Nimue Brown's Blog, page 457

Redefining luxury, Druid style

What does luxury mean? We’re back to ideas that are sold to us from the outside, because it’s so easy to respond to that question with a vision of something that costs a fortune. The push towards ever greater consumerism is often one that asks us to turn old luxuries into things we consider essential, and then to hanker after even bigger, more expensive things.

For the sake of the planet, luxury needs to be a sustainable idea. I don’t think that’s quite as nuts as it sounds either. I do not believe that we’re going to save the world with a hair shirt mindset. Most people are not prepared to suffer for their own gain, much less anyone else’s, and we’re up against all those adverts that keep telling us that we should never experience a moment’s discomfort or inconvenience. Hair shirts are not going to enlist anyone. Not even me. But what if we could de-comodify the idea of luxury? What if we could make luxury, or the experience of the luxurious, that bit more affordable and sustainable? That would shrink a few carbon footprints.

You can’t indulge when you’re on the run. If you’re doing the ‘hectic lifestyle’ routine, grabbing instant food whilst running like a headless chicken from one assignment to the next, you can’t enjoy anything. So the luxury that makes all others possible, is slowing down. And often, slowing down is pretty cheap. A few hours off work will give you that.

A lie in is not expensive, but what is more luxurious than being free to sleep until you wake naturally, and then being leisurely about getting up? You don’t have to wallow in the duvet all day to feel the benefit. An extra hour, stolen from the hectic schedule, is a most lovely bit of self indulgence. Or how about having the time, just occasionally, to soak in a bathtub, to indulge in good massage or leisurely lovemaking? Time is the most precious thing we have, so using that time in pleasing, indulgent ways can create a feeling of luxury at little cost. And equally, no matter how much cash we spend, if we don’t give ourselves time to enjoy the indulgence, we don’t get much out of it. What good a vastly expensive cruise if you’re on the mobile talking to the office all the time?

One of the big mistakes we make, is finding a good thing and then indulging all the time so that the treat becomes normal and all sense of reward is lost. Some such treats become addictive and destructive when continually ‘indulged’. Alcohol for one. Luscious food, for another. Eat ice cream every day, and you’ll barely even notice it. Strawberries all year round are not as good as strawberries that only come fresh from the garden for a few glorious weeks. Preciousness and rareness often equate, but if we make something a regular feature, we deprive ourselves of the sense of a treat. Over exposure to anything can just de-sensitise us, so that we cease to appreciate, or even notice.

I used to sit out overnight to watch the mid summer sunrise. It’s a good opportunity to break with the normal routine. A mattress never feels so magical as it does after a night on a hill. A duvet becomes a gift of the gods then. A roof is a profound blessing. Contrast is good. Contrast allows us to see the real value of things. The more we wrap ourselves in ease, the less we get to enjoy what is good. The less able we become to notice the good in our lives. Coming in after working in the snow, hot soup is sublime.

I’ve stripped a lot of the twenty first century ‘luxury essentials’ out of my life in the last year – more from necessity than spiritual devotion, but it’s been good for me. Happiness is a sunny day when I can dry laundry, and just sit outside and enjoying being alive for a while, knowing that the batteries are charging. Happiness is having the time to soak in lots of hot water. It’s watching grebes dive outside the boat, and sleeping until 8 in the morning. Happiness is not having to cycle in the pouring rain, and happiness is also knowing that, if needs be, I am fit, well and strong enough to do that cycle ride in whatever conditions I get. Going to the pub for internet, electricity and cheesy chips is the pinnacle of self indulgence.

I am bloody determined that as my life swings back towards more conventional options, I am not going to forget these perceptions. The more I am able to enjoy the small things, the easier it is to be happy. The smaller my luxuries, the smaller my impact upon the planet. The closer I get to only having what is needful, the more I experience the indulgent quality of having more than is essential. And the more I see how few things really are essential after all.

