Nimue Brown's Blog, page 467

Druidry and divination

What historical writing there is about the druids tends to mention divination including reading death throws and entrails, and other less than lovely activities. I for one have never been tempted. There are lots of uncertainties about the insights we get from Roman writers, which doesn't help. So, having swept all of ancient history aside with an insufficient overview…. How does divination fit into modern druidic practice?

There are plenty of divination tools out there. I started with runes, having purloined my father's set. There are ogham inspired systems of divination, but, when you consider the academic uncertainties around ogham, this won't be ancient as a method either. There are modern druid oracle cards too. I think the question of whether a system is old or not, is far less relevant than whether it works. Different people tend to feel comfortable with different tools, and will use them in different ways and for different reasons. What works for one may not, therefore, work for another and it pays to try various mthods.

Divination is not something to do just for fun or as a party trick. You need to know what you want and why you are doing it. Asking yourself not only what you want to know about, but why, is very important and should happen before you start questing after insight. In times of fear and uncertainty, reaching for reassurance can be tempting. What we want then is often a comfort blanket, and a divination tool that gives a truthfully bleak outlook might do more harm than good.

We also need to consider how we think reality works. Is the future a certain thing that can be known in advance? If not, what do we hope to gain? Who are we appealing to when we ask our questions? To the cards or stones themselves? To the gods? To fate? Or something inside ourselves? You can undertake divination without being clear about this, but it should be considered. Sometimes the answers can be informative about what we really want from the process.

I use divination methods to divine the present. This is because I do not believe the future is all laid out before me. I also believe that the present does a lot to shape the future, and if you can spot the influential threads in the now, you can make good guesses at what might be coming. This is not much different from all the other forms of speculative thinking that governments, financial bodies and whatnot do. Their methods are not any more reliable than any others. I use divination to help me clarify my own mind, and be clear about my feelings and intentions. I find this helps me to then pick my own path forwards and to shape the future I want, rather than being buffeted by events.

Finally, I use divination for inspiration. I find the aforementioned Druid oracles very helpful for this. I have The Druid animal oracle, and the plant oracle – both the work of the Carr Gomms and illustrated by Will Worthington. They have beautiful, rich images, and a supporting book full of folklore, natural history and insight. Using them I find insight into my own state of mind, and it helps me create a calm space from which to consider whatever events are unfolding, or anticipated.

In stories of ancient divination acts, the theme seems to be wanting to know that your side will win, or how to get the favour of the gods in order to win, or which day would give you the best chance at winning. Much of divination can be seen to be about harnessing good luck and avoiding ill. This is a world view that just does not fit will my own personal philosophy. We get what we get, as far as I am concerned. Most of my questions therefore tend to be about how to survive, how to nourish my own strength and imagination to help me continue, and how to do the best I can with whatever comes to me.

I have done a lot of work at various times, divining for others. Experience suggests that many people either want to be reassured, or they want someone else to tell them what to do. Armed with a pack of cards, some incense and a bit of background music, a person can have far more authority than they might at other times. A friend who would not listen to the suggestion that she's chasing the wrong bloke if I just said it, might be far more open to the idea if I 'divined' it for her. This raises all kinds of interesting questions about truth, integrity, power, and what power does to people. This is one of the reasons I've stopped divining for other people very much.

One of the things I like about the druid oracle cards is that they don't give answers. It's nigh on impossible to get simple 'do it this way' instructions in answer to problems. Instead, they offer kinds of energy to explore and work with. How to do it rests with the individual, but sometimes it's nice to have a place to start from.

Soundbite philosophy and other fish

I woke in the early hours with the absolute conviction that today's blog post would be going in the 'ritual' category. The thing I can't remember, is what it was supposed to be about. This is not unusual, my dreaming mind has a life of its own; I often wake with convictions that can't then be pinned to anything coherent. When they can, I tend to use them. There may be a flow, something I can tap into, things my unconscious mind knows. And, when there's an easy option, I'm not ashamed to take it. So, this is not a blog about ritual, but about thinking, and whether or not we go with the flow, and where the flow might take us.

