Nimue Brown's Blog, page 460

How useful is paganism?

Paganism is a blanket term covering a broad array of beliefs, from ancient practices down to modern traditions. It comes to us from a Roman word for the rural, unsophisticated folk who still worshipped nature, rather than the Emperors. Paganism therefore covers, sometimes, witchcraft, druidry, heathenry, shamanism, Hellenic groups, Romano religio, and a great many others. However, not all folk in any of these traditions see themselves as pagan nature worshippers. Some Druids are Christian, many magical practitioners are not ‘religious’ in the same way. There are also folk who have no specific tradition within paganism and for whom ‘pagan’ is a useful term of self identification, and there are folk who do not want to be labelled.

When it comes to talking to the rest of the world, to government and official bodies, to interfaith gatherings and the media, ‘pagan’ has been a useful term. You might be the only priestess of Vesta for miles. You might be the only Alexandrian witch in the village, the only Kemeticist in the state, but the odds are good you aren’t the only pagan. As a lone practitioner, officialdom will see no reason to bother with you, but will blithely give you a hard time. As one of a body of voters, consumers, readers… you may have a voice. The trouble is in practice we don’t do a great job of speaking for each other. Even in groups where people make a point of trying to learn about other paths for the express purpose of good representation in the wider world, it’s very hard to represent something you don’t personally believe in.

Paganism as a term can give us a sense of togetherness. Many moots are ‘pagan’ as opposed to path specific. I’ve been to a fair few over the years, and met many interesting people, but I’ve never found the term ‘pagan’ bound me very closely to any other pagan. Compared to the sense of connection and belonging I usually feel with other druids, it’s not in the running. But there was a time when I didn’t have a designated path and ‘pagan’ was the only word I could use to describe myself. Had it not been for those broader, more generic pagan groups and gatherings, I would not have met the people who helped me go on to self identify as a druid.

On getting more involved with the life of a tradition, it can be tempting to move away from the ‘general eclectic’ spaces. The New Age fringe, the dabblers, the wannabies, all seem at odds with the good thing now discovered. Except that we too were dabblers and wannabies not so very long ago. I think it’s vitally important to hold the doors open, and have places where people who want to learn and explore, can do so in a supportive environment. Not everyone knows automatically where they fit, and not everyone finds a tradition they readily belong to. This is how new traditions and groups come into being, and is a necessary part of the process.

While it is possible to learn alone, from books, the internet, experimentation, trees and a whole host of other sources, it can be lonely. It can feel a bit mad at times. It can get a bit mad. People are meant to be social creatures, and that’s a part of our spiritual lives too. So while I have doubts at how useful ‘pagan’ is as a word for describing us in our many paths, I’m convinced it has a function as a doorway. It’s an easy thing to find and a place to jump off from. But sometimes it makes for peculiar bedfellows, and throws people together who have very little in common with each other. Being all lumped together like one homogenous gloop probably isn’t in our interests much of the time, but it does have its uses.

Pondering modern Druidry

Yesterday I talked about religion in context, and the way in which many religions have belonged to specific peoples and places. The idea that a religion should be universal, is a very Christian-centric one. So where does that leave modern Druidry? We don’t have much direct connection with the past – some of us more than others, through location, ancestry, deliberate research. Some of us embrace the idea of modern Druidry without wanting to be too bogged down in the details of trying to be authentically Celtic. Modern Druids are all over the world, on every continent. Some have ties of blood if not of earth, many do not.

However, there are some very important ways in which Druidry differs from other religions. There were many Celtic deities who have left one occurrence of their name, one shrine, one carved stone. It may well be that the vast majority of deities belonged to a specific tribe, and a specific place. There’s no reason to think that the Celts as they and their culture spread, took one coherent pantheon with them everywhere. Spirits of place are of course by definition, local. This tree, that cave, the big waterfall, each one is unique, and we recognise their spirit, or what resides there, as a distinct entity. It doesn’t matter where you find yourself in the world, these ideas still make sense. The local aspect of Druidry works anywhere, because ‘here’ is local to us, wherever we are.

