Nimue Brown's Blog, page 462

Druidic arts: Compassion

Memes like ‘survival of the fittest’ ‘do unto others before they do unto you’ and the whole outlook of the economic rat race discourage compassion. It’s not a good idea to care too much about whose fingers you stand on as you climb, whose dreams you trample, whose future you destroy. Caring is all about slowing down, because if you don’t hang around to hear it, you’ll never know what others think or feel.

Bothering about others, human and creature, plants and places, is precisely an art of engagement with the world. Even the art of being a little gentler with ourselves encourages us to look outwards. When we recognise our own fragility and shortcomings, give ourselves a break for being human and flawed, and stop trying to imagine we are, or should be perfect, it becomes possible to treat everything else that bit more gently too.

So much of how we treat people and the rest of the planet has to do with expectation. What we think we ought to get, how we think we ought to be treated, what we think things are worth, and the sense of priority we carry with us. And so getting the job out of the door starts to seem more important than who has a heart attack making it happen. Forget wrecking a landscape, we’re going to create jobs, that’s the priority! We’re going to generate wealth, so it’s silly to say we shouldn’t dismantle a community to make that happen. A non-compassionate culture puts wealth, assets, job creation and ‘progress’ before the wellbeing of the individual.

What on earth is the point of ‘progress’ that pillages as it goes? We mistake benefits for the tiny minority for a good thing. Compassionate thinking doesn’t consider a bank balance, or GDP. It looks at living, feeling, breathing entities in their own right and values them for existing. It sees webs of connections, communities and landscape and knows that they have a wealth in them far beyond money. A compassionate perspective is one which, pretty much by definition, does not seek to exploit. It’s all about what is sustainable.

We learn to care by being a little bit more open to all that is around us. Taking the time to listen, to empathise, trying to imagine how it looks from the other side, what it could mean. We don’t just assume that our own desires should be paramount, we put them in context. Recognising the humanity of other humans, the spirit and the sacredness of all that is not human and around us, we can start to treat all of it like family.

It is impossible to live without consuming. The more we love our food sources, the more challenging that becomes. The person who squashes their capacity for compassion can act far more easily, feeling no pain over waste, ruin and wanton destruction. Our society endorses this very approach. That doesn’t make it right. Caring exposes us to pain. Compassion will lead us towards a desire for action. Compassionate action. Work in the world that makes things better, that lightens the burden for others, minimises suffering, avoids using, does not defile or exploit.

There are so many things to care about that it can be threatening indeed to open the self to what is really out there. I am tempted to compare compassion, as an art, to striptease. Imagine that you start out swathed in layers of clothes. So many layers that you can barely move your limbs. No outside bodily sensations get through to you. Taking off a layer of clothing will be technically challenging, and you’ll hardly notice the difference. Why bother? Take off another layer, and another. There will be an audience, and they will wonder what you’re doing, and they may stare. Take off another layer, it may be by now that you have some freedom of movement, and are noticing how everyone else still has far too much insulation wrapped around their bodies. You may be down far enough now that you can dance where others cannot. For a while it may seem easy, but you’re now wearing far less than anyone else. Bits of your skin are visible. If you keep going, all of your skin will be on display, there will be no where left to hide. Everyone will be looking at you then. There will be no protection between you and the world. Nothing to keep off the cold wind or the rain. Nothing to keep you warm. If what you find is agony, you no longer have a comfort blanket.

There are days when it’s not just about feeling naked, I don’t even seem to have skin on either. The news makes me cry. I didn’t consciously choose to walk this path, it happened as a consequence of life experience, and it hurts. I can’t and won’t step away from it though, because it is real. Painfully, precisely real. It makes me cry a lot.

But I also know that if more people dared to strip off even a few layers, then so much would change. What’s making the world such a dangerous place so much of the time, is our devastating desire to keep ourselves safe.

Druidic Arts: Sensing Truly

I started this one with the idea of listening properly. Hearing what is said, not what we think others are saying. Listening for the voices that speak softly, or do not speak in words. I realised after a while that this is because I’m more confident about the listening bits, than other versions. I work hard at listening, in part because it doesn’t always come easily to me. You may not be shocked and startled to read that I have a lot of opinions. As a younger person, I probably talked more than I would be comfortable with now, as I have learned to slow down and be open to others. I’ve learned to listen for what people don’t say, as well, and for the pauses where a bit of encouragement is needed. It’s a work in progress. Listening well means having the right body language, the right tone, the right level of eye contact, all kinds of details that can be practiced with an eye to making them as graceful as dance moves.

