Nimue Brown's Blog, page 456

Of dualism and Druids

One of the great underpinnings of modern, western thinking, is dualism. Mind-body separation sneaks its way into a great many things. Not least, into spirituality. So many faiths have at their essence the idea of a separation between things material and things spiritual. We must overcome, transcend, or otherwise subdue and conquer worldly, bodily things to obtain Heaven, Nirvana, Enlightenment, or wherever else we think we may be going.

Dualism came out of an old world view that had no trouble separating mind from body because it lacked most of the technical details we have today. Brains are chemical interactions happening inside physical structures. How we think, is physical. The chemistry that informs our thinking, and our emotions, is the same chemistry as works is way through the rest of our bodies, and it is subject to all kinds of influences. We may think about mind altering drugs as being something hardcore and illegal, but they aren’t. The feature in everyday life.

Over many years, I’ve watched what anaemia, low blood sugar or a salt shortage does to my mood, and to my brain functionality. I’ve become familiar with the physical nature of both depression and anxiety, ailments I feel in my ‘body’ far more than in my ‘mind’. Laughter helps us to heal, depression makes us more vulnerable to sickness. Let’s mention alcohol, caffeine, tobacco as well. Hot spices. Hot food even. They all change us.

All of this leads me to think that it is not a clever plan to seek the spiritual at the expense of the body. Mental health and physical health go together. You can’t imbibe poisons and expect your mind to be unaffected. You can’t ignore your body in the quest for intellectual or spiritual advancement, and imagine there will be no consequences. In ignoring the body we can become even more alienated from the natural world, which for Druids, really doesn’t make any sense at all.

I’ve watched with interest in the last few weeks as a number of Druids have started blogging about running. For a spirituality that embraces nature, celebrates the material world and seeks to go deeper rather than wanting to get away from bodily life, it makes sense to me to explore Druidry in physical ways as well as being magical, philosophical and whatnot. Walking, dancing, drumming, working with our bodies, experiencing nature as it manifests in our bodies, is all part of how Druidry can be. We are a part of the water cycle, the carbon cycle, the cycles of nitrogen and oxygen. We have a place in the food chain. Our bodies are made from the dust of the stars and our earthly ancestors. Seeing the spiritual in the physical is, for me at least, a big part of the Druid path.

Following on from this, we can make care for the physical body part of how we live our Druidry. It’s possible to think of the body as the earth in microcosm. How are we going to take care of the earth if we don’t know how to take care of the tiny fragment of nature that is us?

I view my mind and body as parts of a whole. May as well talk about spleen-body dualism, as mind-body dualism, as I see it. It’s all chemistry and physical structures and there’s no great dividing line at the neck. Sugar highs affect brain and rest of body alike. Depression makes my body sluggish. I also don’t see any divide between emotion and intellect. Emotion is, technically speaking, all about the body chemistry, the hormones, the blood sugar levels and so forth. Mood is chemical. Chemicals happen right through our bodies. There is no separation. The idea of viewing myself as a collection of unrelated bits, with some of those more ‘spiritual’ than others, seems a bit daft to me. It’s totally at odds with what contemporary science has to tell us. And, viewing my ancestor Druids as the scientists of their day, means I don’t feel easy ignoring what modern science tells us.

Which begs some very interesting questions about what I would have done had I come into the world in the era when the rational difference between emotion and intellect was very much in vogue, along with the mind-body dualism that has informed how we still tend to think about medicine. Would I have been out on the fringe with the then-denigrated holistic folk, or would I have been supporting the science? Convenient for me that I don’t have to make that decision. I have no idea what the answer is to that one, or what I might have done, but I do enjoy floating the questions.

The nature of fear

Often, worrying is the least helpful thing a person can do. Just chewing on the anxiety and letting it wrap those icy, crippling fingers round your heart on a regular basis, will make you sick. But when life is full of things that scare you, when you’re waiting for the next unpayable bill, the next round of bad news from the medics, the next court date, the next phone call from the police, or your stalker, or whatever it is, letting go of worry is hard. It’s there as soon as you wake up in the morning. It’s there when you sleep, too, shaping up into nightmares, and it’s there when you can’t sleep. Being exhausted doesn’t help, of course.