Never finished

Works of art are never finished, only abandoned. This is on my mind rather, going through edits for the current book, getting the urge to re-write vast swathes and knowing I must not. Stopping is the hardest thing. You can re-write and re-write, or re-draw, or re-record forever, striving after perfection. The result of that approach is that your work never gets out into the world and you never find out what anyone else thinks of it. At some point, you have to abandon it and let it go. A work that never reaches anyone else, is not a success.

Rituals have tidy end points, after which we go home, or to the pub. Courses and workshops have end points. Much of human life is orientated towards getting things finished. But so much of what we do can only ever be a work in progress. Yes, this book is in edits, but this is not the end of my writing about Druidry, this is a stage in the process. Now what I have to do is write another, much better and more useful sort of book.

Dissatisfaction is absolutely essential to good art, and perplexes people who aren’t living and working that way. “Why aren’t you satisfied with what you’ve done?” I’ve been asked. “Why can’t you sit back and enjoy it rather than rushing on to the next thing?” The answer? Because getting to the end of a project, I know things I didn’t know at the beginning. I can already see how to do more, go further, be better, and I want to put that knowledge into action. Those who are satisfied, and stop, do not progress. I want to be the best that I possibly can be. I recognise this means I will never be truly satisfied by anything I do, or, if I get to that point, it marks the end of me as a viable creative person.

I feel much the same about Druidry. This ritual may be finished, but I’m studying it to see what worked and what didn’t. I’m listening to the feedback. I’m already germinating ideas for the next one. The same is true of workshops, and of blogs, of meditation sessions and anything else I turn my hands to. How can I learn from this? What can I do better next time? And so rather than seeing isolated events that come to an end, I live in a state of continual flow and change. Sometimes also a state of progress, but there are times when I get sidetracked, backslide, mess up and do all that is normal and human in that regard. I learn from that, too. Eventually.

Will I ever get to the point of saying ‘I have learned enough Druidry now, I do not need to study any more books.’? That will be a ‘when I am dead’ scenario. Will I ever feel that I have so perfected my ritual skills that I can rest on my laurels (unCeltic as that would be) and be pleased with myself? Not a chance. Will I ever have done enough by way of service to say ‘I’ve got that one covered, I can retire now.’? I don’t think so.

Good Druidry is never finished. Like art, episodes of Druidic work have to be let go of, closed, abandoned. But like artists, we’re always moving on to the next moment, the next act of inspiration, the next taste of magic. It’s good, and necessary, to find joy in what you do, but that germ of dissatisfaction is one of the most precious things you can posses, to my mind.

Celebrating the good ones

A few years ago, talking to Damh the Bard, he made the important point that you cannot have strong, empowered femininity without also having strong, empowered masculinity, and that the reverse is equally true.

By contrast, an ex of mine was generally of the opinion that empowering women displaced men, pushing them out of jobs, out of their identity as bread winners, into a no-man’s land of frustration and barely suppressed rage. (I have no idea what said ex thinks these days, I try to avoid his opinions as much as possible.)

There are, I have no doubt, people of both genders who see any power in the hands of the opposite gender, as a threat to them. There are times and places where this is true. But when we disempower one gender, really speaking, we disempower both. That ‘man as bread winner, dominant and running the world’ archetype, beloved of my ex, tends to mean that a man not in full time employment doesn’t have so much sense of self, and that’s no kind of win. Money, authority and identity can easily be blurred by this mindset. The historical gender attitudes that pushed men out of parenting and locked women in the home made us all unbalanced, diminished us all.

Is it possible to have any kind of enforced power imbalance without diminishing everyone? Money is so often the reflection of unbalanced power. The greater the gap between rich and poor, the more fear and possessiveness there is likely to be for the rich. The fear of being taken down, of being stripped of wealth, of the revolting peasants. The need to control others is born out of fear. People who do not feel the need to dominate are, on the whole, going to be a good deal happier.