Seeing what is really there is also an art. Human perception defaults to seeing what it thinks is there, or what we’re looking for. We miss the unexpected, we tune out that which makes no sense, and we ignore what we thought was familiar. So many people go through so many spaces without seeing it at all. I have to admit, I’m not the world’s most visual person, I have a poor visual memory, I don’t think visually at all. Working with a visual experience of the world means that, in an artistic sense, I’m not far removed from the toddler who grips a crayon in a clenched fist and scrawls enthusiastically. I assume it works the same way as hearing, becoming more aware, more alert, more sensitive.

There is a whole language of scent, which we take in unconsciously but which tells us so much about the world. This is tasty, that is poison. This person is sexy, that person is rank… but compared to most creatures we have pitiful noses. Drawing a deep breath is the beginning of all meditation work, slowing down, breathing, being present. Each breath we draw will taste of something. Being aware of it opens us to new experiences. There are professional nose artists out there, working with perfume and food, sniffing at wine glasses and contemplating how the nasal experience will be for others. Smelling the good stuff, the coffee, the roses, the outside, adds richness to life and deepens awareness of the world.

Then there is our skin. Modern dress norms encourage us to cover up, but barefoot in any space we experience the environment totally differently. Wind in hair, sun on face. Soft grass against bare arms. Cold water running over toes. Human contact. There are so many opportunities for bodily sensation, but we tend to ignore them, and avoid them. The sharp claws of the cat in my leg, the sudden cramp after cycling, the headache… these too are telling me something, and I will experience more for working with them.

Working with the senses as art opens the way to other kinds of art. Firstly, the more we pay attention and perceive, the more we can appreciate the accidental art and natural beauty of the world. Birdsong, rustling leaves, flowing water, human noises become our soundtrack. The scent of flowers, or wet dog become present, rich, part of life. The feel of clothes on skin, the sense of what is physically good and pleasurable communicates to us the values and wonders of things beyond our own bodies. This knowledge and insight also gifts us with skills we can then use to create. Knowing what makes a good sound is essential if you want to write a tune. Understanding what is beautiful in a scene will make you a better visual artist. Alert to the sensual pleasures of food we can create wonders in the kitchen.

Even if we don’t take sensual experience forward to inform creativity, it can still be practiced as an art for its own sake. This is the craft work of appreciation and gratitude. It is the weaving of delight, enabling us to paint colour into our life experience and layer depths into the ways we live. It is an art of finding small moments of happiness and worth, an art of seeing beyond what is ordinary and familiar to spot the droplet of inspiration within it, the sunlight seeping through it, the soul shining from it. It is recognition of what is well done, and of course by contrast will show us what is impoverished or destructive. It may be that the art of sensing truly will show us where there is an absence of beauty, and nothing capable of feeding our souls. Then we have to decide whether to stay, and make something better, or leave and find something better.

Druidic Arts: Deep Contemplation

It is easy to go through life assuming we know what we’ve got, and wearing blinkers and earplugs as an accidental consequence. Thinking is an art form. Challenging all that might be taken for granted is a skill to be practiced.

No one can thinkingly dismantle their world view in one go, without going mad. The method that makes art of this begins in a small way, and with a question. Why am I doing this? is a good one. What do I want? What does that really mean? Why is that happening? What good does this serve? There is an infinity of questioning to bring to the world. Pick one, manageable thing, and question it. I recommend ‘what do I want?’ for its power and simplicity and the way it can slice through the clutter of your life and mind.

What do I want? And then, why do I want it and what does it mean? It is like peeling an onion, as each layer removed reveals another layer beneath. There will always be more layers, because everything we learn creates new questions.

The next tool to master for the artist of contemplation, is dissatisfaction. Most specifically, a dissatisfaction with trite, empty answers that roll neatly off the tongue. Because I have been told to. Because it is my job. Because it is expected of me. Because no one else bothers. Just as the sculptor may chip away at rock, the artist of contemplation chips away at assumption. Somewhere beneath the surface, the beautiful shape of truth or insight is waiting to be revealed.

Anything can be questioned and considered. There is no topic beyond our scope, no sacred, untouchable cow, no issue of what is polite, or fair, normal or reasonable. The artist does not care if it is not the done thing to ask. The artist enquires, and seeks a useful answer.