Sometimes, anxiety can become so intense that everything starts to feel impossible. The fear of punishment makes it hard to act. And, for someone who does not live in fear, this can be hard to imagine. If you’ve been knocked down enough times it is easy to imagine the next blow. The experience of cruelty, unfairness, perhaps even abuse that is inherent in a system, teaches you to be afraid. The fear of not being taken seriously, as well, being laughed at, or told off for being hypersensitive, over reacting. And so the fear begets fear, until you’re mired in it and do not know how to move. At least, it can.

Once upon a time, hedgehogs (a cute, prickly mammal, for those of you outside the UK) used to respond to predators by rolling up into balls. They handled cars the same way. They died as a consequence. These days, hedgehogs know to run away from cars. Sometimes rolling into a tight little ball and putting the prickles on the outside is not the answer to fear and danger.

Nature gives us all kinds of models for responding to danger – both real, and imagined. It is discernibly natural to jump at unfamiliar noises, to associate one bad thing with something that maybe wasn’t connected but happened to be there at the time, and to be nervous of the unfamiliar. Animals do this all the time. My cat is very good at reminding me that there’s nothing weak, or unnatural about how I experience fear. Every rescue dog I meet has the same story to tell. The one who had become afraid of hats. The one who mistrusted all men. We learn to fear through association. And like the rescue dogs, given time, love, support, we can also unlearn, build trust, regain hope. One of the worst things about anxiety is its capacity to make you feel like a freak.

Humans are not, generally speaking, all that good at recognising what is natural in humans. We tend to stigmatise it. Bleeding, sweating, crying, shitting, lusting, raging, hurting, fearing, these are all socially stigmatised. Which makes it that bit harder to vent, to express, to seek support. To get help for the fear, you have to admit that the fear exists, and in doing so you have to deal with the layer of fear that is all about how people will react to your confession.

Fear begets fear, and taking those first steps to tackle it is really hard. But, the sooner you catch it, the sooner you can get it under control and the less badly it affects you. Fear is like any other disease that can spread in your body. The longer it runs unchallenged, the more it eats into you. Think of it as you would a virus, or a cancer.

If you do not live with fear, then this can be peculiar stuff to try and make sense of. For those who are not riddled with it as a sickness, fear seems like a fleeting thing. Nerves. Edginess. Somewhere close to excitement. Perhaps bad enough to make you throw up before you go on stage, but fundamentally transient in nature. It’s hard to imagine that which falls beyond our own experience. But, understanding intellectually is really useful. Because about the least helpful thing you can say to a fearful person is that they are silly and should pull themselves together and get over it. Such words force silence on the ill one. And they add to the fear. Those layers of fearing ridicule are paralysing too. Warm words, words of encouragement and support, are gifts. Having the compassion to say ‘I’ll do this with you’. ‘You can do this.’ You don’t have to do this’. ‘Maybe just try a bit of it,’ open the prison doors and give anxious people a chance.

And, if you haven’t been there, just pray that you don’t. But a significant percentage of us will suffer from anxiety illnesses and/or depression during our lives. This is probably part of the natural, human condition too. Nothing will really prepare you for it, but the person who knows something about the mechanics and possibilities will be less shocked when it happens to them, more able to get help, and perhaps less likely to fall so far and so fast, or to hit the bottom of a dark hole with quite the same crippling force.

Of service and community

Nothing brings a person’s true nature to the fore like hard times and conflict. In difficulty, we see who is motivated by integrity and who puts ego first. We see who the peacemakers are, who the honourable warriors are, and who is all piss and wind. We see the control freaks, the fearful, the vindictive and the bloody stupid. All that is best, and worst in people tends to show up in the hard times.

Communities are difficult things. When two or more druids are gathered together, there will be disagreements. There will be personality clashes. There will be visions of how the world works that cannot ever be reconciled. This does not mean we can only hope to be groves of one, it means we need to work, and we need to have good and honourable intentions. This comes back to what I was saying recently about facilitating, rather than leading. A facilitator is not running something to massage their ego. A facilitator does what needs doing. A leader, on the other hand, will blithely do things that are not in the interests of their community, for the sake of themselves.