I read somewhere (facebook perhaps) a lovely thought form that went 'do not go with the flow. Dead things go with the flow.' Fish tend to swim against the flow, I've watched them seeming to hang in the water in much the same way as kestrels fly against the wind in order to hover. If the canal is anything to go by, dead things can be depended on to go with the flow. So does rubbish. Often 'going with the flow' results in these floating things getting trapped by the curve at the front or back of the boat, at which point all motion ceases. And the flow varies in most watercourses, from barely shifting to torrential floods, all of which a person who goes with it, can be subject to.

Going with the flow is a surrender to the inevitable. Or at least, to what we assume is inevitable. It is the path of least resistance. The sapling that bends in the storm does not break. I spent a little while studying tai chi and Taoism, and the idea of yielding is very important in that tradition. Overcoming by yielding is a strategy worth considering, especially if you dislike violence or conflict. But can all trials be overcome through yielding? Looking at my own life, I have to say, no. I have yielded, a great deal at times, given way, acquiesced, offered no resistance. In the short term it reduced pain, but longer term it kept me trapped in a harmful, soul destroying situation. There are forms of oppression it's very hard to tackle by yielding. Sometimes, yielding only serves to reinforce the problem.

There are lots of glib statements out there that seek to sum up a life philosophy in a few short words. The trouble is, that very few simple ideas can be safely applied to all situations for a failsafe 'how to live well' solution. If it were that easy, someone would have figured it out long ago. Anything that can be pinned down to a single sentence probably won't get you very far, or won't work all the time. Life is much more complicated. Being human is vastly complicated. The things that make sense to one person, in one place and at one time won't necessarily have anything to give even that same person, in another time or place, much less anyone else.

Most actual philosophies and belief systems cannot be expressed simplistically. It's tempting to want soundbites and easy catch phrases, but that's not how a spiritual path works. It's the commitment to complexity, to exploration and a quest for understanding that underpins all spiritual life. The difficulty is part of the point, part of what makes it meaningful to search for answers. The one liners that can readily be shared on facebook are often charming. They may raise a smile or trigger an idea, but slogan-philosophy only goes so far. The fun part is taking that nugget, be it 'go with the flow', or anything else, and working out what that means, right now, in your life. That's where both the real work, and the real discovery happens.

Where is the flow going today? I don't know. But I can go with it, or swim against it, get out altogether, and consider all manner of alternatives. The only one liner of philosophy I'm inclined to trust, is that there is never one true way to anything.

The end of medicine

I'd noticed maybe twenty years ago that there was an issue with antibiotics. I'm not a scientist, not working in medicine, and even so, I got the message. Antibiotics were a finite resource. To make them last longer we needed to stop routinely giving them to animals and prescribing them for the slightest ailment. Apparently no one else paid much attention. We have a myth (upheld by the movies) that science will find a magic solution in the nick of time. It hasn't, and the end of antibiotics is now looming.

Without antibiotics, operations will be far more risky, and things that are currently routine will cease to be so. This may mean a collective shift in how we think about medicine, and for me, it's flagged up some rather uncomfortable ideas about the current systems. The obvious answer to losing antibiotics is to invest more in preventative medicine. There are plenty of ailments that can be avoided, where small, early interventions reduce the need for bigger ones later on. There are many conditions we know perfectly well can be alleviated or avoided just through lifestyle changes.

But here's the thing. If someone has a heart attack at fifty, goes on to need a bypass, medicines, later a pacemaker, more drugs, more hospital time, they cost a lot of money. Or to put it another way, a lot of money is made out of them. A fit and healthy person who seldom needs to see a GP, much less anything more involved, does not make money for anyone – or at least, not for drugs companies or medical companies. There are financial benefits, for some, from others being ill. There is a whole industry out there that depends very precisely on other people being ill. Then there are the health insurance companies, and even in countries like the UK where medicine is mostly free at point of access, there is still the option to pay for a faster service, and people turning a profit. The more interested our government gets in introducing market forces into medicine, the more reason there is to have people get sick and need curing, the less reason there is to keep people well in the first place. The logic of the market place simply is not consistent with treating human beings in a compassionate and civilized way.

The flip side of this is that healthy people are more productive, more likely to be employed, more likely to have longer working lives than those who are sick. Someone who dies young won't draw a pension, of course. And if you have a surfeit of poor people who you can't keep in gainful employment, and you are only thinking in terms of money, letting them die off might make a lot of sense. It's all about priority. When money comes first in all judgements, kindness and decency won't get much of a look in. When the price, the cost, the economic value are the first measures you explore, sick people may generate you more GDP than well ones. I have no idea how the figures stack up, but the results are there to see all too plainly. Far more time and effort goes into cure, than prevention.