By degrees the art becomes habit. It is not the work undertaken somewhere in a private studio. We carry it with us, as we might carry a sketchbook or camera, capturing details and thinking about them. Looking for motives and patterns underlying what we see. Finding evidence of harmony, and seeing places where harmony might be created or truth might be chipped out of the bland stone of normality.

We become aware of our own motives, knowing why we act before we do it, not needing to figure it out afterwards amidst the broken pieces and recriminations. We know how we feel, and why we feel that way, and the dance that is life becomes a good deal simpler for hearing the guiding drum beats of these feelings.

The more we think, and the more we practice thinking as art, the more resistant we become to bullshit. That which is ugly in its illogic, graceless in its circular thinking, foul-smelling with apathy or corruption, is more readily recognised. We know a surface when we see one. It becomes harder to herd or manipulate us by dangling corporate carrots before our noses or threatening us with something that is all noise and no substance.

The thinking artist is free to move through the world at much more their own pace, following the threads of their own tapestry, not hanging in confusion from the loom of another. Cultivating wisdom and understanding, artistry of the mind gives depth and substance to any other art we may wish to practice, be that a bardic art, or a life art.

It is often said that the Druids of old were philosophers. This does not mean that we, as modern Druids need to haul ourselves through the vast, often confusing array of thoughts taught under this heading. We could choose to, but it is not a requirement. Our own discernment and capacity to question are tools in all our hands. When we take up the instrument of refusal, not accepting the shiny surface explanations, we are living our art. Truth is an elusive thing, reality is often subjective. The questioning mind may not find neat and tidy answers, but instead may uncover a multiplicity of possibilities. Not being afraid to enter the chaotic, potential-laden realms, the artist of deep contemplation can see many truths, many perspectives, can seek balance between them, and find their own way forwards.

Druidic Arts: Relationship

Following on from yesterday’s blog discussing the idea of Druidic life-arts, I’m going to pick over the 9 arts in more detail.

The beginning of relationship as art, is simply recognition. We can start with our most obvious and visible human relationships, and move out from there to look at ways in which we exist in relationship with others, human, and then not human. Sharing space and resources puts us into relationship. Consumption creates relationship with that which is consumed. The epic scale of our connectedness to other things is almost overwhelming. Seeking to understand it is an epic task. So we do what we can, known what we can, seek what we can, and the journey into awareness, no matter how far or how slowly we go, is where this art begins.

Once we recognise relationship, we can be consciously involved with it. We can think about our impact, and work with that more deliberately. We can imagine, using other ideas from our druidry, how these relationships could be. What would it take to be the very best kind of pagan parent, or pagan child? What would be the most meaningful thing we could give as druids in marriage, or a work relationship? How are we expressing our druidry in our friendships? What mythic, historical or contemporary examples might we draw inspiration from? As we start to consciously shape relationship, we are also engaged in a process of shaping and changing ourselves. Any art we practice outside of us, must affect what is inside.

There all kinds of qualities we might want to bring to our relationships – that will be different for each of us. Honesty, passion, compassion, respect, patience, understanding, learning, teaching, setting an example, following an example, giving, receiving… so many of these things come in pairs, where the good stuff is passed back and forth between those involved. This is as true of our relationship with land or water as it is with parent or human nature. We can ask questions like ‘how do I want this to be?’ ‘What do I want this to add to my life?’ ‘What do I want to give?’ and the more we consider the possibility of any given relationship, the more we can do with it.

Using tools of listening and good speech, patience, respect and care, we can deliberately craft relationship as though we were making a sculpture or improvising a shared dance. We weave in and out of each other, mindful, attentive, not always dancing to the same drum, but able to work around that too. We do not need to be the same.

Part of the art of relationship involves recognising where our on boundaries are. What do we not need? What is a waste of time? What is pointless, unfair, or downright harmful? If we take nothing for granted in relationship, if we look hard at all we have, then the worthless and demoralising becomes as visible as what is nourishing and joyful. Life may not make it easy to step away from the relationships that cannot be nurtured. But in knowing, we can hold our own boundaries, refuse to be drawn in to point scoring, back stabbing and other acts of poison and disrespect. Walking away is also part of the art of relationship, along with being able to say ‘no’ and being able to hear ‘no.’

When relationship is practiced as art, we may well be working with people who do not have the same consciousness. But, if we are serious in our artistry, we can aim to inspire, to lead by example, to create the space for others to become artists too. And when we are sharing with a fellow artist, choreographing the most delicate, nuanced dances of interaction, that is a wonder. Seeking for beauty and awen in relationships opens the way to new kinds of living, new depths of trust. It becomes safer to share ideas, possible to gently challenge without injury, possible to take risks even. An artful relationship is not a fearful one, because every moment of art feeds our ability to trust and understand each other. Then we are not just dancers, we are tightrope walkers, trapeze artists swinging in and out of each other’s hands, jumping, catching each other, able to do far more in co-operation than we would be able to do alone.

