Nimue Brown's Blog, page 455

Of Depression and Druidry

I know a startling number of Druids who suffer from depression. Actually, I also know a just as alarming number of non-Druids with the same problems. It’s increasingly common. In fact, at this rate it’s going to become normal to be emotionally ill. One of the implications is that the nature of depression will need far more understanding. What non-sufferers imagine depression to be all about is painfully wide of the mark. But, if you’re not enduing it, the odds are increasingly that someone close to you, will, or that you will. Understanding how it goes makes it easier to deal with. Both for yourself and other people.

I think many of us assume that depression is a form of melancholy. People who feel sad may describe themselves (often inaccurately) as ‘a bit depressed’. There’s often a sense that what depressed people need to do is pull themselves together, stop being whinging emos, and get on with it. I probably don’t just speak for myself when I say, I find myself wishing it was that easy. Faced with someone who is pale, wilting, claiming they can’t do things, it can be easy to assume you’re seeing a freeloader, someone playing up, being melodramatic, attention seeking. Now, anyone who tells you they are depressed and then starts telling you what you have to do as a consequence of this is, frankly, a bit suspect. Controlling behaviour, regardless of the excuse, is not a thing to support or facilitate. Most of the depression sufferers I know find it very hard to ask for help. Telling people that they have to do things, is hard to imagine. Depression is not something we seek or enjoy, it’s life sapping and a bloody nuisance. Some days I feel like the whole time I’m walking round in lead boots wrestling with an octopus wrapped around me, that no one else can see. Normal things take ridiculous amounts of effort.

Depression is not ‘feeling a bit blue’ or ‘being a bit down’ or ‘needing to pull yourself together’. Depression is a defence mechanism. It’s a way of coping with things that the individual cannot otherwise handle. From the outside it may look like melancholy, from the inside it’s a process of shutting down, climbing into a shell, putting up the walls to keep out whatever it is that the body can no longer endure feeling. Stress, anxiety, and physical pain can all contribute to this process. The person who is weeping over something can often be in a better sort of place than the person who is still and silent because they’ve gone numb. Depression can be all about watching the colours drain out of your world. All the hope, all the reasons to keep going, fade away, and it feels like dying on the inside. Which sometimes results in people thinking that actually dying might not be such a terrible thing.

Why are so many of us falling soul-sick in this way? I think the more interesting question is, why everyone else has not done so yet. We have unprecedented access to the horrors of an entire planet. Every really attention grabbing murder and act of abuse makes it to the media. There’s a daily diet of war crime, tragedy, political idiocy. Every day we see the triumphs of money and power over common sense and decency. We’re driving species to extinction. When did you last see an image of a sick or dying child? Recently, at a guess. When was the last time a news item made you despair for humanity? Probably in the last week, at a guess.

In making a dedication to the land, in relinquishing ignorance and trying to live ethically, Druids take a course that eradicates any real hope of burying the head in the sand, and ignoring what’s out there. And of course we aren’t alone. People of heart and integrity are bound to feel what is constantly presented to them. Of course the violence, cruelty and tragedy are nothing new. It’s just that most of our ancestors only had to deal with what happened directly in their own lives, without simultaneously being burdened with the griefs of the world. One of the big problems with the griefs of the world is that most of the time, individually, there’s nothing we can do. A sense of powerlessness will eat away at your capacity for hope like nothing else. And that, in time, will put you on your knees.

As a Druid I have to stay open and aware. I cannot look away, ignore my responsibilities and pretend that all is well in the world. As some ambling ape-descended biology, I can’t always sustain that and keep moving. I have good days, and bad days. My body has a finite capacity for coping with distress. I try and generate hope. I do not always manage this.

I saw a facebook thing the other day, the gist went like this. The media tells you what to think and what to do. You run round on the treadmill making money for someone else, to buy stuff you don’t need that is killing the planet. Your air, food and water are being poisoned. And still you shuffle along. You are the zombie apocalypse. Wake the hell up.