Bards of the Lost Forest had a core of three whose world views were not compatible. We made a strength of it, because it meant that there could be no core dogma, nothing others had to fall into line with. We accepted the different perspectives, and all was well. This was easy because we were collectively there to run an event, not to be important.

I’ve had a lot of experience of organising things over the last decade, and spent a fair amount of time in the company of other people who organise things. If you want it to go well, you have to be doing it for the love of the thing, and not for the desire to look good or be important.

It is difficult when the druid community has an occasion for collective shame. The last thing I want to do is stand up in public and draw attention to these moments. But at the same time, we should cast our eyes in the direction of the Catholic Church and child abuse, to remind ourselves what happens when we pretend not to see. To the best of my knowledge, we aren’t on that scale, and I pray we never will be. But in the meantime, we should not accept any kind of leadership that exists to serve the ego of the individual and not the good of the community.

I’ve been in conflict situations before now. I’ve had to consider what I needed, and balance that against what was going on in a wider context. I had a thorough stabbing in the back from people in my folk club, many years ago. I know what it’s like to be put in an unworkable position. While I did what I had to do to make things viable for me, I also kept my folk club going. I did not let my community down, but I did have some people leave it – their choice, not mine. Often, there are no perfect solutions to these things, but a bit of thought and care for the consequences and some attention to timing and detail goes a long way. I’ve found myself in conflict situations on the druid side too, times when public venting of anger and resentment might have made me feel a lot better, but could have caused untold harm to others. I’m proud to say that I didn’t do what I might have done.

People can, and will vote with their feet when they find themselves encountering ego and bullshit. To those of you who undertake to run things I would say, you are there to serve. If you aren’t there to serve, do not expect support.

To those many of you, facilitators and participants, who are doing what honour demands – in whatever form that takes – who are acting out of care and integrity, I salute you. Hang on in there. You represent the very best of what druidry is, and there are a lot of you.  More than enough to carry the day, to find the good, to make something worth having.

 

I’m not commenting specifically on Druid Camp, of course, having no direct involvement. I wish peace and the best of luck to those people trying to make a go of it, and have every sympathy for those who have felt obliged to step back.

Celidh Druid, Disco Druid

Dancing can be an act of prayer, ritual, meditation or magic. Shared dancing reinforces bonds of community and celebrates rites of passage. It can also be part of how we get to those rites of passage. More in the sense of helping people pair up and reproduce than in the sense of killing people. Thinking about dancing can be useful for thinking about ritual, because there are similarities of function and implication. Ritual too can be full of prayer, meditation and magic, can reinforce community, celebrate rites of passage and whatnot.

The celidh is a structured form of community dance where people are helped into groups or pairs if needs be, and told the steps. A few dances will give you most of the basic steps, it’s easy to get the hang of. The structure facilitates contact, reduces awkwardness and self consciousness, enables people with little natural talent to dance, and happily includes people of all ages.

The disco, on the other hand, gives you far more scope for innovation. You don’t have to dance with anyone, and no one is telling you what to do. On the downside, they can be very slow to get started, everyone too self conscious to be the first person up, the only one strutting their stuff. It’s very easy in fact to go to a disco and never dance – no one will be encouraging you in the same way. It’s harder to ask for a dance partner in that scenario too, while the structure of the celidh makes it easy.

Both, of course, have their pluses and minuses. The more formal structure there is, the less room you have for personal innovation. Except, once you get good at celidh dancing, once you know the steps and have confidence, you find there is a lot of room to develop your own style, express yourself creatively and so forth. You can still choose how you dance.

Druid ritual is more like a celidh than a disco – which has little to do with the possible music preferences of druids. There is a fair bit of structure and being told what to do. The steps become familiar, but different rituals, like different dances, will have their own shapes. You don’t really need to know what you’re doing to participate and it’s easy to learn by doing. But how rigid do we want the frame? Do we need a script? Do we need bits of ritual that will dependably be the same, everywhere? How much familiarity do we want or need, and how much need do we have for innovation?