Relationship as art is the breeding ground of dreams. Moving beyond fear and assumption, moving beyond the normality of taking everything for granted, we can look further, to the trees and the sky, and wonder what we could do there. We open doors to possibility, we nurture hope, and we enable each other. This is just the beginning.

Nine Druidic Arts

I must start by saying that these are ideas I am working up myself, they are notions in progress, and I am just gathering the basic ideas and casting them forth to see what anyone thinks. There is nothing definitive here, and no authority, just ideas about how we might take Druidry forward to be less about private personal faith and more about living in the world.

What I’ve identified below are 9 areas of endeavour that anyone could choose to practice as arts. By this I mean that they should not be assumed to come naturally. They can be studied, developed, expressed with beauty and consciously put into the world just as any other art form is. I’m going to give an overview today, and then in coming blogs go through each area and how it works. Many of these are ideas that come up in other aspects of Druidry, what I think I’m doing differently is this idea of treating them like art forms, and the implications of that.

Relationship: We readily assume that relationships are ‘natural’ and require no conscious attention. As a result many of us don’t even notice half the relationships in our lives, or the implications of them. Once we look deliberately at relationship, we become more aware, and we can start to deliberately craft relationship so that our love lives, families, working partners all become a deliberate form of art into which we pour soul and inspiration.

Deep Contemplation: In going beneath the surface, asking profound questions and seeking real answers, we step away from a superficial life. Finding good things to contemplate and the mental tools with which explore, our whole understanding of the world can change. Weaving threads of ideas and understanding together, making new concepts out of the raw materials we have. This may manifest in all kinds of ways, but is something that we can encourage others to do, and in sharing it, help to make it more socially acceptable.

Sensing Truly: Not only listening to the humans we encounter, but to all that is around us, to birds and wind, to the voices within things. Seeking out that which is not usually heard. Any open sensory interaction can be developed as an art, we might equally practice seeing what is there, feeling in a real way, becoming more in tune with the interface of our experience and the world. Habits of perception can make us blind to what it really there. Deliberate, artful engagement gives us clarity.

Compassion: It begins with a desire to understand, a willingness to hear and to look beneath the surface. Open to the feelings of others, non-humans included, able to feel for them, and with them. We can also practice compassion upon ourselves, and in that compassion also learn to treat those around us more gently. Compassion does not stay a hand from doing a hard but necessary thing. It requires us to mourn the unavoidable consequences, and to seek for the best way through.

Looking for wonder: Seeking the numinous is the art of finding what is good and beautiful. It is the skill of seeing spirit manifest in the world, or at an earlier stage, it is seeking for the means to play that melody within our lives. Banality is an easy, socially supported perception to hold. Seeking wonder requires conscious engagement and a willingness to be moved. When we are moved, we can then share that.

Nurturing: This is the art of helping other things to flourish. Be that raising children, growing plants, easing pain, facilitating creativity or a great many other things. Nurturing is the art of holding a space that enables others to grow and develop. Praising, encouraging, listening, caring and finding ways to nourish are all aspects of this art.

Slowing and stopping: The modern world is hectic. For a spiritual life, it is necessary to slow down, and sometimes to stop, being here, and now, not moving or acting, just experiencing. A person who studies slowness as an art may explore the scope for enabling slowness in others.

Good speech: Clear, honest, accurate and helpful communication is an art that facilitates a great many other things. We practice this not just by honing our personal skills but by encouraging it in others, and if necessary, demanding it in others. With questions that press for better answers, refusing to accept poor logic, domineering words, or verbal manipulation, we take this art forwards.

Responsibility: We begin by learning to differentiate between things we are responsible for and things we are not. The development of this art involves learning to take responsibility through choice, recognising when there is something to be lifted up and carried forwards. The art of responsibility is the art of not looking the other way.

 

There is no end point with any of these, any more than in other art forms. Committing to these ideas as arts is committing to lifelong work. All of them require, at least once you’re past the basic ‘learner’ stage, dedicated involvement with something outside the self. Being the only druid in the village does not mean you are a druid in isolation. Practicing druidic arts does not require anyone else to notice or understand that you are doing a druid thing in public. The reasoning may remain deeply private, the consequences are in the world.