I think there’s an argument for saying that a lot of depressed people are that way because they are awake. Perhaps if everyone woke up, we wouldn’t have to feel like this anymore. None of us. We could just fix things. And we really could just fix things, if enough of us wanted to and we could agree on how to do it. Let’s not go there. Hold the positive thought.

Guest Blog: Folk Magic and Folk Religion

By Nukiuk

In folk religions respect is of the utmost importance because everything has a vitality, every thing has a life and so any action will have an impact on another soul which has its own powers and its own ability to impact the world. Thus a person’s interaction with the magical world must be about seeking to have respect for one’s fellow humans, for nature, for objects, and the spirits, fairies, kami, etc that inhabit all of these.  With this in mind there are three fundamental types of spells and prayers which people use in Folk Religions.

1-Respectful Actions.

Not so much spells as a way of interacting with the things around a person to ensure that they have good luck, while avoiding bad luck. In Celtic lore such respect meant asking permission before moving a stone or cutting a tree so that the fairy within wouldn’t be offended. In Japan such respect included warning the spirits that live within the earth before peeing on the ground so that they could move out of the way and wouldn’t grow angry and curse the one who had wronged them. To utilize respect people would think about what might be offensive to nearly every object/spirit and try to mitigate it. This doesn’t usually mean not doing something, rather it means giving fair warning that one is about to do something, while apologizing and or asking permission to do it. Such respect keeps a person safe while making more likely that their spells wills succeed.

2-Charms or Spells

Charms utilize a person’s own abilities and powers as well as those of other spirits in order to achieve a goal. There are two things one must keep in mind when crafting charms and spells. First that Celtic lore states that humans are related to the fairy, thus the Celtic Folk Religions tells us that we can potentially have great abilities and knowledge. Second one must keep in mind that everything has certain powers and so these powers can be used to enhance the impact of one’s own powers.

Thus charms involve a person utilizing certain objects, herbs and or short chants in order to gain help from other powers as well as well as a short set of words or actions designed to draw out a person’s own powers (such as sympathetic actions and poems). For example, one Cornish charm used to remove corns from one’s feet called for a person to show their bare feet to the moor while telling the corns to vanish nine times.

An interesting charm of Finnish origin to prevent wasp stings is as follows;

O Siilikki, woods’ daughter-in-law, pray discipline thy wee ‘winged bird,’ hide away thy ‘feathered chick,’ bind up its wings, confine its claws, to prevent it stabbing with its pike, to prevent it sharpening its steel. Kuutar, conceal thy children now, hide, Päivätär, thy family, and follow not a wizard’s wish, don’t be made jealous by jealous folk.

This charm is interesting because in not only makes a request of a nature spirit to keep wasps away, it makes a request of two other magical beings to keep wizards from using their magic to make wasps from stinging.

3-Closer Relationships and Contracts

The most complex of all three forms of folk magic involves both the development and utilization of a relationship with spirits which in many ways can be likened to a contract. Sutras, prayers, songs, offerings and similar things were done either to create a contract between a person and spirits, deities, fairies, etc; or to honour a pre-existing contract. Songs, feats, celebrations and sutras are useful to this end because they attract spirits and fairies to a place and allow these beings to enjoy the company of humans. This is a large part of what Samhain, Beltane, Yule and similar holidays were and are.

In many cases such celebrations involved things specifically designed to invite fairies to come among the people. Yule and Beltane both involved bringing trees and greens into the village and home so that fairies and similar nature spirits would have a place to reside among humans during the festivals. Other celebrations involved actually building figures out of straw or similar materials for the spirits to reside in so that people might dance with them or make offerings to them directly.

Not all contracts are so simple to honour as creating beautiful music and celebrating an event. Often such contracts require that those humans honouring them follow a very specific set of instructions involving; chants, songs, movements, specific offerings, and formulas which must be followed to the letter. It is these more complex contracts that required druids to learn for years, even decades to learn to fulfil.

Because folk magic is about relationships rather than formulas the exact nature of any contract, charm or respectful action is based not only one what a person is trying to accomplish but whom they are requesting help from. This is why understanding the nature of fairy and deity as well as the personalities of specific fairies and deities is the most important part of folk magic.