Author Jean Roberta pointed out in a blog some time ago (sorry, I cannot remember where) that gay and lesbian couples have a big advantage over straight couples. There are no assumptions about how they are supposed to relate to each other, who is supposed to have which role. As a consequence, they have the freedom to build relationships that are much more rooted in the nature of the individuals. Straight people can learn from this.

As a Druid, relationship, and the idea of relationship is central to a lot of what I do. I’m fascinated by how we imagine ourselves in relationship, by historical conventions, social norms, and questions of what is natural, and what is pure construct. So much of gender is imaginary, and yet there are some pronounced physical differences, which are especially relevant in a child-rearing couple. The reality of pregnancy and birth does change what each person can do.

I like the kind of empowered men who use their strength to nurture, shelter and support those weaker than themselves. I like the kind of men who have too much self respect to ever force sex upon a woman. I like the kind of men who delight in powerful, capable, liberated women and would never be so undignified as to whinge ‘I feel like you don’t need me now, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do’ when faced with female success. I like the kind of men who know how to love, admire, and enjoy women, who knowhow to be friends with women. A man who needs to crush a woman in order to feel superior, is not, in my book, any kind of ‘real man’ at all. He’s a waste of space. I wish I’d come to understand that one a bit sooner, I could have spared myself years of having to apologise for success, for happiness, for capability.

I’m writing this today in no small part because I want to celebrate the good men. The ones who support, and do not crush. The ones who make the world a better sort of place. The good guys. And mine in particular, because it’s his birthday, and he is so worth celebrating.

Happy birthday Tom.

And to all you lovely guys out there, you who are man enough not to need to knock anyone else down, power to your paws.

Learning by heart

I’ll start by saying that I detest rote learning, the kind of learning where you are just forcing facts into your brain, usually with a view to regurgitating them in an exam and then forgetting the lot. That kind of learning does not generate wisdom or feed inspiration very often.

However, dedicating a lot of material to memory was very much the work of the ancient Druids and Bards, as far as we know. They didn’t write anything down, it was all oral transmission and memory. Most of us don’t go in for that kind of learning at all, but it’s very different from being able to recite a multiplication table. Being a bard is about making the carefully learned words come alive, in the moment.

Yesterday I watched a group of children put on a show. There was about an hour and a quarter’s worth of material there – songs and dialogue The oldest children were 11, the youngest, I think 7. That’s a lot of material to have got to grips with, in a matter of a few months. A great deal of work, dedication and repetition went in to getting them there, and the result was stunning. It’s amazing what can be done when there’s a will to make it happen. But if you suggested that kids ought to have an hour’s worth of learned material in their heads, complete with actions, I don’t think many people would see that as a good use of the child’s time.

I recall being at a druid event some years ago, with no formal entertainment, and people, less than perfectly sober people, trying to amuse themselves with songs – frequently half remembered ones at that. I have enough performance level material in my head to run for a good four hours flat out – tunes, songs, poems and stories. In practice, my voice is not up to more than 2 hours of uninterrupted performance. Probably less these days as I haven’t done the epic busking stints in a while. It’s long been natural to me to have a reservoir of learned material I could draw on, and this event made it apparent to me that for many people, that pool of bardic lore isn’t there. Which is a shame.

There’s something magical about dedicating yourself to a piece of art – be that a dance, a tune, a song, poem or story. Giving yourself to it so that you can learn it, means that it in turn becomes a part of you. There’s time taken to understand the relationships between each note, each nuance of the words, how an arrangement might shift it and make something new of it. Learning the song, or the story is all about understanding it and having a real relationship with it. It tangles into your soul. The stories we tell, the songs we sing become a part of who we are. They enrich. And when the power goes off, we have some way of passing the time.

Community music, dancing with people, and all these kinds of sharing are really bonding activities. You can’t forge those kinds of bonds by sitting around and watching a television program together. You can’t do it on facebook, either. The immediacy of something shared is powerful. The offering of song or words is one of the best things I think anyone can bring to a ritual.