Trees are important to Druids, and probably always have been. The trees that grow in this soil, are the ones I am engaging with. Whichever soil I am upon. It is the native trees of the land I am in that will be the ones that matter. Now, even within the UK, tree distributions are not universal. The south east was originally a mix of small leaved lime and oaks, but the small leaved lime are not useful for much that humans do, and have not been encouraged. Where I come from, beech is the predominant wood. In wet areas, alder and willow predominate, and on high ground you get the pines. Some of the distribution of trees has to do with the long history of human use. Some of it has to do with the landscape. Trees are not an abstract concept, and in terms of how we practice, this is very important.

There can be a tendency in modern paganism to be over-fond of the 8 festivals, but for them to make any sense, they too must be adapted to where you live. Pagans in the southern hemisphere swap the festivals over to fit what they’ve got. No point celebrating spring in late summer. For any aspect of Druidry to make sense it has to be related to nature as you experience it. Living close to the Severn river, it would make sense to honour the tides. A person on the coast might have a daily practice that reflected the ebb and flow of the waves. A person ten miles inland might well have no reason to doing that, just going down to the shore occasionally and working with what they find. No point talking about John Barleycorn if your part of the world is mountainous and grows sheep, but Imbolc will likely be a lot more resonant.

Then in ritual, sometimes the landscape affects the shape of what we do. If you’re facing a mountain and have a river at your back, then earth is in front of you and water is behind you, and sticking to the usual ‘quarters’ would be weird. We have to respond to what we find. It may make more sense in such a context to scrap the quarters entirely, hailing spirits of mountain and lake, rather than earth and water generically.

Wherever we are in the world, our Druidry has to reflect nature as we experience it. Therefore I would argue that even if you are in Australia and drawing heavily on the Celts what you do will still be essentially local. This land. These plants. Those creatures. A druidry that isn’t, to some degree, local, doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Some people complain about the degree of looseness in modern Druidry – that it isn’t pinned down or firmly enough defined. That’s only, arguably, true, when considering the international picture. The Druidry of Here and Now tends to be a lot more specific. The looseness of the overall tradition gives us room to respond to Here and Now rather than clinging dogmatically to fixed ways of doing.

In space, Druids would still be able to adapt to their circumstances and make it work. Because we don’t have to pray to the East, for example. It would be interesting to consider how the less planet-orientated religions would actually work, if you tried to take them off the planet.

Religion in context

The converting tendencies of Christianity and Islam have given a perspective of the place of religion at odds with many perspectives. Most religions are not universal, nor meant to be. Judaism is the religion of a people, and I have recently discovered that Shinto is Japanese to a degree that would make a nonsense of outsiders trying to practice it. Romans venerated their Emperors. Faiths do not exist in a vacuum. They exist in a social context, as part of a culture. They may be interacting with other cultures – the relationships between Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and Shinto are, from a superficial look, clearly very complicated. The relationship between politics and religion is equally long and messy. Just think of the divinely sanctioned rulers, and the rulers who became gods.

There is a vast difference between mediaeval Christianity, and any of the modern interpretations. And I would bet at least as much difference again to the people who started it. How much of Christianity belongs in the landscape of its origin? What happens when we take a religion out of its place of origin and give it to people from a different culture? Can it hope to be the same religion? If I took up Buddhism, or Taoism, could I really follow those paths with the same depth as someone whose whole culture was steeped in them?

Then there’s issues of language. Words in translation are always imperfect, there are seldom tidy matches that carry all the same subtext and nuance. Often, there are words that just don’t exist, ideas that one language cannot embody. I see this in Buddhist writing, where words like ‘ego’ and ‘empty’ are employed to mean things that we do not usually use them to express. I have a feeling that if I read these ideas in their original language, and met those words in their true form, I could have a chance at understanding something that currently is beyond me.