 

 

Nukiuk is a folklorist who has been studying the relationship between Eurasian Folktales and beliefs in order to better understand the ancient religions. You can find more of his research of fairies at http://www.zeluna.net/fairies. You can review many of his resources at http://fairies.zeluna.net/p/resources.html

What do Druids sing?

This question had a great deal to do with me self identifying as a druid in the first place. I was asked at a folk club to sing ‘one of my druidy songs’ had no idea what it meant, and  started asking questions. Up until then I’d been just pagan. So, this week Silverbear asked in the comments about singing, and I figured it’s a good topic and worth a poke.

There isn’t a vast body of Druid songs out there to draw on. We have a few truly awesome performers, Damh the Bard http://damh.wordpress.com/ being the songwriter whose work I am most familiar with. I’ve learned a lot of Druid thinking from that man! Plenty of us look to the folk tradition (John Barleycorned to death once more) but that’s not an answer for everyone. Here are some ideas about what to look for in a song, because it is entirely possible to steal from a great many places in order to source good material to sing in ritual or as an expression of your Druidry.

 

1)      It has to be viable to perform the song with the gear you have in the kinds of spaces you use. Mostly this means unplugged and with whatever you can play or whoever you can talk into helping you out. Some songs can be stripped down to just words and tune and work fine, others fall apart. With practice it gets easier to spot which is which, expect to have a few fails as part of the learning process.

2)      It needs to be something you are technically capable of pulling off under pressure. I’m all for taking on challenges, but for live performance, comfy is good. Outside, your voice doesn’t carry as well, the need for increased volume will probably compromise your range, and your fingers may shake. Budget for this.

3)      Songs about the seasons are good, or that reflect for you some essence of a season. Sting’s Fields of Gold (which strips down to guitar and voice with no trouble) is, for example, a really lovely Lugnasadh song. There’s many a lusty rock ballad that makes sense at Beltain and many a mournful goth thing that could be rolled out for Samhain, for example.

4)      Story songs are good. There’s only so much ooh ah love ya baby material that any one circle can take, but a song with a narrative, can be made to work. It is, for example, entirely possible to sing Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell unaccompanied, and it’s a great story (hard on the voice though, with reference to point 2). Narrative songs are always a plus.

5)      Songs of protest are powerful. For events like Peace One Day, anti war songs are a must. But there are many songs, in many genres that are full of protest. Killing in the Name of is unlikely to work unplugged, but you can get some John Lennon in there, and dig out all those sixties peace love and freedom songs.

6)      Songs that mean something to you. If you find a song meaningful, resonant, important then you’ll sing it that way, and often that just works.  Don’t be afraid to try it.

7)      Accidental deity songs. Just sometimes, taken out of context and sung by a pagan, some of the love songs in the world can start to sound more like hymns of praise to a deity. Experiment, see what speaks to you.

8)      Write your own. This is always good, because it comes from your heart.

 

My only ‘don’t’ is, don’t nick things off the Christians and re-write the words. It’s a bit sad and usually awkward and mostly doesn’t work.

 

The mysteries of teaching

In any mystery tradition there can be tension between how much you tell the student up front, and how much is sprung upon them in surprising and dramatic ways, calculated to change their awareness. Initiations are a prime example of this. How much should be unknown and unexpected, and how much should be done with the consent of the student?

I’ve had experience of teachers who liked to say ‘trust me and I will open the way for you’ and who wanted me to surrender myself into their hands, be guided, trust that they would do the right things for me. I’ve never been at ease with that. I’ve read about people who have undergone surprising initiations, to good effect, and I’ve listened to people who have been shocked and distressed by things done to them in initiation.

If you take on the responsibility of making choices for your student, you have to be aware that you can get it wrong. I once used a meditation I’d taken from a book, which involved starting with just one candle in a darkened room and then blowing it out. After the meditation I learned that one of my crew suffered claustrophobia and that darkness was a trigger. She’d got through, but it was a humbling and life changing lesson for me. I would not want to hold that responsibility for anyone, I would rather ask. I have yet to find any teaching situation where I couldn’t usefully say something in advance about what it was for or what might happen. I’d rather do that precisely because it makes the student an equal partner in a process. I think informed consent is important.