It’s rare to have a ritual circle where all the participants have similar levels of experience. If a Druid ritual is open (as many are) then the capacity to embrace a participant who has never done it before, is vital. That means you need someone calling out the steps. If you leave the inexperienced to just improvise, they may be paralysed by self consciousness, or just have no idea what to do and thus feel excluded. But on the flip side, I find too much structure stiffling. I hate having a script. The wilder and more improvised a ritual is, the more I tend to enjoy it, especially if I’m working with people who can just go for it. I suppose, by my own metaphor, that makes me more of a disco druid. (She who lives by the metaphor, dies by the metaphor…)

Of course it’s all about balance. It’s about knowing the nature of your ritual group, or knowing enough to be able to guess what will be called for (as with open rituals). Even in the most carefully planned and structured ritual, it’s possible to leave some space for in the moment creativity. I think it’s preferable to do that, it makes it possible to bring in the energy and inspiration of the moment. And even in the most structured and scripted of rituals, there is still room to perfect your art and find your own way of dancing.

And, just for the record, it was a celidh last night that prompted this, not a disco.

Adventures in writing Druidry

When I started druidlife it was as a column over at thewww.paganandthenpen.wordpress.com and eventually I took the plunge to go it alone. But, I started with the idea of writing about my life, as a druid. Somewhat nervously. Rather expecting people would drop round to tell me I was doing it all wrong, that I shouldn’t be calling myself a druid etc etc. It wasn’t entirely paranoia, the journey to here has been an odd one.

But there hasn’t been much of that. One troll, who was a personal troll and not some random internet acquisition. Not bad going really, some 300 and more posts on.

When I’m writing the non-fiction, I’m very conscious that druidry is a big, diverse thing full of people who don’t agree with me. I like this about druidry. It keeps us all on our toes. But it means that if I venture a ‘druids do this’ then I risk putting a misleading thought form into the world, and I also risk the manifestation of angry people who want to correct me. My main strategy is to focus on what I do. I use phrases like ‘some druids’ and ‘druids I have met’ and other such ways of leaving room for all the stuff I don’t know about and all the people who do it differently. Years of feedback have taught me, I think, to be careful about my exact phrasing. I’m very grateful to all of the people who have poked and prodded, reminded me of the diversity and generally kept me straight. I still have moments of making generalisations, or not being clear enough in what I say… it’s a work in progress.

Blogging is one thing. There’s a temporary, fleeting quality to a blog that makes me feel ok about it being a work in progress. Books have a far more permanent quality to them. Stepping up as a blogger, I’m just a druid writing about life, but to be an author is far more about claiming some kind of Authority. That makes me nervous. Now, book the first was fairly easy because I was writing off the back of years of experience meditating, running groups, using meditation in ritual and workshops and so forth. I knew what I was talking about, I knew the subject hadn’t been covered by anyone else, I felt fairly easy about sticking my head up and going ‘oi, world, I know some stuff that might possibly be helpful’. And so Druidry and Meditation was born. Book the second will be out in November. It’s got history in it, and I am not a ‘proper’ historian. It’s got all kinds of reflections on what it means to be a druid, where we’ve come from, where we might be going. I’ve tried to hold that open, inclusive blog voice, but I have a lot of strong opinions, and there’s every chance people are not all going to like this one.

But all this pales into insignificance when compared with what I’ve just done on the fiction side. I’ve got a novel with comedy Druids in it. I’ve tested it on some non-druids and they liked it. But, basically, I’m taking the piss. What I’ve written bears some resemblance to the sillier bits of our history and almost no relation to what we modern folk get up to. I think. It’s going to be interesting if I turn out to be wrong on that score!

The thing about druid books, and druid blogs is that I can assume the audience is probably more pagan than not, and knows me as one small voice amongst many. Fiction works in very different ways. I can’t make the same assumptions about the audience, and, I’m taking the piss.

I gather there are some druids who go in for excommunicating other druids (don’t ask me how that works, it’s not my idea of how to be a druid). But, I find myself asking, have I gone too far? Will I get excommunicated by someone? And if so, is it going to be the history, or the piss taking that lands me in most trouble?