It does take discipline and effort, but that’s no bad thing. What it gives us in return, is far more than the cost. A gem inside your head is with you for life. Sharing it enables you to give something beautiful to others over and over again.

And the more you learn, the easier it gets to learn.

Selling you something

I have a lot of issues about television, but for today, I’m going to focus on the adverts. Now, adverts of course are not unique to TV – posters are everywhere, magazines, facebook, most websites. Anywhere you go, someone will be trying to sell you something. Even here (glance to your right, in case you missed it.)  See, I’ve just tried to sell you something! But TV is unique in how it does this, and I find it troubling.

Most ads, online and on paper, are static. A few words and images which are easily ignored. They may even be targeted, and I don’t mind that – eco tourism in my nature magazines, green products in my Green party publication and so forth. I don’t mind hearing about things I really could be interested in. TV can focus, based on assumed age group of the audience, but aside from that, it’s mostly aiming for everyone. This is not helpful. Your best hope is things like DIY stores alongside DIY programs. So it’s mostly a cluster bomb approach.

Now, when you watch TV, you may well be sat down, and interested in a program. If you’re not, then the raised volume often associated with advert breaks will draw your attention to them. But, watching is an immersive medium. With your vision, and your hearing engaged, and anything to hold your mind a bit, that’s your attention tied up. TV programs try very hard to keep you engaged. So do adverts. You are, in many ways, a sitting duck. And so the advert has the power to throw you, immersively into the world of the advert, and tell you something that will make you want to buy a thing.

Now, you may assume that what adverts tell you is all the reasons why you want this fantastic product. They don’t. I did a brief marketing course a few years back. The first thing they told us is that the easiest way of getting people to buy stuff, is fear.  Fear of missing out. Fear of being left behind, or thought less of by friends. Fear of not having something you didn’t even now you needed, and so forth. Every time a TV advert sells you something, it is also almost certainly selling you a little bit of fear too. It’s telling you that your bathroom isn’t clean and shiny enough to pass muster. It’s telling you that your kids will fail because they don’t have some bare essential you’ve never even heard of. It’s telling you that colleagues will look down on you for being sweaty or having the wrong glasses, or some other bullshit. It’s also telling you that it’s ok to look down on people who do not have what you have.

Under the smiling, shining surface of adverts, there’s a lot of encouragement to feel dissatisfied with your life as well. Are you in the slow lane? Is your car not as great as this one? Is your wardrobe letting you down? Are you too fat? Too hairy? Too human? Be afraid that people will judge you for this. Be very afraid. Buy our product to have a hope of hell in surviving out there in the urban jungle.

The adverts come round with considerable frequency. How much time does a typical TV watcher spend being told to buy more stuff, and given reasons to feel shitty about themselves? Every day. What does that do to a person’s self esteem? What does it do to their consuming habits? We cannot, as a planet, afford the rapacious nature of our consuming culture, and yet every day, the vast majority of us are being beaten about the head with the message that if we don’t buy more stuff, we are going to be total failures. This is not helping. It’s not good for us. It makes us sad, and it encourages to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need. The things we are sold as solutions to our problems are not solutions. Happiness is not a shiny kitchen, or the right brand of soup. Happiness is much more complex. You will not find it at the bottom of any kind of bottle.

I would hate TV less if it didn’t spend so much time trying to sell us stuff. Adverts are not the only problem though, but I may come back and grouse about other issues another time.

It is possible to sell things without using fear or trying to cause misery. I’d rather go ‘ here is a thing that I made, if you think it might suit you, please do buy one, it helps keep me in mushrooms and potatoes and that enables me to keep doing this stuff.’ But what about an advert campaign that suggested, be it ever so subtly, that you couldn’t hope to be a real and proper druid without reading my books? A campaign to tell you this is the definitive book. The only one worth having. So many adverts sell the authority of the product. I don’t believe in the authority of my product. I’m going to spend some of my time telling you to read Ronald Hutton, Kevan Manwaring, Robin Herne, Brendan Myers, Cat Treadwell, Emma Restall Orr and others, and more. For gods’ sake, don’t imagine you need my book to go druiding! There are lots of good books out there. Mine is not the only way.