There’s also the mindset of the teacher to consider. I’m sure there are folk out there wise and aware enough to handle the spiritual path of another person, but I’d also bet they aren’t the majority. Taking that responsibility can be all about ego and self importance. Saying ‘I know better than you what it is that you need’ is not always a safe and healthy approach. It makes it easy for us to try and control and direct another person, to hold power over them, to make them do what we think they should be doing, not what their soul needs. All souls are different. The teacher who persuades, guides and suggests has to work a lot harder, can be argued with, and will have to justify themselves. A teacher in that position is also learning.

When we start out along any spiritual path, the idea of mystery can be exciting. Yes, we want to be led blindfolded into a ritual where amazing transformations occur. What we’re rather looking for there, can be for something from outside to come to us and do all the work. Magical transformation, not transformation we have laboured for. And yes of course the theatre is alluring, the sense of stepping away from conventional reality. But does that make it productive? Maybe not.

The world is full of mysteries and wonders without our needing to stage them. My personal preference is to engage knowingly with a teacher, free to take on what works for me and reject what does not. (Thank you OBOD for allowing me to do just that.) And as a teacher, I just don’t want the responsibility. I’d rather offer a possibility and let a student decide whether they like it or it makes sense for them. I know that when I started teaching, I thought people would expect me to be all wise and all knowing. I rather thought I ought to be. I felt like a bit of a fraud, truth be told. But over the years I’ve become a lot more comfortable with not needing to be any kind of guru. I don’t have all the answers. I can’t tell you what you most need to do. I will not take you blindfolded into a ritual unless you’ve told me there’s something of that shape you need.

There are many different styles of teaching out there, and increasing numbers of teachers. If you run into something you don’t like, then it is important to know this isn’t the only available way. (And some less ethical ‘teachers’ may well try to claim there is only their way, just ignore them.) There are many ways, many styles, and the odds are good that somewhere, someone will be teaching at least some of the things you want to learn. You may need to go through several teachers to find your own way. You may end up doing it yourself from a selection of sources. But the bottom line is, if the experience does not feel right to you, then it isn’t right, no matter how much someone else may think they know best. Saying ‘I know what you need better than you do’ does not make it so. This holds up outside magical and spiritual training too. Informed consent is always, in my opinion, the best life choice. I’d ask serious questions of anyone who wanted me to take too much on trust, in any scenario.

Sexed up classics

Last week author friend of mine Sarah Masters was caught up in some international media excitement around sexed up classic fiction. With Fifty shades of grey selling by the bucketload, fiction about sex is going to get media attention just now. And inevitably, some the attention is hostile. Why mess with the classics? Why not make up your own story? Those are two questions I wanted to tackle today.

Why mess with the classics? Actually, there’s nothing shocking or original about re-writing a tale to fit your time and place. Films do it to Shakespeare with monotonous regularity. The Crimson Petal and the White owes a lot to Jane Eyre. Daphne Du Maurier’s The Parasites has a lot of shades of Wuthering Heights in it. There is even a literary subgenre – revisionist writing. Usually the premise is that by writing into an existing plot you comment on the original in meaningful ways. Take Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea which tells the tale of the mad wife from Jayne Eyre.

Most of our classics were written at a time when writting about sex was not an option. However, there is a lot of character that you can show through sex. It may seem like a gratuitous add on, but well written erotica is not all bump and grind, it tends to offer a lot of insight into the emotional and psychological lives of the characters. Having been following Sarah Masters’ work for years, I say with confidence that if she re-writes something, it will be because she has something to say. One of these days, when I’m not so overworked, I shall be very interested to take the time and have a read.