Watch this space…

What do Druids do on Friday the 13th?

Last time this date came around, someone landed on my blog by googling just this question. I doubt they found much to help them, but, recognising that someone wanted an answer, I thought today would be a good time to wheel one out.

The short take would be: Nothing different. (For most of us)

There are important reasons for this though, and they merit exploring. Firstly, the Friday the thirteenth superstition I believe to be Christian in origin, having to do with Judas being the 13th (Jesus plus 11 nice guys) Good Friday being the day of crucifixion, and another strand to do with the persecution, torture and execution of the Knights Templar. I will happily admit to being hazy about all of this – it’s not my tradition, it’s not part of my sense of how the world works so I feel entirely comfortable knowing very little.

The thing is, that Friday the 13th is one of those many, many things that exists only because humans have all agreed to believe it does. As a Druid, I am more interested by what happens in nature, and by things that are discernibly real. If humans were all wiped out tomorrow, there would still be day and night. There would still be seasons, equinoxes, solstices, there would be full moons and dark moons. None of that depends on our noticing it.

Weeks do not exist without people. They are an arbitrary system for dividing up time into manageable units. They may be very old, but if we went, they would cease to exist. So, the idea that one day of the week could be more or less lucky than others, only works if you believe that arbitrary human systems are magically meaningful. I don’t.

Months have a loose relationship with the real cycle of the moon, but it’s too loose to be helpful. Again, these are human ways of cutting up the year into useful sections that help us keep track of what we are doing and manage our relationship with time and the seasons. Months are not real in any sense that they would exist without us either. Therefore the day of the month is just another human construct, signifying little. And if you’re a pagan, and you know that the coven is supposed to have 13 in it, you might not think of 13 as an unlucky number at all, but as a pagan-friendly sort of number.

Years are human inventions too – at least, the dating of years. We count from the year when a chap might or might not have been born in Bethlehem, and we stick with it because it’s what we’ve got. Without humanity, this would not be 2012, it would just be another journey of the earth around the sun.

So, I am taking no more precaution against ill fortune today than I would on any other day. I am not anticipating any more trouble than usual, and based on observation to date, the ebb and flow of fortune in my life has nothing to do with calendar dates. I don’t know enough astrology to know if the movement of planets has ever had any relevance to what’s happening to me. Generally, what is going on keeps me busy enough. My personal belief is that shit happens. Sometimes we bring it upon ourselves. Often we make our own luck. Just occasionally it feels like there are other hands pulling the strings.

Looking forward to hearing everyone else’s take now….

Behaving like a child

A conversation on facebook yesterday resulted in a chap stomping about, announcing that he was a grown up and only going to read proper, grownup books and that anyone reading children’s books, must be childish. I’ve learned to take these moments away and reflect upon them rather than replying in haste. Some people are best ignored, responses just fuel the emotionally immature behaviour. There is, I think, a world of difference between immaturity and childishness. Many children have old heads on young shoulders and wisdom that has nothing to do with years. Many adults are stroppy, self important and prone to throwing the teddy out of the pram, in slightly less literal ways.

There is so much that is childish which we reject to our cost.

For the child, life is new and full of surprises. They learn to be jaded and cynical, to suppress joy, to hide fear and excitement and present the bland, ‘grownup’ face that is so often mistaken for a sign of emotional maturity. Even though it is the coming of adult hormones that takes our emotional capacities to whole new levels. There is nothing immature about the feeling, or expressing of emotion. The child looks at the world in wonder, and spends a lot of time asking ’why?’. They are reluctant to accept that anything is impossible. They have not yet succumbed to the mantra of work and more work to consume more and enjoy less. Most children are still inclined to feel compassion for things other than themselves – cute fluffy animals especially. They haven’t yet acquired compassion-fatigue or the sense of futility that comes with being a proper ‘grownup’.

And yes, they still read stories full of hope and wonder. Real, serious books for grownups frequently lack this. Yesterday’s complainant talked about the superiority of Hardy. You don’t get many laughs in a Thomas Hardy novel. You don’t get much hope for humanity either, or any kind of vision of a better world.