I’m very conscious of not living in a Celtic culture. My blood ancestry has some Celtic in it, and, having grown up with folklore and mythology, I got steeped a bit, I feel this culture as my own heritage, which may help me. But I’m aware that I can only ever be a Druid of my time. This is one of the reasons that I think deep relationship with the land, the trees, the spirits of place, is so vital. Religions do pass through cultures and different ways of seeing the world. Something survives, but something also changes. Interesting to ask what is vital and intrinsic, and what we can afford to let go of. It’s easiest to keep the surface things like costumes and settings, hardest to keep the understandings that belong to another time, another people. But should we? How important is continuity? Should we be more concerned with who we are and what we do now? I see a risk that we will imagine continuity far more easily than we will truly find it.

The world I live in is not the world of my grandmother. My son will inherit a place that could be as different again. The language evolves continually, along with understandings of the world. Belief cannot be a constant in a changing world, belief too must inevitably be changed by everything else that we do and know. Perhaps that means that the greatest scope for Druidic thinking lies in the future, not in the past. Who knows?

Playing with fire

It occurred to me years ago that the skills which make a healer, also make a torturer. The uncanny knack of knowing where hurts most, can be deployed in all sorts of ways. I talked a bit last week about dark reflections, that which takes us into the worst of who we are. It’s been something I’ve wrestled with for years, in various ways. I have a dark imagination. There are things in here that enable me to write psychotic, evil characters, insane characters, and variations on a theme of human awfulness. Some of it comes from observation, but the capacity to make sense of that calls for empathy. Oh, in many ways, empathy is one of those lovely, fluffy things, but there are some things which, if you can empathise with them… you wonder about yourself.

I have a fair idea of what my most unacceptable traits are. I’m obsessive, I see the worst in things and the potential for disaster. I’m really good at frightening myself. I have a low boredom threshold, and a low tolerance for triviality and banality – that may not sound awful, but it means I struggle in ‘normal’ social situations and prefer to avoid them. Quite a lot of the time, I find people difficult. I’ve commented before that I only feel that I manage in some situations by faking it.

Humans cock things up. As far as I can make out, it’s one of the most reliable measures of ‘human’ we have. I think the single most insane thing I have ever done to myself, was to buy into the idea that I should not get anything wrong. There were environmental pressures – aren’t there always? We don’t have a culture that tolerates human error. Admit to a mistake and you could be in court, sued, in prison… so we all try our best to pretend to be perfect, shift the blame onto other shoulders, or fold ourselves into some kind of human origami that mostly hurts and still isn’t perfect.

Nature isn’t perfect. Much of evolution is a wee bit insane when you pause to look at it. Let’s stop and wave to the duck billed platypus, the sea dwelling creatures who have to get on land to reproduce, the land dwelling creatures who have to get into water for the same business. One of the easiest things to learn from nature is that mistakes are natural. Not all of them are fatal. Some are funny, plenty don’t last. Without mistakes there could be no innovation, no change. Permission to make mistakes is also permission to learn, grow and experiment. If you have to get everything right, you can only keep doing what you’re sure works. That which does not work can be really informative, and can enable new things to be figured out. Why be ashamed of that? And yet, we so readily are. The idea that we are, or should be, perfect, is damming, in every sense.

To be afraid of a mistake is to be afraid to live. It’s true in relationships too. It has to be ok to be less than perfect, to misunderstand, get it wrong. Then it’s ok to say ‘that didn’t work for me.’ If you have to uphold the illusion that your partner is perfect, it becomes impossible to say ‘ouch’ when something hurts. When you start pretending you aren’t bleeding, don’t mention that you’re fighting for breath… the illusion of perfection may be maintained but the reality of it is ever further away.

When we are free to be imperfect, we can be kinder with each other’s short comings. In admitting the cock-up, we have more room to fix it. In not demanding superhuman, impossible perfection, we give people the space to be more, and better, than they currently are.