Why not make up your own story? Well, much ‘new’ fiction is borrowed. King Lear wasn’t just Shakespeare’s story, he did a version of a well known tale of the time, by all accounts. I suspect we’ve been recycling stories for as long as there have been stories. The more of a ‘classic’ a thing is, the more likely it is to attract revisions and sequels. Gone with the Wind and Peter Pan spring to mind here. The thing about jamming on a well known story is, you can sell it. The marketing is really easy and publishers like that. Again, going back to Sarah Masters, I know she has a ton of highly original work to her name, but most people won’t have heard of her prior to the sexed up classics. She has always deserved far more attention, but that’s not resulted in any wide scale interest. Her novels often read like dramatic movies. She has wild, intriguing plots and interesting characters. But being original and doing her own thing has not got her the same attention.

This is all about the market, and is connected to why the music industry always has so many cover versions of old songs floating about. Bean counters prefer sure fire things, and the sure fire is familiar, not new and original. For a creative person, this can be bloody frustrating!

If the idea of sexed up classics doesn’t appeal to you, then stay well away. There’s no obligation to read, or be interested, no matter how popular a thing is. Nothing can violate my sense of Wuthering Heights more than Cliff Richard’s Heathcliff musical (not seen, I’m just deeply prejudiced) so I have every sympathy for people who feel protective of beloved books. But, easy enough not to go there.

The other thing that would be nice would be if more people did vote with their feet and buy the entirely original things by new authors. That would feed a lot of authors, result in a lot more new stuff, and help to tackle the mainstream culture of same old same old that tends to stifle rather than promote creativity.

Of Druidry and time

One of the things I’ve become really conscious of this week, is that engaging with nature has a time element to it. Different parts of the day belong to different entities. The same place has a very different character, set of inhabitants and, arguably, spirit, depending on time of day. While the sun is up, I have birds and butterflies. At twilight the fish are jumping, the bats and owls come out, the toads are more active. Into the night there are foxes, badgers, hedgehogs, and at least rumours of otters. I’ve seen glow bugs lately as well.

We all have to sleep. When we’re asleep, we’re not out there encountering the wildlife or engaging with the spirits of place. I find that I can’t go messing about with my sleep patterns without consequences, so while the odd all nighter, random early morning and the such is ok, mostly for my own wellbeing I need a fairly stable sleep/wake pattern.

One of the consequences of needing to engage with the rest of the world, is that I can’t have the summer sleep pattern I really want. I’m a creature of twilight by preference, but to do dawn and dusk when the nights are so short here, I would need to sleep for a few hours in the middle of the day. One of my longstanding ambitions is to have the time and space for experimenting with how this affects me.

No matter how deep a spiritual bond we have with a space, there will always be things we do not know about it. If I’m watching the fish, I will not see what the birds are doing. The more attention I give to one aspect of what is around me, the more likely I am to miss something in the bigger picture. There are balances to strike, between focus and wider awareness. We need that bigger picture – without context, and a sense of how it all fits together impressions readily distort. We also need the deeper, more involved relationships. And thus we come back to the issue of time. There’s only a finite number of hours at our disposal. I cannot forage with the badgers, and dive with the terns, and sing with the dawn chorus and the evening blackbirds and have time to work and eat and fulfil other duties and needs.

Therefore there are always going to be times when what happens around me remains a mystery.  I may get odd glimpses. When I say ‘hello spirits of place’ even though I know the place well, I hold an awareness that I am also speaking to the mysteries, the unknown, the things that come out to play when I am asleep.

There were eleven badgers last night, one rabbit who I watched for ages, one fleeting visit from a fox cub, and a great number of glow bugs, several bats, and no doubt far more small things that I didn’t see. Hello mysteries.

Good Druidry should be entertaining

It’s all too easy to be hyper-serious, po-faced and miserable about religion. The puritan, holier than thou sort of approach. Issues of life, death, life after death, the soul, ethics and what the gods might want from us are of course big and serious issues. A quick glance at religious history is more than enough to demonstrate that it’s easy to go from taking things seriously, to making life a misery for the good of the soul.

In many ways this is another balance issue, following on from yesterday and the crotchet. There are many religious and philosophical schools of thought out there that favour abstinence, subjugation of the flesh, fasting, physical forms of penance, that encourage a sense of guilt, shame and discomfort and that just aren’t conducive to human happiness. The argument tends to go that the good of the soul is more important and the suffering of the body is good for the soul.

