scope to grow and improve. “You got that specific thing wrong” is a door to learning how to get it right. The ones that haunt and hurt, tend not to be about specific mistakes, more a sense of being inherently a failure. The comments that suggest you are not capable of being good enough. The ones that say there is no hope, you might as well not even try. Save everyone the hassle, why don’t you? These will often come with the assertion that this is to help you, put you straight, save you from yourself. It’s hard to fight off someone who is convinced they’re doing you a big favour by knocking the illusions, pride, stupidity out of you. But that doesn’t make them right. None of us is made of fail. None of us is beyond hope of improvement. None of us is destined to cock everything up. If that sort of little voice has got inside your head, I’d like to offer you one magic word to use against it. It’s a potent word, and a powerful charm against that kind of destructive, abusive treatment. The word is ‘bullshit’. Try it. Say it out loud. Bullshit. When you hear the derogatory, rubbishing, unhelpful, you can never win comments, say it again. Bullshit. It will help.

Guest Blog: Water Fairies

By Nukiuk

 

Cool grey and green lichen covered stones surround the small pool which reflects the sky above, a small slash disturbs the crystal clear waters and a coin drifts down to join hundreds of others, each representing some wish, each a desire. For hundreds, even thousands of years people have cast votives into this well as an exchange to aid in their hopes. Such wells dot the Celtic landscape, and are perhaps some of the last remnants of the first religion of the Celtic lands.

Down the hill a ways the river bends and flowing water saturates the ground allowing the trees to grow a little thicker as they seem to stretch just a little ways out into the farms. Once these trees would have been decorated with cloth in the spring, offerings for the fairies of the water which lived within the river. For water fairies were the most important of all fairies among the Celts according to Briggs. Such fairies granted wishes and fertility, they aided in the growth of crops and kept people safe for thousands of years. When Julius Caesar was planning to invade the Celts he received reports that they primarily worshipped water fairies. Further among the Irish Danu, the mother goddess of the Tuatha De Dannan was associated with rivers. Among the Gauls Deo Matrona who was associated with the river Marne was the “Mother Goddess.”

It should come as no surprise then that Arthur’s greatest sword, the one which would not only help him keep his kingdom in tact but which also would not break was given to him by a water fairy. It was after all the water fairies which were people’s protection and comfort. In one tale a woman is forced to flee her home as she was tormented by horned witches. Eventually she collapses, weeping beside a well. It is here by the water that a voice speaks to her giving her the knowledge of how to rid her home of her tormentors. Such stories are typical of water fairies, which, being shy beings tend to avoid being seen by humans. Even so they do sometimes appear, most often in the form of an animal.

The Grimm Brother’s fairy tale of “Little Brier Rose” begins with a Queen and King who want a child and water fairy who grants them that wish.

“One day while the queen was sitting in her bath, a crab crept out of the water onto the ground and said, “Your wish will soon be fulfilled, and you will bring a daughter into the world.” And that is what happened.”

There are two pieces of knowledge we gain from the water fairy in the tale of “Little Brier Rose;” the first is that such fairies often take on animal form. In the Scottish fairy tale of “Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree” the water fairy which acts as an oracle appears as a trout. Other fee’s and water fairies appear in the form of giant eels. As I argued in “Water Spirits as Fairies” the tales of the Loch Ness Monster likely come from the tales of water fairies in eel/serpent form. Indeed the first written encounter with one of these creatures is of a Christian Missionary trying to banish it, not as a physical being but as a spiritual one.

The continuation of this tradition in “Brier Rose” with the appearance of the crab shows us that water fairies were important to people up into the 19th Century. Indeed in the other version of Sleeping Beauty the King and Queen actively go out to the sacred wells in order to gain a child.

The fact that the water fairy gave the King and Queen of “Sleeping Beauty” a child is interesting because water fairies can to some extent see the future. In other words the water fairy in the story of sleeping beauty was the only active being in the story, she was the one who set the story into motion, so it was she who could be said to be the author of the tale. The water fairy was most likely assigned this role in the story not just because she was the provider of fertility, but because fairies are lovers of art and beauty. Sometimes this means that humans, and the story of humanity are their art.

There are a few important things to bear in mind about water fairies, first is that they are lovers of the journey of the state betwixt and between one and another. In one tale a Welsh farmer falls in love with a water fairy and offers her some cooked bread but she claims it’s too hard, so he offers her some dough and she says it’s not done enough so he offers her some half cooked bread and she accepts this gift.

One must keep this in mind both when giving gifts too and receiving wisdom from water fairies, because while they seek to aid humans they never give a full answer, the picture they give humans is unclear so that the humans will have to take the journey on their own. It is only through the journey after all that a person is able to gain true knowledge and appreciation. This is the realm of water fairies to provide both knowledge and fertility.

As with all things done by the fairy in Celtic tradition continuing to work with water fairies wasn’t always so simple. They are after all enigmatic creatures, for they will providing water to drink and aid in the growing of fields but will also bring floods. This is why people worked so hard to develop and maintain a relationship with water fairies. Often travelling in procession every spring to the sacred waters, singing and praising it. Further they offered the water fairies gifts, most often of cloth but also of more valuable goods, for a relationship with water fairies as with all fairies is one built upon a bond which humans must foster.

 

Nukiuk is a folklorist who has been studying Eurasia’s folk religions and fairies, you can learn more about this at http://zeluna.net/.

To see the references for this article visit http://fairies.zeluna.net/p/resources.html.

Contemplation in Druidry

Contemplation is one of my favourite methods of approaching Druidry. It’s a big, umbrella sort of a term covering a number of ways of working, and one that I’ve found fellow Druids increasingly interested in. Contemplation needs very little, if any training. Pointers can be nice, but its available to anyone at any level, including children. It does not require special gifts, magical whatevers, you can be as muggle as you like and the path remains open. As we don’t all hear the voice of spirit, or walk in otherworlds, this is an important consideration. Contemplation does not lend itself to hierarchy, dogma, or forming powerbases. I like this aspect. It can be solitary, or shared, or both.

Contemplating can be a purely intellectual process, all about asking questions. We can ask questions of anything we encounter in life. Politics, science and culture are full of potential material to contemplate. We can ponder all manner of things with a view to deepening our understanding, seeking our own place, figuring out how we want to live. It’s not unlike philosophy, only without claiming (necessarily) the language, history and habits of philosophical thought. As a topic, ‘philosophy’ can seem daunting to the ‘unqualified’ where contemplation does not imply the need for a knowledge base.

We can contemplate our own emotions, spend time sitting with our feelings, being present in our bodies and deepening self awareness.

We can set ourselves specific exercises, contemplating an object, image, concept, experience and so forth. This approach takes us more into the realms of meditation.

Finally, we can approach any action with a contemplative mindset that allows us to think deeply about what we are doing, while we are doing it.

Thus contemplation can be a part of all aspects of our lives. It enables us to deepen relationships and further our own understandings. Coming back from long, inner journeys, we then have the option of sharing what we’ve found. This, I think, is always a good thing. While I’m much in favour of solitary working, the person who never touches base with anyone else can become separated from consensus reality all too easily. Sophilism, that perspective where we become the only thing of value in our own universe, is not conducive to good Druidry. Of course we may disagree over the outcomes of our ponderings, but this is good and healthy, it helps to keep us questioning. The person who dedicates to contemplation should not be dedicating to always thinking they are right, or getting too comfortable and smug. This is a path of questioning, and above all else, we have to keep questioning ourselves as well.