I used to get told off regularly for giving the impression I thought I was better than everyone else – this because I demand more of myself than I would of other people. That’s a crazy place to go as well, when we equate striving and standards with superiority. I am not allowed to be better than you in case you feel that as a personal slight… which also means you are not allowed to be better than me, and the cult of mediocrity reigns supreme. I’d rather not live that way. To be imperfect, and striving, to be a mix of light and dark, strength and weakness, power and vulnerability is more natural, more real. What is fragile in me may enable you the space to be strong. What is wrong in me may inspire you to be right. What I cock up, may make some other person realise what the best solution would be. Life is not binary, not either/or, not win or fail. Achievement grows out of setback, compassion out of anguish. The very best that we are capable of may depend entirely on the very worst parts of our natures. If I know where to stick the pins in, I can use that to torment, or I can take up acupuncture. We are like fire in this regard, burn the house down, or cook a meal. There is no human material that cannot be used to make something beautiful, and nothing beautiful that cannot be subverted in the most unpleasant ways. There is nothing truly perfect, and no imperfection that cannot lead to greater things. It all depends on what we do with it.

The Queen and I

I’ve not been hanging out with the Queen over the last few days. I’m not in with her crowd, I confess, nor did I hang out with her in a voyeuristic way via the TV. I went to a couple of squib events that were ostensibly in honour of her jubilee, but it was a bit of tokenism on my part really. I find it hard to work up much enthusiasm. Yes, I too have that kind of phoney nostalgia for a Britain that never was where we all had charming street parties, afternoon tea, cricket and world power (skimming quickly over the issues of colonialism, as we always do). I can’t quite buy it and I can’t quite feel it. I’m enough of a romantic to like going round believing (self consciously)in lovely things that never were, but Great Britain is beyond me.

I was a republican in my youth, and then the Americans elected George W. Bush. It occurred to me that the rest of the world does not hold you quite so responsible for the actions of a hereditary monarch. It’s not like you picked them or anything. Elections are no guarantee of quality, or that (to quote Andy Hamilton) you won’t end up ruled by an idiot called George who only got the job because he was the son of the previous idiot called George. The queen is harmless enough, does a good job of the hand waving, is a tourist attraction, and has almost no practical power. I can work with that.

Now, as I understand it, the Druids of old were very much wired into the Celtic political structure – advisors to Kings and all that. While I’m interested in politics, I’m also conscious that about the last thing I want to be is obliged to participate in running things. I’d rather be on the side lines, heckling when appropriate. It’s another one of those things which points at the great divide between historical Druidry and modern practice. If we had that kind of clout these days, I wouldn’t want to be a druid. I don’t like the mixing of religion and politics. It’s one thing being guided by ethical principles, quite another to run a country on the basis of what you imagine God wants. I’m increasingly inclined to think that if you couldn’t get it past an atheist, it probably isn’t a great policy. I also think that religions do not benefit from having that kind of power. It makes religion attractive to the kind of people who want power, who are not usually also the kind of people who care much for spiritual concerns. I like a bit of unworldliness in my religion. I like it to give me an option of stepping away from the madding crowd now and then.

I wouldn’t want the queen’s job. I don’t fancy the scrutiny, or the lack of job options. I wouldn’t want politics to enter into who I married. I could go on. I worked out when I was a child that I didn’t want to be a princess. But, she does a good job, I have no complaints, I’m very glad for her that she’s managed to live this long, I wish her well. So, shall we throw away all the plastic bunting that was made in China now? Throw way the uneaten party food, fold up our commemorative towels, and get back to normal? Do we all feel more British, more connected to each other, more hopeful? I’d bet we don’t. So much energy, to achieve, what, exactly? And so much that needs achieving. What if we’d spent all that money on honouring the queen by taking on child poverty? Or tackling some other shameful social issue? But, where would be the fun in that?

Chocolate Chips & Rocket Ships

Perhaps not the most obvious title for a druid blog, but bear with me. The reason is good. It’s all about things bardic, about who controls creativity, and a kickass thing I would like to try and tempt you with.

There are few things more difficult to get paid for, than poetry. Very few royalty paying publishers will even contemplate it. How many living, famous poets can you think of? Not many, at a guess. Most poetry is written by amateur enthusiasts, with varying degrees of quality, and far lower degrees of financial success. But when anyone says ‘bard’ I still think of poetry. Traditionally, it was all about the poetry, even if we do wander further afield now.