I notice that many of the people who are keen to make the rest of us conform to po-faced, puritanical standards of behaviour, pick soft targets. They’re harassing pagan gatherings, complaining about goths, rock music, tattoos, role play games and the such. The kinds of harmless things favoured by relatively harmless people. In a world where a child can die from hunger, where people are tortured for political dissent, where rape happens, child abuse happens… campaigning against the satanic evils of pretending to be an elf at the weekend, is not just crazy, it’s sick. However, fighting the satanic influence as it manifests in goth culture is unlikely to get you killed. Fighting the kind of regime that kills and tortures people could be dangerous. Isn’t it curious that so many self-styled religious do-gooders are only interested in saving us from goths, elves and yogic meditation?

There are several things that can happen when religion is po-faced and miserable. The healthier option is that people vote with their feet and take up a happier religion or become atheists. The more disturbing option develops a kind of shared religious masochism, celebrating and encouraging misery. This can get pretty sadistic too. It leads to people thinking its fine to stone women to death for imagined sexual offences, for example.

Soulful, ethical happiness is about the best thing imaginable for people. Happiness that comes from taking joy in the world, sharing good things, having meaningful relationships, encourages us to live responsibly. The idea that good happiness can be rooted in material things has been too long absent from our culture. We have the quest for excess as an archetype, where, with an absence of depth and soul, people seek every greater and more dangerous fixes of adrenaline, sex, drugs, alcohol, risk, just to feel something. What they feel then isn’t satisfaction though, as anyone with an addiction can tell you. It pushes back the hunger a bit, but that path never brings real relief or joy.

What if religion was all about seeking balance, happiness and joy in this life? In the life we know we have, not the uncertainty of a possible next world, where the dress code and rules of entry can only be speculated upon? There are those who think that focusing on this life makes us selfish, greedy, too willing to consume. I don’t think that needs to be the case. The better we understand what makes for genuine happiness, as opposed to the quick, soulless fixes that leave us hungry for more, the better able we are to live ethically. Real happiness is not power, or things. Those are traps that ultimately just make us more anxious, more needy. And it is entirely possible that we only get this life, and storing imaginary brownie points for an imaginary next round is doing us no good at all.

Druidry is not inherently po-faced. We can smile before our Gods. We can laugh. We can, in fact, have sex with each other, without shame, or guilt. We can celebrate our skin, our existence, our sheer, alive, vibrant physicality.

I think the way to spread spiritual values through our lost and troubled times is not by beating people about the head with moral judgements. Inspiration is the answer. Through beauty and wit, through laughter and merriment, through warm communities and happy gatherings, through holding each other in the bad times, we inspire. We don’t reduce the world to something grim, we don’t view life as a thing to be endured. We remind each other of the good bits, the things that make it all worthwhile.

 

(The title owes a debt to Ursula Le Guinn, who said, ‘Good art should be entertaining.’ It’s a similar sort of issue.)

Of work, time out, balance and crotchet

Technically you can spend your every waking hour working on something. I’ve tried, I’ve watched others. Mostly what happens is that inspiration, energy and efficiency decline in a steady and dependable sort of way until you’re left exhausted, miserable, thinking you should be working all the time, not knowing what to do if not working, and essentially unable to work. In terms of getting anything done in the long term, working yourself into a hole is no kind of answer.

Working on a computer, where most of my ‘product’ is virtual, I find I need regular doses of real stuff too. It’s nice when the physical versions of books turn up, that feels real, but it’s not the same as working hands-on. Balance is increasingly important to me, and I find I need to strike those balances over longer time frames, not just on a daily basis. There has to be time for play, time to do nothing, time to seek inspiration, and time for doing.