So, if you want to modify these, add more, add queries, argue the whole premise, or anything else, please add comments. I’d like to thank Buzzard who caught me skimming over this as a thought form in another blog – I like to be challenged, it helps.

Tiger mother growls

One of the most natural things for a mother, in any species, is to protect your offspring. Be it the mallard flying at seagulls to stop them eating her chicks, or the fox running to draw you away from her cubs, mothers protect. Millions of years of evolution, survival and instinct are behind us when we do it. Of course for the modern human mother, it’s not quite the same, but all the drives are still there. The urge to protect and defend can come out in all kinds of ways, some more helpful than others.

You can’t wrap a child in cotton wool and insulate them from all risk, harm, or danger. Not if you want them to grow up and be viable, independent adults. They need to learn which risks are worth taking. They need the space to run and play, which can mean falling off bikes, and out of trees. Bumps, bruises, cuts, scrapes and often broken bones ensue from the natural process of growing up. Knowing when to hold them safely in the nest, and when to let them explore the rest of being alive, is hard. Apparently it doesn’t get all that much easier with practice.

I have heard it said that dads do not experience the protective urges in the same way and are better predisposed to support the child in the risk taking aspect of their development. This makes sense to me, and the idea that between two parents, or the wider culture of family and tribe, there should be balance between protection and support. Getting the child to cycle is usually a dad/uncle/granddad sort of job. It’s not to say men aren’t protective too, but I think they risk assess in very different ways.

There are things we cannot protect our children from as they grow. They will go out into the world and make their own mistakes. They will get hurt. Bad things will happen to them. We cannot individually make all the world as safe for them as we could when we were toddler-proofing the house. All we can do is equip them with stories, ideas, skills and confidence so that when the inevitable happens, and they hit something hard, they have the means to cope. And then try to be there if they need us to help them pick up the pieces. My son does not have a defensive layer of cynicism of apathy. He cares. I know that when he gets out there on his own, either the world will break his heart over and over again, or he will grow the kind of skin that doesn’t let him feel much. But he’s grown up with my shortage of skin, and he knows it can be lived with, and maybe he will dare to keep caring.

The hardest thing, is seeing something I cannot protect him from. However much I may want to be the tiger mother (he’s a tiger boy) there are things I cannot do for him, things I cannot get in front of him to shield him from. And I would. Seeing fear in a child’s eyes is an awful thing. Seeing deep emotional pain that you can’t take away, and knowing that the only possible way forwards means that those young shoulders have to lift a heavy burden, and there is no way to carry it for him. All that can be done is to give him words of love and support, to be there, to listen, to trust him, to remind him that he is a brave and bold sort of tiger and that he will come through. Nine is a very young age at which to be tested to your limits and beyond. It’s a very young age at which to have to stand up to adults, fight against a system and bear responsibility for the shape your future is going to take.

There are plenty of children who face far worse. The ones growing up in war zones, or who have to watch famine and disease kill their families. The ones who cannot do anything as their father beats their mother. The ones who live in fear, in pain, with hunger and all the misery the world can inflict. And there are also the mothers who are not tiger mothers, who have succumbed already to despair. In nature, mothers eat their offspring when they feel too threatened. Human mothers get that most dreadful impulse too. There are the mothers who kill, the mothers who neglect, or who are so damaged that they simply cannot do the job. There are tiger children who do not have anyone to growl on their behalf, and because I have no skin, that thought makes me want to weep.

There are days when all I can offer him is my tiger growl, to tell him that he is not alone, even if he does have to deal with some very hard things for himself. I can only hope it’s enough.

Aspiring Druid, still learning

When I started exploring druidry, I read all sorts of books with content about who the druids were and what they did, and not wholly identical content about who druids are and what they do. I came to the conclusion that while modern druidry cannot be ancient druidry, in many ways it isn’t even trying. There is reason to think that the ancient druids were the learned, educated class of the Celtic peoples. Modern druidry focuses almost entirely on personal, and sometimes group spirituality. I do know plenty of individual druids who do strike out to learn other things or who are already intellectuals in their own fields though.

By the time I finished my degree I’d figured out that, while I enjoyed the learning, I hate the assessment process. It was getting in the way of the interesting stuff, and it seemed ever les relevant to me. I didn’t want marks out of a hundred, I wanted to push the boundaries of my own understanding. Since then I’ve frequently been a self taught student of all manner of subjects. I love learning. There are however, a number of ways in which a person can learn.