In a world without antibiotics, preventative medicine has to make more sense. Precautionary measures and lifestyle changes have to predominate, at least if we're serious about survival. And if money can't be reliably made the other way, that could well swing it.

The antibiotics problem isn't news. It shouldn't have surprised anyone. It was inevitable, we knew it was coming. Just the same way that we know that we will run out of oil, gas and coal eventually. We know climate change is on the cards too, or at least, most of us do. So are we going to follow the antibiotics model here and pretend there isn't a problem, or hope a magic fix will come in a timely fashion? There are a lot of things we might just have enough time to do something about, but only if we get off our collective posterior sooner rather than later.

So often the argument for not acting comes down to anticipated costs. We can't be green, it'll put our industries at a disadvantage. We can't clean up, it costs too much. No one seems worried about the figures that might be involved in not acting. What is it going to cost us, longer term, if we don't tackle the pending oil crisis and the melting of the ice caps?

Of course by then, the odds are someone else will be in government, so why worry? They can deal with it. Or science will magic it away, or if we close our eyes and all sing very loudly, we can pretend none of it is happening. It's not just fantasy, its suicide.

Why write fiction?

I found myself asking this question yesterday. Over the last year, most of my energy has gone into non-fiction work – this and other blogs, Druidry books, promotional work. I wrote a novel last year, but that seems a very long time ago. Non-fiction is comfortable, work-wise. I like the calmer, more intellectual thinking. Once you get started on a topic, the material suggests a logical progression. It speaks directly, makes its points clearly. What can fiction do that non-fiction cannot? I realised yesterday that if I couldn't answer this to my satisfaction, I would not write any more novels. (I've written about eleven novels so far, most of them published).

When I started novel writing, in my late teens, I did it because I had something to say. There weren't just stories and characters in my head, I had an agenda, a sense of direction. Then I discovered exactly how publishable I wasn't, and like so many authors before me, started exploring what it takes to be commercially viable. I've spent about a decade writing things I thought I could sell, and earning a modest income from ebooks as a consequence. Every year it's got that bit harder to sustain my enthusiasm. I realised yesterday, that there is no point in writing novels that are supposed to sell, as opposed to the stories I want to write. I've spent so long on the former that I have little sense of what the latter would look like any more. Better to write non-fiction.

That might have been it. However, I'm married to a man who fell in love with the novel I wrote in my early twenties, back when I was still writing more from the heart than from the head. So we had a long conversation about my work and the direction I'm heading in, and whether to give up the fiction.

Tom pointed out that fiction has a far greater capacity to be emotive, and to generate empathy. There is also the inherent scope to enchant and inspire – harder work in non-fiction. There is room to come at big ideas from odd angles, exploring what ifs.

I spent last summer under a lot of pressure to make my work even more overtly commercial. Yesterday Disney announced big losses because their latest bound-to-be-a hit movie, that no doubt ticked all the boxes, turns out not to be a profitable, sure fire thing after all. I don't want to live in a world where books, films, plays and other arts are written based on a commercial assessment of what might sell this year. The further we go trying to make things a definite commercial hit, the less soul there is. Maybe audiences aren't going to go for the box tickers so much in the future. What I do know, is that I can't do the commercial thing, it makes me miserable and the quality of my output deteriorates and then dries up. If I'm going to create, I need to be able to be proud of what I've made.

I have several books languishing on my hard drive. I'm going to wait until the graphic novel comes out, and then either find them a home, or give them away. A lot of people swung by this blog yesterday for the free poetry book. That was a huge morale boost. Books sitting unread on hard drives are a waste of time.

If I set out to write a novel thinking I'll just give it away, and not worrying about publishers and marketing and all those distractions, I may write something I like. I may finish it. Hell, I might even start it, and right now that would be something in itself.