It’s one of those hard to assail publishing truths that poetry does not pay. It’s not that people don’t like poetry, but somehow they don’t buy it. Of course the scarcer new published poetry becomes, the less chance of finding a thing you like. Lack of supply contributes to lack of demand. And as we all know, out there in the real world, most of what happens depends not just upon the money, but on what the bean counters imagine the money is going to be.

Back in the ‘good old days’ before the internet, before we all learned that vanity publishing is bad and wrong, people used to self publish their own poetry, and sell it. There was no great taboo against self publishing, that’s relatively modern. It was also entirely normal to finance a book by getting together subscriptions to pay for the printing. One well heeled aristocratic patron might do it, but otherwise, a person with a lot of enthusiastic friends could raise the money, publish a book and get underway in a literary career. Somewhere along the way, we stopped doing this, as ever bigger and more conservative publishing houses took control of the market. Poetry publishing all but dried up. Great works of literature no longer top the best seller’s lists. Many of those big, powerful houses are not doing as well as they used to either. The ones that haven’t closed down entirely.

The internet has brought us full circle, making self publishing easy and normal again, although plenty of people will tell you it’s not the same as having a ‘proper’ publisher. But, you can hire an editor, a cover artist and a formatter, and you can make a good book without a publisher. I want to add that I am not inherently averse to publishing. I work with three different houses – O Books, loveyoudivine and Archaia – all small, nimble, creative houses, risk taking and interesting. There are things a publisher can do that a lone author cannot, but that’s another story.

The other thing that has returned to us is subscription, through crowd sourcing sites. Not just for books, but for all manner of creative, imaginative endeavours. Things the bean counters would never dare to imagine might work. If enough people believe in a project, it can happen. Power is no longer exclusively in the hands of big, cautious corporations more concerned about shareholders than real achievement.

Which brings me round to Chocolate Chips & Rocket Ships. It is that most impossible of things – a poetry collection. It’s aimed at children, but I think adults will enjoy the charm. Each poem is illustrated, and there are some amazing and well known illustrators who have been captivated by the plan and are contributing. It’s on kickstarter. Which publisher would step up to a plan like this one? And if they did, it would be years in the making. With support and a fair wind, you’ll have this one in good time for the Christmas stocking, or whatever your nearest seasonal equivalent may be.

I would like to live in a world that values poetry and is willing to pay poets enough to live on. I want to live in a world where things that are generally loved and valued, that inspire people, get to happen. As Tom is one of the artists doing Chocolate Chips, I have a personal interest, but I’d be saying much the same if he wasn’t. If you have the shiny spin off from the TV series and movie with attendant plastic toy, sure, someone will publish you, no matter how trite the content. I’ve had some exposure recently to the rubbish aimed at kids. I’m heartily sick of Oomy Noomy and Waawaa Laa Laa type creations, and all the other gaga figures who spout gibberish and sing happy tunes that have no tune to them at all. Kids are people too. Kids have brains, and imaginations, and need their creativity nourishing with good stuff. They are frequently not getting good stuff, they are getting a diet of anaemic pap. There are great things out there though, and they need cheering, supporting.

So, please take a moment to look at John O’Marra’s lovely project here http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/427948257/chocolate-chips-and-rocket-ships?ref=email , and on www.ChocolateChipsAndRocketShips.com

Come the revolution, I will write you a sonnet.

Living with history

We’ve been wandering around in a cathedral today – something I always like doing. Along the way I read up on glass restoration and the issues it raises. Often, to repair a thing is to change it, especially if you add or replace material. A thing that is repaired enough times may cease to be the original. (Something Pratchett frequently plays with in his fiction). So to what extent should we intervene, to preserve, replace, keep viable, to what extent should historical things be left to crumble? It’s an interesting issue for any pagan to consider because of ancient, historical sites. But I’m going to keep talking about glass.