One of the things I’ve learned it’s useful to do, is to draw breath between projects. Often projects are overlapping so that when one ends, it can be tempting to just carry on, transferring attention to others, but it’s not been a good strategy for me. I’ve often got a piece of fiction or two on the go, as well as the graphic novels (admittedly, Tom has most of the work there) and the Druid writing. But, the end points need celebrating. And it’s important to stop. So, I’ve finished a thing this week. It’s verse, light hearted and aimed at children, a huge departure from anything I’ve done before. I love striking out into new things, I hate being in a rut, the diversity I like in my work is definitely part of my sense of balance. Still running… words for a joint novel writing project and a poetry collection that could be assembled soon, and a story I’m still typing up. I’m in research mode for the next Druid book, and I’ve got the title of another project on my list, waiting for me to start. But not this week.

Having finished the verse collection for now, I’m having some days off – just doing email, editing and blogging, which are the things that give me structure. I find I need a little structure to offset the chaotic ways in which I work, and that these three things are enough to give me that. Another exercise in balance there. So, tomorrow I shall spend some time with some ducks, I think. Today, I have started a crotchet project. This is wholly different from having a writing project on the go, as its mostly restful for the brain rather than taxing, gives me time to daydream or listen to the radio, or chat, and results in a thing I can hold. I’ve always found a kind of soul satisfaction in making things I can hold in my hands. Tomorrow, I may get the paintbrushes out and make colourful splodges with the child.

I know, that through doing this, I will be able to write more effectively when I dive head first into the next project. Working with my hands gives my brain time to ferment ideas and brew things into new combinations. The daydreaming is essential. A life that is just work leaves little room to daydream, and soon there’s no aspiration, no longed for destination, and no content for stories. I also find a lot of inspiration in play, mucking about with friends and family, letting ideas and jokes build and roll. Some of my best writing ideas have come from just that.

I like the zen saying: before enlightenment, fetch wood, carry water. After enlightenment, fetch wood, carry water. It doesn’t matter what spiritual or intellectual, or emotional thing we’re doing, it’s vital to stay balanced, to be earthed by something real on a regular basis.

Before fiction writing, crotchet. After fiction writing, crotchet. At least for this week.

Announcing the next book

I’ve been talking a bit about this on facebook, so I thought a blog post was probably in order too, now that dates and whatnot are confirmed. My second book on Druidry will be out in November of this year. I’ll admit I was surprised by the speed, but Moon Books are a nippy sort of oufit, not like bigger houses, where it can take years for a book to see the light of day.

So, the next one is Druidry and the Ancestors. There were a number of thoughts underpinning the choice of direction. Firstly ancestors come up in Druidry rather a lot but I’m not aware of any books tackling how we relate to our ancestry, as druids.

Secondly, I read Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe, which flags up how little we know about the ancient Druids – we have material to speculate upon, but none of it is issue-free. He also makes clear just how problematic our modern ancestors of tradition were – Iolo Morganwg and his contemporaries. When I read it I felt a powerful need to try and respond, to think about how we construct ourselves as modern Druids, conscious of our history and the problems in it, but still valid. In many ways, this book is me trying to start that process. I’m aware that Hutton’s work has changed what OBOD present to the world, and have no doubt that in coming years we will see more work that tackles the thorny subject of where we came from.

The third thing was my personal life. I spent six months in a cottage that had belonged to my family for many generations, and that had an impact on me. I’m also dealing with a child who detests his birth father, who needs to engage with his bloodlines in meaningful ways (not just my side of the family) and who needs to define himself in ways that do not relate to the birth parent he loathes. Working with pagan groups down the years I’ve been conscious for a long time that many pagans have stepped away from the beliefs of their families, and that many of us have a lot of problems with our most immediate ancestry.

So, this is not entirely a book about the Druids of old, although they are in the mix. It’s about how we think about all kinds of ancestry, how we construct ourselves, and so forth. It was not an easy book to write and I’m conscious that plenty of people might disagree with me. I’ve tested it on enough folk to be confident that it’s not wide of the mark and I have a lot of faith in my publisher and editor, but, I may be going to ruffle feathers.

But, for the extra win, I have my bloke’s art on the cover of this one. And, with all due reference to previous blogs about the covers of Druid books, yes, there’s a tree on it!