Children are frequently willing to believe that things could be better than they are. They do not reject hope. They like stories in which good things happen.

Where I’m dabbling in writing for children, I’ve needed to spend a lot of time thinking about what children read, reading it myself, talking to children about what they like, and listening to them generally. Children do not see the world as adults do, but I feel that so often in trying to make ‘them’ more like ‘us’ we diminish them. ‘Growing up’ so often means the stripping away of hope, aspiration, and the ability to enjoy small things. Leaving us with, at least in some cases, the kind of miserable, jaded adults who are angry about any signs of joy and enthusiasm in other adults. Ye gods, what a closed and unhappy way to live!

I want to be more childlike. I want to remember how to enjoy a story that ends happily because everyone got an ice-cream. I want to bury experience and re-embrace the world of the Owl and the Pussycat, Alice in Wonderland and Pooh Bear. I don’t want to write, or read, more stories that reflect ‘gritty reality’ and show us that we can only be smaller than we thought we were and that no one gets out of here alive. I want stories that inspire. Stories I can put in front of adult and child readers alike, safe in the knowledge that I am not going to steal anything precious from them in the process.

There was a survey a few years back on books that had changed people’s lives. It was topped not by some high brow literary revelation of the human condition, but by The Lord of The Rings. Serious, grownup people (mostly on Radio 4) claimed to be surprised and horrified. How could we all be so shallow, so childish as to let our lives be changed by such a silly bit of fantasy, they wanted to know? Why weren’t we being changed by something more important and substantial?

I suspect the answer is simple. Books that set out to be a high brow revelation of the human condition, are frequently a crappy read. I could list all the high brow and terribly important authors I’ve read (I did an English Lit degree) and who are mostly obscure and frankly, deserve it. It’s noticeable that the big guns, Shakespeare, and Dickens, were crowd pleasers in their time. High brow literary endeavour has never sold books in any great number, and probably never will. People who write books in the shape of mathematical structures. People who deconstruct, who are ironic, and post modern and terribly clever, write tedious, story free stories about characters you just want to see eaten by a dragon. Good stories are the vehicles of good ideas. As Ursula Le Guinn says, good art is entertaining.

Humans are story telling creatures. Good stories are alive, and uplifting, and inspire us in some way. I’m fine with beautiful tragedy too, but not with jaded hopelessness. If you’re the sort of self important adult who wants all the grownups to only read important, serious, grownup books, you probably need to do some work making peace with that inner child, all things considered.

Facilitating, not leading

Leadership implies authority. Yesterday in the post Being a Druid Leader  I talked about some of the things that trouble me about leadership as a concept. Today I’m going to poke around the idea of facilitation and how that differs from leadership. The most critical difference is that a facilitator does not have to put themselves in a position of authority. This can be applied to the running of just about anything, and also to teaching.

Leadership tends towards dogma. Leaders tend towards visions, and ways of doing things. Now, we all need ways of doing things and we all need inspiration to guide us along our path, but does this mean we need precise guidance from a leader? When you are first learning a path, be it druidry, or politics or an academic subject, what you don’t know is overwhelming. Having someone to help you get to any kind of path through the confusion of trees, is often a great relief. But the more we learn, the more likely we are to have our own ideas. There will be things we want to try as unique visions come to each of us. Some visions are small and personal, some epic and revolutionary, but all are important.

People who set themselves up to lead, to bring their vision into the world, to teach their particular path and so forth, run the risk of trying to turn students and followers into them. I’ve been there, I have experimented with the t-shirt both as a student and as a teacher. If you are inspired by your own ideas, it can be tempting to want to push others into taking them up. And surely, that is the very nature of religious tradition? Except that Druidry usually prides itself on being non-dogmatic, and teaching your vision can be a quick route into dogma.

Someone who facilitates does not instruct. They may offer ideas, suggestions, and whatnot, but will spend as much time listening to how others want to do things, as they do laying out their own plans. A facilitator creates a safe space, a framework, in which others can explore. Now, obviously the shape of the framework will inform the options of other participants, but if you get it right, they aren’t constricted, just held and reassured.