Somehow, I can’t see that catching on in mainstream advertising, but it feels a lot more honourable than the usual approach.

The silence of the Gods

A great many Pagans and Druids talk about serving the Gods, and doing what the Gods ask of them. I have a confession to make: I do not hear the voice of deity. I used to, years ago, but it went away. There may be reasons. I became too wrapped up in my pain. I become too weary to give – my acts of service went to the material realm, I had nothing to offer the Gods beyond that, and so, perhaps, they ceased bothering with me. Perhaps I have become spiritually deaf. Perhaps there is nothing they want from me right now and they have more important things to be doing. They are Gods, after all.

I have no trouble at all holding to the idea that Gods exist. But I’ve never been good at holding relationship with anything I couldn’t interact with. Belief without relationship doesn’t work for me, I don’t know how to do it. I love and respect the natural world, and the energies of human creativity. I pay a lot of attention to the things I encounter, to the reeds and the grebes, the sky, the earth. I have a sense of the sacredness in all that is around me, but based on previous experience, that’s not the same as a feeling of relationship with deity.

I could beat myself up over this. I have spent a lot of time wondering what changed, and why, and whether this is some judgement upon me, some proof of insufficiency and of not being a proper Druid after all. When the rain falls on me, I do not think it is a divine judgement on my shortcomings. I think it’s rain, falling. When something random and shitty happens in my life, I don’t tend to think “ah, the gods are pissed off with me again, better sacrifice a goat.” Shit happens, and it happens to everyone, and some of the best people I know have had some really hard things in their lives. So that can’t be it. That said, when unimaginable good fortune comes my way, I do tend to wonder if I have been smiled on by some benevolent force, and I express my gratitude.

There are people in my life I haven’t heard from in years. People on the folk scene, for example. The silence does not suggest to me that they no longer exist. It doesn’t make me think they hate me. Based on experience to date, when I next run into them, we’ll sit down somewhere and talk, and the intervening years won’t matter much at all, aside from the work of filling in the gaps. Why should I assume the gods are any less busy, and any less pleasant, than folk musicians? I don’t.

I’m saying this partly because it’s something I have made my peace with. Partly also in response to the many online pagans who are talking about their personal relationships with the divine. I would be prepared to bet I’m not the only one who doesn’t have that right now. Am I less of a human because of it? I don’t think so. Am I less of a Druid because of it? Well, maybe, but also maybe not. Perhaps the work I need to be doing right now is quietly inside myself, and the Gods are leaving me alone until I get straight enough to be useful again. I also don’t think of the Gods as being omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, I think they are finite entities and they may be busy elsewhere.

So if you’re one of the people who isn’t talking about what the gods ask you to do for them, I hope this comes at least as some kind of comfort.

Of real arts and internets

Following on from thinking last week about culture and creativity, and the relationship between the unreal computer world, and real arts. I’ve noticed a thing. I’ve become accustomed to the ways computers and the net operate. The back button. The undo function. The search facility. There are times when, in normal working, it occurs to me to want one of these features. Real life doesn’t have a back button.

We’ve been set building recently, for the school’s upcoming production. All very low tech, lots of cardboard and paint. No ‘undo’ option there either. A mistake means doing it again, or accepting the flaw. It’s such a radically different way of working.

Of course most people for most of human history have done without search engines, and undo buttons. Most human invention has been undertaken with no way back if you mess it up. I wonder what the ease of undoing most of our work does for modern creativity? Is it a good and useful thing, or does it make us slack?