I’ve been looking today at a big stained glass window in which a number of restoration theories have been tried. It’s a window full of figures. Some have lost their faces due to time. On a couple of people, these have been replaced with plain glass, making the missing bit obvious. The effect, from a distance, is weird. ‘Blobby head’ does not begin to do justice. Then we have the sketched-in faces to give an impression – these stand out as being separate from the original and also jar with it. For added comedy value, a restoration old enough that no one wants to mess with it, has put a beardy face over a woman’s body! Finally there’s a new face replacement that looks like a vibrant piece of stained glass, in keeping with the window as a whole. At a glance you wouldn’t spot that it’s a modern addition. However, the woman represented has been given a fringe / bangs and a jaw line, so that anyone looking closely can tell it isn’t part of the original window from the 1300s.

I’m very much in favour of preserving that which is beautiful or meaningful. I think it’s important to consider the sense of the whole though, alongside authenticity. I saw a wooden knight figure which had been damaged and reassembled, there was a bit of wood missing, but the absence didn’t undermine the sense of the whole. Not like the blank glass blobby faces in the window. “Authentic” may be an issue, but so is “usable” and I am entirely opposed to turning things into museum pieces when they could be kept as living, functional spaces, or items. The idea of museums is relatively recent, most of our ancestors either kept using, or discarded. With finite space, time, resources and money I think it’s fair to question why we keep anything. Not to say that we shouldn’t keep history, but that we ought to consider why we want to hold it ‘in tact’ why we are so alarmed by intrusions from our own time, why we want to pickle history and put it behind glass and only look at it.

The Victorians had an enthusiasm for ‘restoring’ that meant something a lot like ‘making over’ fitting the actual past into their ideas about what they wanted the past to have been. That’s always a risk, but now those Victorians are also part of history. What they did to historical things is part of the world we inherit. Is Victorian history less valuable than 1300s history for being that bit closer? Is it only the scarcity of material from a period that makes it valuable? What we value and preserve, and why, is an important question. How many hovels have you seen preserved as national history? Isn’t it odd how historic worth and money tend to go together?

What do we want the past for? Do we need it to be somehow pristine, untouched by intervening years? That’s so unnatural. I’d rather have a breathing, living thing that is part of now, as well as part of the past. I love modern windows in ancient buildings – if you have to replace something, why make a replica when you can make new? And I love the modern, female figure with her jaw and fringe, who fits, but is not pretending to be of the time. Would I want someone to put Stonehenge back to its original form? Absolutely not. It is how it has become, and there’s no certainty we’d get a reconstruction right. I wouldn’t mind if the road could be taken away from it though. It’s funny, we go mad trying to preserve a specific thing, so often forgetting that it belonged to a context, which mattered. We preserve specific ancient sites, but not the landscapes in which they sit. In focusing on one tree, we forget the forest.

History is good, but making a thing work is more important. A stained glass window full of blank panes and blobby heads may avoid introducing modern matter, but it’s not impact free. It changes the context of all the remaining glass. I’d rather a well considered reworking that respects the integrity of the whole, rather than clinging to the past above all else. I’d rather something that works, and can be touched, than a broken relic doomed to remain forever in a display case.

Irony and Druids

I read a lovely piece in the Guardian this week – http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/30/enough-irony-art-eurovision?INTCMP=SRCH  talking about the horrors of modern irony. As a culture, we embrace the idea of things that are ‘so bad they’re good’. Starting from hideous incompetence, painful mediocrity and other such shortcomings, we can make a TV program by mocking the afflicted and having a laugh at their expense. What it gets us is a hollow sort of thing, joyless, destructive, and facilitating the use of worthless rubbish as ‘entertainment’. The writer concluded by saying that the most subversive thing a person can do in this climate, is really care about something.

To my mind, the old fashioned, Druidic image of satire and irony is a good one. It should be there to bring down the pompous, not to bolster them up. Irony should be used on politicians, journalists, anyone whose trade involves too much power and not enough value. Irony and the laughter it draws are the weapons of the powerless against tyrants and fools. This is important work. But when the reality is that we are spoon-fed rubbish and told to feel smugly superior in face on it, that’s not proper irony. It’s just allowing people to sell us facile nonsense. And of course the person who does not get the joke, the person who goes ‘that is a crock of shit’ can be knocked down for not being cool enough. The Emperor has no clothes on.