Here’s a simple example. Running a guided meditation, you can say “You come into a beautiful clearing, sun is streaming through the trees and you feel happy and blessed.” Or you can say “You come into a beautiful clearing, sun is streaming through the trees, it’s a quiet and safe place. Take some time to be in it and see how it makes you feel.” The first approach forces the emotions of the participants, the second does not. In the second, a person needing to deal with grief would be able to sit down in that envisioned glade and weep the tears they could not shed in public, for example.

Facilitating is less work than leading. It does not disempower the people who come to you. It requires everyone to be to a decent degree, responsible for themselves. It doesn’t tie you into ways of working that are quite so likely to sap energy. It also means that you do not take control of where your people go, what they learn, how they practice. You do not get to own what they become.

I learned a lot about facilitating in my time at The Druid Network – an organisation that embodies this ethos of making spaces but not leading. I’ve seen it at work at OBOD – yes, the shape of the written course means you’ve got a path to follow, but good tutors (I had several) will support you in finding your own detours and building your own ways of working. It’s easier to share the work of facilitating – a group of people can collectively facilitate a ritual, but only one or two can lead. There’s more meritocracy this way, more distribution, more, when it comes down to it…. Druidry.

Being a Druid Leader

During my twenties I ran moots, rituals, workshops, meditation sessions and musical events. I also worked as a volunteer for the Pagan Federation and The Druid Network. (All under my previous name). I have dipped my toes in the murky waters of pagan leadership. Yesterday I saw a comment about how few pagans are willing to volunteer to make things happen, and I wanted to comment on the perfectly sane reasons why this is so.

Volunteering is unpaid. You put in hours of your time and a lot of energy just running something simple like a moot. Now, if you have a job, a family, a home, a life, you maybe don’t have lots of spare hours to give. And the people you give to won’t reliably treat you like a hero. Many will make demands, want your attention, expect you to do things their way. It’s always a lot of responsibility to shoulder.

Taking control can disempower others. The less leadership there is, the more scope for things happening organically. And if that means not happening, that may be a good and healthy thing. Letting people grow so that they can create their own magic has its virtues. Where I have run things, I’ve tried to do so with as a light a touch as possible – not least because it makes the workload bearable.

Up until recently, I did not have books to sell. Hold that thought. Most magazines on paganism will not pay you for articles because they can’t afford to. Most pagan organisations cannot pay you to work for them. Most events will not be able to pay you for talks or workshops, you might get some free table space. But, if you don’t have a stream of work you can sell, then ‘service’ as a pagan means just that. You give, and you give and you get paid for the odd handfasting. Running workshops you hope to cover the cost of the venue. Most of us are financially poorer for volunteering, but weren’t in it for the money anyway. No one should feel obliged to take that on. And for the people, like me, who are now doing it as part of the day job ‘service’ is not the word. This is the day job.

Some of us go full time as pagans, or as creatives. I’m the latter. I do a lot of Druid stuff, but my work life includes a lot of editing, and writing in fiction genres too. I am not a Druid as my full time job. But if I do an event, I can carry my books, my bloke’s art, and maybe I can earn enough to cover the train fair. This puts me in a different position to the true volunteers.

But for the first ten years or so of my public, pagan life, it was not my day job, it didn’t pay the bills. I can’t afford to be a Druid full time as it is, and I have to say, I don’t want that to be my job description, either. I like the rest of my life rather a lot.

There are a great many people out there who do step up and run things. I know scores of teachers, celebrants, moot leaders, ritual organisers. Motives vary. I would say with confidence that, whatever the justifications about service, there are 2 things that cause a person to seek leadership roles in the pagan community. For a small minority, it’s all about self importance and the certainty of being superior to everyone else. Generally, such folk are a pain to work with, dogmatic and demanding.  I do not think paganism benefits from such leadership. The other sort, are the folk who need to feel useful. We need the validation of a round of applause. We need to feel wanted and appreciated. We of the raging insecurities who step up to the front in the hopes that someone will love us for it. This is a bard issue too. The hunger for applause that gets many people onto the stage, is a hunger for approval, for a place in the world. It’s underpinned by anxiety, self doubt and a lot of pain.

Still crying out for leaders?