Over the last couple of years I’ve gone back to using paper for some projects. It frees me from needing the computer on and enables me to work in different places. It also requires me to focus my mind. I don’t have the world’s best handwriting, for a start. But I’ve noticed a peculiar thing. My typos are creeping into my writing. I sometimes write ‘jsut’ by mistake. I have no idea why this is happening, and it bothers me. My spelling isn’t great, and although spellchecker has helped me improve, I do wonder about the written mistakes that came from typos.

It takes a lot more discipline to write, or practice any art without the safety net of a back button. There’s a requirement for attention to detail. There’s so much difference between art made in the moment – the live performance, the hand written book, the hand drawn art, and something you can undo and redo to your heart’s content. There are of course good things about being able to polish and improve, but it can make us lazy. It’s easy to develop a throw something together now, fix it later policy.

And the over-polished can start to look, sound a bit unreal. Last night I heard a live recording of the current chart topper, Oliver Twist. Live it had a wild, almost anarchic and joyful quality far more vivid than anything in the cleanly recorded and carefully produced ‘proper’ version.

One of the reasons I like folk, is because I like things that are a bit more real, and a bit less shiny. Unshiny, from a writing perspective, may mean technically awry, but it can mean having all the idiosyncrasies and unique features of voice ironed out of it to make the work sound standard and anonymous. I’m no fan of that. Fortunately, the computers are not yet trying to do that to me.

Now, what has the spellchecker spotted?

Reflections on Folk Magic

I recently read Stephen Wilson’s The Magical Universe – a book cataloguing evidence of magical practice and belief in mediaeval Europe.  This is not the high, learned magic of people who might self identify as sorcerers, but everyday magic. The sort of magic your typical peasant might be dabbling in. Evidently much of it intertwined with, and leaned upon Christianity. I get the impression that our mediaeval ancestors had no problem doing magic and seeing themselves as Christians. Plenty of magic in fact called on saints, priests, relics, dust from sacred places, holy water, the wafers from communion and so forth. There might well have been pagan roots, but there was a lot of Christianity in the mix too.

What struck me most was this: The entire tome could be summed up by saying that the folk magic of mediaeval Europe was about trying to cajole a hostile world into letting you live, reproduce and keep your offspring alive. This is the magic of survival. I don’t know enough to say just how highly the odds were stacked against life, but the magic described in this book suggests a belief that it was so. Magic is about getting the crops to grow, warding off storms and vermin, tackling disease, finding a mate, keeping children safe from evil influences, cursing and warding off curses, for the greater part.

What do any of us do in face of a hostile reality that is beyond our control? We pray, we ask for help, we try and find some way of getting in control. It’s easy to look back at our history and see the foolishness of superstition, but what about the present? Are we any better, or merely different?

We put so much faith in politics and democracy to give us a bit of control and influence, and yet the same kinds of people, from the same kinds of families tend to be the ones in power, and it’s very, very rare that a change of government makes any significant changes to things for the better. We get bigger, nastier weapons, more compelx systems, not much compassion. Progress is small and slow.

We put our faith in science, too. Our fictions, books and films alike, are full of it. Meteors, aliens, diseases and all the other things that might imperil humanity may threaten us, but worry not, clever boffins will save the day! And so we believe that clever boffins will save us from climate change, from the effects of over consumption, from the diseases we create for ourselves through our modern lifestyles. We expect a pill for every ill, and a device to offset every wrong thing we do. As a consequence, we carry on poisoning ourselves, feeling entirely rational about the idea that science will save us. Is this faith in the power of science any more rational than the belief in the intervention of saints? Might it not be a magic wand by another name? Yes, science can do a great deal, and no doubt will, but it is not a magic cure all, and we are going to have to take responsibility for our own individual and collective fates.