As an added bonus, it looks like I get to launch the book at a Druid muster in November, if all goes to plan. Watch this space….

Sweet little lies

My son has a tremendous interest in ethical questions. He’s particularly fascinated by the ethics of lying, such that this has been a significant topic of conversation lately. Now, the simple answer here is that lying is unethical. But of course there’s the line ‘If Hitler is at the front door and Anne Frank in the attic’. There are times when the only honourable thing to do is to lie. There are many people who lived and escaped persecution only because someone hid them and lied for them. Everyone who helped a Jewish person flee the Nazis. Any movement that resists oppression and tyranny depends on subterfuge to some degree. The underground railroad. When the state itself becomes evil, following the law is not the most honourable choice.

Most of us will not find ourselves in a Hitler/Anne Frank scenario. I hope. But every day presents us with opportunities to be more or less honest. Lies by omission are common. The things we let slide, don’t mention. The little injustices we allow to pass unchallenged. The little mistakes we cover up. Most of the time, these don’t make a lot of odds in the grand scheme of things, but when they do, situations can suddenly run out of control and either you have to fess up, or their follows a process of having to tell more lies to hide the first one. Not a good place to be, not an honourable solution, and frequently, not something that allows for a fix. The person who can admit to a mistake has the space to learn, repair, improve. The person who denies ballsing things up cannot redeem themselves, and cannot learn. Appearing to be right, at the expense of actually being right, will cost you dearly in the long run, more often than not.

Then there are the lies we tell to spare someone’s feelings. The theory being that a lie to avoid pain is kinder. That is true sometimes, but at others, it sets people up for a fall. The person whose failings are not pointed out to them can have a seriously inflated self opinion, and sooner or later will run into a bit of reality, and find they aren’t the best novelist who ever lived, after all. I gather current TV shows frequently make ‘entertainment’ by laughing at people who think they’re far better than they really are. The kinder thing to do would have been to point it out sooner. Thinking you are something, and finding you are not, can be far more traumatic than dealing with the truth early on. And again, there’s scope to change. If someone points out where you are failing, you can learn, improve, become what you want to be. The person who wrongly believes they know it already is being denied all kinds of opportunities to really achieve.

There are the lies of convenience. Most people, when they ask how you are, want a short, reassuring answer. It can be tempting to give that. I spent years lying to everyone around me, by saying  ‘a bit tired’ ‘just a bit under the weather’ when I visibly wasn’t ok, rather than saying what was going on. I did it to spare the people around me, and I did it to protect the person who was depriving me of sleep, undermining my self-esteem and abusing my body. Crazy. But like a lot of women in my situation, I didn’t want to face up to the implications of what was happening to me. Easier to blame myself, than the father of my child. Had I spoken the truth, someone could have pointed out to me that things were not ok. I couldn’t bear the idea of anyone thinking ill of my ex back then. And I also wondered if people would just agree with him, that it was my fault for being too demanding, too emotional, too… whatever it was that week.

When I started being honest about what had happened, I found warmth and support. I found versions of me that weren’t deemed useless, ridiculous, over reacting and unreasonable. I was told that the things I felt, wanted, needed, were the least a human should have. I wish I had dared to trust sooner.

One of the things I learned from this, is that if you consider yourself to be an honourable person and do not feel safe in being honest, it is time to question the situation you are in. It may not be Hitler at the door, but something external is quite probably awry. If you have a mindset that leans towards taking on responsibility, then it can be easy to internalise blame, to carry things that are not yours, and so forth. When honesty feels dangerous, there is serious work to do, somewhere.

The decision to lie should never been taken lightly. If it’s to avoid inconvenience, or for some other short term gain, it’s worth weighing up what the bigger picture looks like and what the ultimate cost might be. Difficult truth can be handled with tact and care. Mistakes need to be owned. And if it’s not safe to be honest, start thinking about an exit strategy.

For myself, I’d rather tell the truth as far as is humanly possible, come what may. But I do not currently have an attic, much less any Jewish girls depending on me for their lives. In that scenario, you can bet I’d be lying my ass off.