Love like you've never been hurt, write like you don't need the money. Ok, I think it was 'work' originally, but not to worry. I used to write like it wasn't a job, but instead a dream. I used to write for the pleasure of telling a story and in the hopes of finding one person who would get it. I've had a decade of listening to other people telling me about market research, genres, rules. You have to do this, you can't do that, you must, you must…. It has sucked the joy out of me. No more. I'm very aware of there being a lot of people in my life who will judge me on sales figures and income. For many people, the only measure of quality is the cash it brings. I didn't set out down this path because I longed for fame and fortune. I wanted to tell good stories. I still want to tell good stories. The greatest commercial success of my writing life so far was the project I refused to compromise over.

Inspiration matters to me. It is part of the essence of druidry, and the beating heart of the bard tradition. If I don't honour that in my work, what on earth am I doing? So, I'm going to write a novel. A long one, full of wildness and strangeness, that will not fit tidily into a genre classification, and that will probably be very hard to sell. Having made this decision over night, I feel happier about my working life than I have in years.

Who parents?

A tricky, emotive topic, and I'm no legal expert, but here goes anyway.

The UK legal system starts from the assumption that contact with both biological parents is best for children up until the age of twelve. If one, or both parents do not want to be involved in a child's life, then they cannot be forced. A child under the age of 12 is not deemed able to decide what is in their own best interests, and therefore regardless of their feelings and experiences, this can result in it being decided, for them, that contact is in their interests. If you are able to prove abuse, it is possible that the contact will either be indirect – letters and phone calls, or supervised. Proving abuse is actually difficult, and if the abuse was psychological, nigh on impossible.

Here are some things most people probably do not know. A person can rape their partner and still get access to the children. A person can hit or sexually abuse a partner in front of their children, and still get access to the children. A person can murder their partner, and still get access to the children. I think this raises some very interesting questions about what we understand 'best for the child' and 'good parenting' to mean.

Now, coming at it from the other angle, a step parent, who has done all the raising, all the caring for a child, is not considered, by the laws of the land, as being as important for a child's development as access to the birth parent. So imagine a scenario, in which the father has been disinterested for the first 8 years or so, and then wants to be part of the child's life, having them stay over alternate weekends and for three or four weeks of holiday through the year. That the child has a stable family and has grown up with someone else in the role of father won't count for a lot.

When relationships break down, a child cannot demand that a parent makes time for them, but a parent can demand access to a child who does not want to see them. As contact with both parents is assumed to be best, the child can then find themselves living between two houses. This is not a recipe for stability, continuity, or a sense of place. What happens when one parent decides to buy the child's favour with expensive gifts, late nights, all kinds of undisciplined indulgence that will, very literally spoil the kid? The parent who says 'no' will inevitably lose influence and become unpopular, and again the child does not benefit from this.

How important is the biological act of parenting? For a woman, the act of carrying and bearing a child has a huge impact, whether the child is kept, or not. A man can become a father and not even know it. For men who are actively engaged in parenting, the process of becoming a father can be just as dramatic and life changing.

If you give your eggs or sperm as a donor, you don't have parental rights to the child that may come from this, so far as I know. A woman who becomes pregnant – whether by choice, accident or force, and who does not terminate the pregnancy, cannot avoid all of the implications and responsibilities of parenthood. Should we give the same rights to a man who gets laid and doesn't hang about? How about a man who was misled and thought the woman was on the pill, and would not have impregnated her had he known, or who would have chosen active parenting had he been given a chance? And when it comes to putting the whole mess before a judge, parties may have different takes on what happened, and varying levels of honesty. Finding the right way through must by nigh on impossible in some cases.

But we start with assumptions about 'best' for the child.

I talk a lot about relationship in druidry. I think it matters whether a child has had a good relationship with the birth parent. I think the shape and nature of the relationship between the parents does matter, because it's so easy for one parent to use the child, or the courts, to harass the other, and that's not remotely in the child's interest. I firmly believe that 'one size fits all' solutions very seldom fit anybody. I also think that if someone hasn't had a chance to parent, then giving some space s a good thing, but not at the expense of what security and identity the child already has.

In the last few years I have talked to so many people about this kind of scenario – I've lost track of how many. I've heard shocking and depressing tales. I've met perhaps one or two parents who have felt ok about the process. If there is any decent measure of justice, the people involved have some sense of being treated appropriately. The system at least should make sense. The assumptions underpinning it should be logical. It should have enough flexibility to cope with the uniqueness of everyone coming into it. If we started valuing engaged, active, caring, supportive parenting more, perhaps we would put less emphasis on biological parenting and treat the whole issue very differently.