We don’t have oracles any more. We have the media, which tells us what is going to be the next ‘must have’ whether we are the right shape, the right style of parent, the right face, whether we want the right things. Is our collective acceptance of the voices that come out of little boxes actually any better founded than believing the words of priestesses deep in a trance? Is it any more useful? Any less manipulative than the worst imaginings we have had about magicians manipulating ignorant, primitive people? The magic words come out of the box and we all run out to buy a new pair of shoes. Most of us don’t listen to religious leaders any more. We don’t go to the wise woman for advice. We listen to TV experts, we read agony aunt columns, we let ourselves be led by people we’ve never met, who know nothing about us. And this makes us more rational than the mediaevals?  We don’t believe in saintly miracles, but we do believe in miracle diets, miracle cleaning products, miracle life saving drugs even though there’s plenty of evidence that none of them are totally reliable.

We still do belief and superstition. We’ve just change the delivery methods and the names of the forces to whose wills we consider ourselves vulnerable. We placate them with offerings of money, and hope they won’t turn on us and destroy our lives.

Writing Druid Books

When I first started exploring Druidry, quite some years go now, I was terribly excited about the books I imagined I would be coming into contact with, thanks to advice from wise teachers and those further down the path. You know the ones: The books of ancient wisdom. The books that would tell me how to be a druid. The books of mystery and wonder that would enable me to see the world in whole new ways. Those books. Based on observation, I think a lot of young pagans anticipate the existence of such great works and many are disappointed. I found lots of introductions to Druidry, lots of things that hinted at deeper things and refused to tell me how to do them, or told me that I could only learn then directly from an actual, physical teacher. I was not pleased. I’d just finished the kind of degree that had convinced me that, really, anything worth learning could be learned by reading about it.

My natural inclination is to read. These days I use the internet a fair bit too, as well as books, but I am more likely to want a book about a thing than any other method of learning. That may be hardwired. However, there just aren’t the books out there to teach me the things I want to learn, and that’s been the case for more than a decade now. I expect the teachers who could teach me are out there, but one lives in a hut half way up a mountain and doesn’t have a website. One only speaks Russian. One was tragically killed by a bear last week, and four of them are, themselves, still in their teens and have not yet grown into their own greatness. Or so I like to think. So, where the hell does that leave me?

One of the things that bugs me about books on modern paganism, is that an awful lot of them are very general, introduction type books. Especially in Druidry. There are some people who feel that you can’t even write a book on Druidry without devoting the first chapter to yet another rehash of the ancient druids, the revivalists…. And I’ve got to say, if you’ve read more than two books on druidry already, that can get a bit much. I want a world in which everyone has to read Ronald Hutton, and then everyone else writing about Druidry can start the book by saying ‘read Ronald Hutton, I’m not doing the potted history.’ Think how much paper and frustration that would save! It was suggested to me that I do a potted history at the start of Druidry and Meditation. I didn’t. I also don’t want to get bogged down trying to explain what modern Druidry *is* every time I write a book. Again, more than two reads, and you’re going to be heartily sick of that debate.

What I want to read, are books that go a lot deeper into some facet of Druidry. If you know of good ones, please, please put them in the comments at the bottom. Robin Herne’s Bardic book is already on my to-read list, Kevan Manwaring’s The Way of Awen is a favourite. Brendan Myer’s The Other Side of Virtue really took me places. Books for people who are not beginners. Books for people who have already read some books, done some rituals, have a sense of where they want to go.

In the meantime, I’m trying to write something useful. I wrote Druidry and Meditation because when it came to trying to run a meditation group, I couldn’t find anything to help me. The title now in edits came about for similar reasons. I was going through a thing, I had no book to help me on my way. I’m working on book 3, researching, pondering, experimenting a thing that does not have any significant pagan books about it, so far as I can find.

Which brings me to the final question. What ‘Druidry and….’ book do you really wish someone had written? Where are the biggest, most aching and frustrating holes in your bookcase just now? I’m not at all promising I can write them, but I’d like to know, and maybe someone else will look at the list and say ‘bloody hell, I know so much about that topic, I could do that’ and will then do it.