Skill learning, the mastering of an art, craft, instrument, or other form of physical activity. The Celts valued skill and respected their craftspeople, so I feel that this kind of learning entirely supports my more spiritual druid work. I don’t have a Celtic tribe to live in, and I cannot know what that would have been like, but I can take inspiration from what I do know about.

Fact learning can be very important when it feeds into developing a skill. It can also take a person into learning number three (bear with me). However, it’s very easy to go round acquiring facts in the same way that others might accumulate money, or possessions. Bland, irrelevant information cluttering up the mind and glittering like fool’s gold. Do we need the football results or the music charts of the last fifty years committed to memory? Do we need to know the population of Beijing? We probably don’t. The kind of fact learning good for pub quizzes and trivia games doesn’t tend to give us much else.

Then there is learning that leads to understanding. It’s like the difference between knowing all the prime numbers from zero up to a million, and knowing what a prime number is. In theory, you could commit them all to memory without knowing what they mean or why they might be interesting. Understanding is a form of learning that takes us into relationship with the subject matter. It enables us to recognise, to adapt, change, re-imagine. Fact based knowledge can be sterile, understanding is much more likely to breed creativity.

There is a tendency in modern culture to compartmentalise. We keep work, family, leisure time separate. We don’t take our spiritual lives to work, or our families to college. We divide intellect from emotion, mind from body. Most importantly, we tend to hive the spiritual life off, away from the rest of who we are and what we do. What we need to do with spiritual life, is take it other places with us, and actively seek those other places.

To be a druid is not just to sit in a tree somewhere contemplating the wonders of nature. Druids need one foot in the wild, one in the civilized world. One foot in the emotional realms, one foot in the land of intellect. One foot in the spirit planes, the other firmly on solid, material ground. One foot on the goat, the other on the well. I now have an image in my head of an eight legged octopus druid, tentacles all over the place.

Moving swiftly on… working with the intellect in any field is still druid work. It’s not separate. We’re pretty good at recognising skill learning as part of the bardic path. There are other kinds of arts I think Druids need to be studying and exploring. The art of good relationship is central. And beyond that, the occult science that is the blending of intellectual understanding with spiritual insight. I think the technical word for that is ‘wisdom’. That’s something to quest after.

I’ve just read a Catholic book on prayer and am now tackling a Protestant text on the same subject. It’s made me remember just how much I love studying, how fired up I am by working with ideas. Some of my other druid tentacles keep waving though, not letting me shift into an entirely head based view. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is just another thing to collect and horde. I keep asking, where am I going with this? What can I do with it? No grand epiphanies yet, just more signposts along the path.

Taking no prisoners

I read a letter recently in which it said something like “drivers cite congestion frustration around the school as the major cause of their speeding through the village.” That people feel comfortable saying this astounds me, but its part of a much wider culture and one I feel very strongly about.

We may not have much control over our emotional reactions to things, but we do, all of us, choose how we behave as a response. The idea that something, or someone else is ‘making’ you behave in a dangerous, violent, cruel or antisocial way is ridiculous. No one is holding a gun to these people’s heads to make them go faster. As they aren’t emergency services, the few minutes of differences made to journey length is largely irrelevant. We do what we want to do in these situations, and then we deny responsibility. If a child is knocked down and killed as a consequence, will the driver still blame the frustration of congestion and imagine they aren’t responsible? Maybe some people would.

We get cross. The heat of angry emotion rushes through us, so we shout. We are entitled to shout, because we’re being made angry by someone else. And then the anger means we want to take the offending person and shake them. We are so angry we hit, we push, they fall. It’s not our fault, they made us do it, they made us angry.

Now let’s take a step back. What did the person do to make us so angry we were violent? Maybe they insulted us. Said we were stupid, or wrong, or that we’d let them down. Told us they weren’t happy, or that we’d hurt their feelings, or we’d frightened them, that we weren’t perfect. Not had the dinner cooked on time. Not ironed the shirt perfectly. They made us angry. They made us do it. You said ‘no’ and I wanted to hear ‘yes’ and now you have made me angry, and when I beat you until your bones break, that will be all your fault.

See how it works?

Every day, anger leads to violence in someone’s life and violence leads to serious damage, or to death. More often than not we aren’t talking about big, heroic reasons for getting angry either. We aren’t talking about thumping the guy who raped your daughter, or beating off a mugger, or anything justifiable. No, we’re talking the kind of people who, being slowed down by the traffic around a school think that breaking the speed limit, in an area known to have children, dog walkers, joggers, cyclists, horses and tight corners, is just fine. Ordinary people. Normal people.