I am not cool. I am not even slightly interested in being cool, or having people think me cool. I want funny things to laugh at, and soulful things to be moved by. I want to care, not only about my real(ish) life, but also about the unreal things that are offered to me for my amusement. I’ve been accused of being a snob plenty of times mind – for not liking computer games, or predictable genre fiction, for not being tolerant enough of other people’s innocent pleasures. Part of the problem is, I don’t see the innocence. Hours spent killing imaginary people in computer games does not seem innocent to me. It seems like a way of desensitising a person to violence. I am never going to be persuaded that violence is fun. Nor do I think that the five minute celebrity cult of reality TV is innocent. The less said about manufactured pop-disasters massacring old songs in the pop charts, the better. This whole approach to entertainment stifles creativity. You can’t feed off the old stuff forever, but X-factor and its conies make it harder for real artists and creators to get a look in. How do you compete with someone who gets that much screen time?

So you won’t catch me celebrating much as being ‘so bad, it’s good’. It’s such an easy way of justifying rubbish. It’s lazy. I’m much more interested in the idea of things that are inherently good. So many people don’t seem to believe in that ideal any more. I’d like something so good, it’s great. Something so good in makes me laugh until I worry about wetting myself, or cry until snot comes out of my nose. I want something so good that the awe of it literally knocks the breath out of my body.

When I saw the painting ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ for the first time, in Bristol, I was reduced to tears. I don’t want to be cool, I want to be overwhelmed with emotion, inspired to new heights of passion and sensitivity. I care, and I care about a lot of things. Crap irritates me. Dull, predictable, low quality things irritate me. Give me something unpolished and heartfelt any day. I’ll listen to a middle aged man singing the folk song he loves any day in preference to some bling laden girl prancing on the TV mangling  some variation on a theme of ‘ooh, ahh, baby, yeah’. It doesn’t have to be shiny, to be good. It needs to be cared about. Enough of the unsatisfying surfaces, I want something real.

That’s why you’ll find me hanging about with pagans and steampunks, with artists, bards, musicians, people who dare to care about what they do. The good stuff is out there, it just takes a bit of finding.

The challenges of peace

I’ve never been interested in the kind of peace that comes from burying your head in the sand, or from accepting oppression. These things can look like peace, might even feel like it, but they aren’t true to my Druidic ideals and I try not to go there. That said, there are so many things I cannot fix and have to let go of, because if I took their absence of peace into me, I would go crazy.

It’s one of those curious ironies that the quest for meaningful peace can call for some serious bouts of equilibrium shattering. Steeping way outside my comfort zone seems to be a regular feature. I’ve had a dose of that already today, in the ongoing saga of trying to deal with things between my son and his father. This is not new. I’ve been trying to speak for my son all his life, to explain what he thinks and wants, to support him in getting where he needs to be. For me, this is intrinsic to parenting. How it works, varies, and depends a lot on how people see me. For some I am, or have been, the pushy, demanding mother, over reacting, over emotional, putting my own feelings onto my child and demanding attention through him. I mentioned dark reflections yesterday, and those words have been painfully hard to hear over the years. I’ve heard them from the child’s father, and the child’s father’s girlfriends, from teachers and other professionals. Arguably people who all had something to gain from disbelieving me. But I’ve also found plenty of teachers and other professionals  who recognise my lad, understand how he feels, embrace and celebrate what makes him different, and do everything they can to enable him to flourish. It may not be a coincidence that I’ve never had any negative feedback about me, there.

The teacher who blamed me for my child’s distress belonged to a school that went on to send one boy to a special needs school for his behavioural issues, and did not recognise that the other child in the scenario had autism. He’s since got the much needed diagnosis. Maybe if they’d listened to my concerns rather than telling me I’m hysterical, three families would have had the support they needed, rather than leaving them to struggle unrecognised. Peace comes at a price, and often the price is a willingness to sacrifice peace. I’ve gone off at a tangent a bit here.