Shall we give it a go?

The day I discovered I am female after all

Apparently I’m not the poor excuse for a woman I thought I was. This comes as a surprise to me. I’ve been reading Caitlin Moran’s book on being a woman, and it’s made me realise that I am not a freak. I am not some kind of walking feminine-fail. I’ve talked about gender identity before. About how even though I bleed, have breasts, have given birth, I never felt like a proper girl. In the last 24 hours I’ve turned a corner, and I wanted to share something of that.

So here’s the reasons I felt like a failure. I hate high heels, I do not covet them, I cannot walk in them. In fact, in whatever shoe, I do no walk like a girl, I don’t sashay my hips. It goes further, none of my movements, or postures, are sufficiently feminine. I don’t much like makeup. I don’t paint my face. Mostly I just wash, brush and restrain my hair, I don’t devote hours to it. I do not enjoy clothes shopping.  I also don’t like the kinds of clothes that are bought and worn purely to be sexually appealing. I like sturdy, practical clothes. Being pretty has never really been on my agenda.

For years, I lived with a man who devoted a lot of time to pointing out where I didn’t cut it as a girl. He told me what clothes I should be wearing, what colours and shapes, because apparently I had no idea how to dress myself. He tried to teach me how I should move, walk and stand. He bought me heels. And lingerie. Clothes worn to be sexually appealing, to him.

But of course he was better at being a girl than me. He knew how to move, how to walk. He could walk happily in high heels. He paid a lot of attention to hair and makeup, and loved pretty dresses, and slutty dresses, and lingerie. He was the girl, I was merely the person who looked after the child and did the cleaning. I wasn’t a proper woman. And gradually, my confidence waned, my sense of self eroded and I stopped feeling like any kind of real person at all.

I’d like to pause here and say this is not about transgender. I know quite a few trans folk, one way and another, and the only other one I don’t get on with, the problem has nothing to do with femininity and everything to do with her having a very short temper. People are people, I’m not one to judge, and it doesn’t bother me how anyone else chooses to self identify. But that’s also the point here. How anyone else chooses to self identify. Because there is no self identity in the world, other than ‘total shithouse’, that requires the deliberate and consistent denigration of someone else.

I’m a girl. I would pass the medical. I’ve got all the right reproductive organs, I even managed to produce milk for a while. I bleed. Compared to whether I like handbags, this seems to be the more important qualifier. In all fairness, I struggled with gender identity in my teens, before the advent of the bloke, but that doesn’t let him off the hook in the slightest.

Editing for Giselle Renarde last week, I came across a beautiful line about a trans character who did not pin her gender identity to her body parts. Lovely. What a beautiful, self empowered way to be. So why was my gender identity pinned to whether I met someone else’s definition of what female ought to look like? That’s nuts. And what a representation of female that was – please haul out your worst vision of a drag queen caricature and add in ways of moving that suggest you’re a rather low cost sort of hooker and you’ve got the right image. I don’t want to be a drag queen, I’ve got breasts already.

We all have the freedom to imagine who we are. That does not have to be about what nature gave us. We all have the option to fantasise, and we all have the scope to try and shift our reality that bit closer to the dream. Be that a hair colour, or a false leg, or getting your tongue split, or a new tattoo… who we are is our own business. But as soon as we feel we have to knock someone else down to build that, we’ve gone somewhere entirely dishonourable. It’s as true in spiritual life as in gender identity. To be a Druid, I don’t need to rubbish half the other Druids out there. I don’t need to bitch about other people’s beliefs, or put them down. I reserve the right to comment on things, but that’s about being a questioning human being. I don’t need anyone else to be anything less in order for me to be myself. And next time anyone tries to build themselves up but flattening me, I am not going to co-operate.

For the first time in a long time I feel entitled to this skin I’m wearing, to the gender identity that goes with it, and that bit closer to feeling able to be me.