Once we’ve established that “you make me angry and therefore my reaction is not my fault” is a viable idea, we can escalate. I shout at you. Tomorrow I shove you. Next week I’m going to slap you in the face and in a month’s time I will push you down a flight of stairs, and then I’m going to get so angry that I kill your dog, just to show you that making me angry is a bad thing. And even then, I still feel like I have the moral high ground. It’s not my fault. You made me do it.

“You” might be a five year old child. You might be a pregnant nineteen year old or a brittle boned granny of eighty. It doesn’t matter, apparently. Your power in causing anger, is too great, and you therefore deserve to be punished. You were asking for it.

In case you aren’t squirming with discomfort already, I’d like to mention a news story this week, the jailing of a man from Cornwall who gouged his girlfriend’s eyes out. She has young children. No one was talking about why he did it, and that’s brilliant, because all the reasons, the justifications are imaginary. He did it because he was a sick and evil bastard. But I’d be prepared to bet you that in his head, in the moments when he reached for her to do that, he was telling himself it was fine. Justified. He was angry. She made him do it.

Evil starts small. We don’t wake up one morning and decide, spontaneously to torture, murder or otherwise destroy another human being. We go slowly, building our confidence and our justifications. Most importantly, we hear or see things we don’t like, we allow ourselves to feel angry about them, like a spoiled child who isn’t getting their own way and then we IMAGINE that feeling this way entitles us to retaliate. Or speed through the village. Or take it out on the next person.

“It/he/she made me angry, made me do it” should never, ever be accepted as an excuse for appalling behaviour. It’s bad enough in small children, utterly unacceptable in adults.

Druidry and the Ancestors

Yesterday I heard from Moon Books that my new title, Druidry and the Ancestors, has a home with them. I am delighted, and feeling very inspired with the work I’m now doing on my third Druidry book (more of that another day). I thought this would be a good day to say a bit more about what I’ve been doing, and why.

It all started when I read Ronald Hutton’s ‘Blood and Mistletoe’ last year. It’s a book every druid should read. It is not comfortable, making clear the many uncertainties in what we ‘know’ about our ancient pagan ancestors, and the sheer embarrassment figures like Iolo Morganwg inspire. Dealing with our more recent Druid ancestors, is a challenge we need to step up to. Out of ambition, imagination, possible insanity, they crafted the roots of our modern practice, and many of us repeat their words without knowing what they are and where they came from. I got to the end of the book and felt an overwhelming urge to try and respond to it in some way.

In the last few years I’ve been living in a land that is full of family history for me, I even spent six months in a cottage where, including myself and my son, 7 out of the last 8 generations of my family have lived. That was a profound experience, bringing me closer to my blood ancestors. What I thought I was going to do, was write a book all about my personal experience of ancestry, recent and historical, and talk about my personal reactions to Hutton’s work.

When I’m writing non-fiction, the extent of my planning is to get down my chapter headings and a few key words as to what content I should cover. In fiction I’m a ‘panster’ working to too tight a plan in either form makes me miserable. The frequent consequence of this is that projects change as I work on them, and what I have at the end is not what I envisaged at the beginning. I got to the end of the first draft of Druidry and the Ancestors late last year, and realised I had accidentally written a history book. This, frankly, was a bit of a shock. It resulted in me doing a lot of things the wrong way round, because I then needed to do some research to fill the gaps in my knowledge and deepen my understanding. Cries for book recommendations ensued. I read a lot more pagan stuff, explored the work of Honouring the Ancient Dead, looked at laws around the dead, treatment of bones, repatriation of indigenous people, radical political history, women’s history, social history, older writers tackling paganism, bad pagan history… the research took over, and anyone so inclined can track bits of where this was going by wading through old blog posts here. It was a learning experience.

The second draft was a much more academic style piece than the first, resulting in a mix of the scholarly-ish and the personal, which may be where I’m going as a writer. I’m not an academic, I’m a mere Bachelor of the Arts, but to write the kind of topics that interest me, I’ve got to wrestle a bit with giants. I don’t want to write impersonal, authoritarian texts, and the only way to avoid that is to keep it personal and individual, I think. It makes for a curious juggling act.

I’ve had one review already, which does suggest some pagans are going to hate what I’ve done. I think I’m ok with that. I believe in what I’ve written, I’ve offered it as my take, not an ultimate truth, if it offends people… so be it. Pagan history is not what we might want it to be, but I think we need to be honest about that.