It’s very hard remaining peaceful, or working for peaceful outcomes when you are hearing things you do not want to hear. It’s easier to reject the message bearer, devalue or demonise them so that they can be safely ignored. It is not easy to take a good hard look at yourself, question your own motives and assumptions, and consider that you may be the one who got it wrong. Of course, in a scenario where one person will do just that, and the other cannot hear they are less than perfect, there tends to be a resultant culture of blame that has nothing to do with who is right, and everything to do with who is self critical and able to bend. In conflict situations, rare are the times when any of us couldn’t have done a better job, one way or another. Sometimes the better job would have been to leave sooner. There is a kind of peace that can be held by believing that you are never wrong and never need to change, but it’s a fragile, unhealthy peace that takes you further and further from consensus reality.

I wrote some words today. They are not new words. They are variations on words that I’ve been saying for all of my child’s life. This is what he needs, how he feels, what he wants. If those words were listened to, it would serve to help the person I like least in the world. But it would also help the child, and that matters more. The quest to bring peace into his life, brings serious disquiet and challenge into mine. But one day, he will reach the point of being old enough and wise enough not to need me to do this for him, and hopefully by then he’ll have enough of an example about what true peace looks like, what is worth fighting for, what should be forgiven and what is just human, that he can go out there and do a good job of things. Got to be worth a go, that.

Wibbling

This won’t be much of a post, I suspect, because the last few days have had a good go at taking me apart. Solicitors, epic and terrifying bills, people with far too much power over my life. But today I talked to someone official who sounded like a human being, which is unusual in the system, and who maybe actually listened and heard.

Oddly enough, that kind of thing makes me cry. But the grief came this morning, before the stress. Grief, bubbling up from who knows where? From my history, from some unbled psychic pustule…. As I’ve commented before, the sheer physicality of the process is strange. Emotion moves through my body in the most direct, shattering ways, and leaves me exhausted. I can afford to be exhausted today, the second draft of the novel I’m working on is typed, this week’s edits are done, publishers have been talked to, research undertaken, collaborators emailed. I have periods of intense thinking and activity, and periods of having to stop, and this is moving towards stop. So if I don’t get a blog up on Saturday, it will be because I’ve opted to take some time off.

Oddly, as I write this, I find myself thinking of Jayne. Those of you who have been reading for a while may remember her frequent and highly negative comments on my posts. I had a fair idea for some time as to who she really was and when I intimated that I could out her, she went quiet. I don’t know if she still comes by to read – she might, because there are some very odd links binding my life to hers, whether I like it or not. What I do has the power to impact on her dramatically. But then, that’s true of so many of our relationships and we seldom know how such things will fall out.

Jayne captured the voice of my fears, and expressed well all the kinds of things I tend to beat myself up with, all the flaws and failings, all the shortcomings, all the ways in which I could be wrong. I hear that voice in my head even when there’s no one saying it to me in person. I’ve come to appreciate how much I enjoy not hearing it though. I suppose many of us have those little voices, feeding our insecurities, reminding us of our mistakes. On the whole they belong on the inside of the head. They may help to keep us honest. It’s better not to be hearing them from the outside, in terms of what that’s like to live with. I wonder what life would be like without them.

Sometimes I still wonder what Jayne would say, and what she thinks. Usually when I’m writing my bog posts. My troubled shadow, unable to admit who she really is, or where she fits in the story. I ended up writing a lot of blogs for her, trying to explain ideas that she couldn’t grasp and perspectives she couldn’t handle, before I worked out who she was. I rather hope she’s moved on, able to get on with her life and to find some direction and meaning that doesn’t refer to me. But it’s funny, sometimes the people who hurt us and try to bully us only manage to provoke us into doing better. But then, she would probably say that I was the bully, and she the one provoked into growing. It is always odd, facing a dark reflection of yourself in this way. Who am I, between these perceptions? I know more than I used to. That may be partly why Jayne went away. The hungry ghosts depend on us believing in them.

I may manage to write something more coherent tomorrow. In the meantime, I wish you all well with whatever life throws, peace at your hearth, peace in your hearts, the insight to help you find ways through your day, the inspiration to make better, the open heart that knows how to feel joy. There are too many hungry ghosts in the world already.