Some of my leadership roles, I actively sought (TDN) most fell on me (PF, moot, rituals, folk club) some I did in answer to requests (workshops, music, meditation). I found it hard to say no, because I was working from a place of tattered self esteem. Some of it did me more harm than good. It cost me high in terms of energy. I got some things back from it.

These days I’m trying to find a better balance, working out what I can sustainably give and what is too much. So, right now, I am one of the many pagan folk who isn’t willing to run anything, and I make no apology for that. I am at the stage of life where I need to just turn up sometimes with cakes, and that be as far as it goes. I shall be attending a few events this year, but organising nothing. This prospect makes me very happy. I get my applause fixes in more viable ways (hurrah for blogging).

It is as important in paganism as in politics to question to motives of those who want to lead. And to question our own motives if we have the sudden urge to be out in front, telling people what to do, making big statements about how modern paganism *really* is…

I don’t want to speak for anyone else. I don’t want to tell anyone else what to do. You lovely people persist in turning up and reading, and that’s very much like a gentle round of applause, enough of a fix to keep me going. I’ve come to the conclusion that I like facilitation more than authority, and that’s what will be guiding me as I amble onwards.

Letting them fly

All fledglings must at some point leave the nest. My son was telling me this morning that when it is time for bear cubs to go it alone, the mother bear chases them up a tree and then abandons them. He said he’s glad he isn’t a bear! For him, it’ll be a slower, more gentle process over the next eight years or so, but it is a process we have most definitely started. This week he’s away on a residential thing with the school, having adventures. By slow degrees, he will learn to leave the nest and fend for himself. My definition of being a successful parent is that I will get him to the point where he doesn’t really need me anymore.

There is a lot of similarity between teaching and parenting in this regard. Getting it right means getting them to the point where you wave them goodbye and watch them strike out into the world. Students and offspring alike must not be under your sheltering wing forever. The trouble is, keeping them there can be really tempting. It is very human to want to be wanted, to need to be needed. And so we can easily hang on to children, and students because we like the comfort of them being there and needing us. It can tempt us to hold back a few things, to not tell them everything, so that they still need us for a few bits and pieces. It’s not the right way to go.

In many ways students are easier, because they are more readily replaced. Most of us, on waving the newly adult offspring goodbye, are not going to go and create a whole new person to replace them with. Some of us will get a puppy instead. Students tend not to be around for so long in the first place – perhaps a few years. That makes the letting go easier, and if you’re any good as a teacher, the next one will turn up soon enough.

It can be tempting, with students, to take them on when they aren’t right for us, or to try and keep them once we find that we aren’t the teacher they need. Saying ‘there isn’t anything I can usefully teach you’ is hard. Having a whole flock of students feels like kudos, feeds the ego, helps us feel important and worthwhile. Pushing just one away feels like admitting defeat, or being a failure. It isn’t. Failure is keeping them when you can do them no good.

Of course once you’ve got a child, you’ve got a child and this is a very different scenario most of the time. It’s much less usual for a person to have to consider that they cannot parent the child they have in the best way. But it does happen. Seriously physically disabled children, or ones with profound learning difficulties can be more than it is feasible for a parent to manage. Sometimes what you need are professionals who do not have to manage things 24/7. I can’t begin to imagine how hard and painful a decision that must be to make though. There are the parents who fail so badly that social services intervene and tell them they can have no role in the child’s future. There are also the parents whose offspring reject them. That can happen at any stage in life, and as they get older, if we have messed up, they are more likely to flee from us.

What of the parent who tries to hang on to the child they are unable to properly take care of? We may feel every sympathy for them, may pity their problems, recognise their grief, but it’s not enough. Regardless of the age of the child, no amount of thinking you love them justifies trying to hang on to them when they really need to be somewhere else. It’s far easier to recognise when you aren’t the right teacher for the job than I imagine it must be to recognise that you aren’t the right parent for the job.

Getting trained as a teacher isn’t difficult, but how many of us are trained as parents, or know where to go for help when we can’t manage the workload? It’s one of those issues where I can see the problems all too clearly, and the solutions seem hard to imagine in the context of the kind of society we have.