This time, I’m doing the research first (I think) and I know where I’m going (I think) and probably by the time I’ve written it, I’ll have a whole different book from the one I’m imagining now. Notes from the journey here, as they occur to me, and, thank you all for being part of this. I’ve included an acknowledgment section and it does mention how much I owe to all the people here who feed back. So if that’s you, this is a book that sort of has your name on it. And thank you.

Pagan Facts and Fiction

‘Fact’ is a word that gets bandied about without much attention to its meaning. A fact, is something that we can all agree is true. The earth is round, and goes around the sun. The Battle of Hastings happened in 1066. Things that do not require much in the way of interpretation, and which therefore it’s hard to be subjective about.

Then we have theories – ideas which can be substantiated with evidence, but are not wholly certain. Most of science is theory, and every so often something comes along to change how we perceive, and the theories grow. Politics, economics, law – these things all depend on theories too. Anything about trying to organise the future is theoretical. Any belief position can never hope to be more than theory. We might point at supporting evidence. We might be personally convinced, but there’s plenty of room for others to disagree, and for us to be proved wrong.

Beyond that, is the wonderful realm of fiction, where imagination is king and anything is possible. Speaking as someone who spends much of their life making things up for a living, I know that fiction is often at its best when you lace a few facts in. Draw on some real stuff, some theories, and you ground the imaginative bits and make them seem more plausible. I’m working on a steampunk novel at the moment. My knowledge of period clothing, advertising and thinking allows me to wrap some more believable things around some crazy ideas, and by association, the crazy stuff is that bit easier to swallow. Authors have been doing this ever since there were authors.

Now, when it comes to fiction, the blending of fact, theory and wild imagination is fine. But what about other aspects of human endeavour? We don’t like it much when we catch politicians trying to get crazy things passed us, wrapped up in camouflage sanity. We tend to hate it when journalism weaves mad interpretations in amongst the accurate details. There is an argument that says all religion is applying imagination to the observable facts.

There’s nothing wrong with speculation, even when we’re having serious conversations about the nature of reality or the lessons of history. Speculation leads to theories, and theories lead to a search for evidence, and evidence, sometimes, leads to facts. Not always, but there’s always that possibility. What happens though, when we blend speculation seamlessly with fact? When we don’t bother to mention which bits we have evidence for, and which bits are guesses, or inventions?

It’s so very easy, once opinion is on the table, to have that opinion coloured by assumption and prejudice. If I ‘know’ that all people on benefits are there only because they are too lazy to seek work, then I’m hardly going to approach someone from that background with an open mind. If I ‘know’ that the Bible is literal truth and that pagans are all worshipping Satan, then I am never going to be able to hear otherwise, and no matter what evidence I get, I will filter it through my beliefs and hand it on as Fact. Where this really becomes a problem is if ‘facts’ that are really just ‘professional opinions’ or ingrained prejudice, are allowed to wander out into the world unchallenged, because the next person who runs into them may have no way of knowing what they’re seeing, and may believe it to be true.

There are a lot of people out there who have no understanding that their ‘facts’ are nothing more than a bundle of opinions and prejudices. I entirely defend any person’s right to their opinion, but not their right to believe that it should be unassailable. We should not demand the right to believe that our fiction is true. Very little in this world is actually verifiably, reliably true. Almost everything involving people depends on subjective interpretation and therefore is open to different interpretations. It’s better to assume that you have theories and ideas, not truths.

I could get into an epic rant here about some aspects of what claims to be paganism. I know some of what gets written is the regurgitation of innocently encountered mistakes. I know some of what we do is reaction against the ways in which the mainstream denigrates our ideas. And that, is bloody frustrating, but digging in won’t solve the problem. Paganism does not gift us with a great many facts. We are blessed with all kinds of theories, some of them pretty solid looking, and with a great deal of embarrassing rubbish. The internet is full of it. People claiming authority from ancient whatevers, people banging on about all manner of wild and wonderful things as though they were a literal, unassailable truth, whilst ridiculing the literal Bible brigade. We can’t have it both ways. We can’t change what the majority do, but we can tighten up on our own writing and thinking. We can challenge each other when we make too big claims for ourselves and our history. We can dare to say ‘I think’ and ‘I believe’ rather than ‘it is clearly true that we all came from Atlantis and I am the direct descendent of a dolphin priestess who was taught by aliens.’ (I made that up) As it stands, paganism is no sillier than the vast majority of human endeavour, but we really could improve on that.