Nimue Brown's Blog, page 48

The Call for Peace

(Nimue)

The call for peace is something many Druids do as part of a ritual. It may be as simple as calling for peace in the four directions, and for peace in all the world. It may be more complicated – I once did a Peace One Day ritual that focused on an extended call for peace rather than have it be part of how you set up a ritual.

Peace isn’t simply the absence of conflict or violence. You can get that kind of quiet by successfully oppressing people. Peace is a state of being, and it calls for a commitment to justice and fairness. A lack of conflict that isn’t underpinned by justice is itself a state of conflict, it’s just not wholly visible to anyone on the privileged side of it.

Peace means dismantling privilege and replacing it with equality and fairness. To have peace we have to dismantle white supremacy, colonialism and exploitation. We have to deal with all forms of bigotry and oppression and build a human society that is fair. To create peace in the world we need to be at peace with the natural world rather than pushing exo-systems to breaking point.

The call for peace is not a call to something easy. In the short term at least, it’s not a call to uncomplicated comfort. To have peace we would have to first understand where peace is not present, and what the barriers to peace are. Those who have most and who benefit most from the way things are would have to change most and give up most. Justice is seldom appealing to people who benefit personally from ongoing injustice.

To seek peace, we have to be ready to be troubled. Peace based on looking away isn’t real, and solves nothing. I acknowledge that the world is hard and overwhelming and that staying functional is vital for each of us and these things require careful balancing. Being discomforted is one thing, being unable to function is another. It is the people who are most comfortable who most urgently need to be willing to be less comfortable.

Love and fear

(Nimue)

Suffering is an inevitable part of life. The more you love, the more likely you are to experience loss and grief. At the same time, love is very much the answer to not being afraid of what life does to us all.

When we’re held by love, then whatever comes is simply a challenge to face. When you can be confident in the love, comradeship and support of others, then the challenges are bearable, no matter what they are. When we are determined to make the best of things for each other’s sake, then we are best able to live.

Conversely, without insulating layers of love and support, any challenge will make you feel exposed and vulnerable. There’s more to fear when you anticipate having to face challenges alone, unsupported or without kindness to ease your pain. Individualism can be incredibly isolating, and there’s a lot about modern society that pushes us towards feeling like we have to tough everything out by ourselves.

When we reach for each other, reach for support and ask for care, we become like a grove of trees, holding each other firm. To be able to give is a good place to be. Being asked for help means being part of something, feeling your place in a community of support. 

Overcoming the fear that no one will care isn’t always easy. My experience has been that the vast majority of humans are kind, and will do what they can. Whether that’s a warm word, or rolling up their sleeves and piling in to help, most people are inclined to try and make life better for the people around them.

If you’ve experienced the other thing, it can make it harder to trust and seek help. If you’ve been humiliated for needing help, or mocked for suffering, then it is not easy to keep trusting people. There are those amongst us who feel the need to belittle other people’s struggles and to shame people who talk about their troubles. My guess is that this most likely comes from a place of pain and not feeling able to ask for help, and thus resenting the people who do dare to ask. There are also those who won’t help and who resent being asked, and they have their own issues. Most likely these are people afraid of their own mortality and vulnerability who cope with the world by not thinking about anything that makes them uncomfortable. This is not a workable response to reality and ultimately makes them more vulnerable to life’s challenges.

The people most likely to help are the ones who have been there or who are dealing with similar issues. Not the people who have the most resources to spare, but the ones who understand. In my experience, people who are struggling are incredibly generous with other people who are struggling while those who are best off are the ones most likely to say that they don’t have the time or the resources to get involved.

The Morrigan

(David)

I am in the process of research, seeking knowledge, after experiencing a powerful visitation from Crow. Who I know, like, and respect, but who also in this instance may or may not be The Morrigan.

I don’t know. I’m very cautious.

In theory, I could fit the bill and this might be a path I’m being called to follow. I’m a warrior, with the first half of my adult life spent in the military. I’m also a rebel. In the military, despite my promotions through the ranks to a certain point, I dedicated myself to battling against bullying. To fairness. Certain people considered me a bleeding heart liberal, but those who came under my care in that respect were grateful for it. Also, many of my ancestors were Irish. In my living memory, a big part of my family were part of the Irish diaspora. I refused to fight in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, being vocally opposed to Thatcher’s shoot-to-kill policy. I’m glad to say that although my 20 years service included several conflicts, I was never required to participate in any that involved colonialism. Luck? Good fortune? Coincidence? Or helpful guidance? And in the second half of my adult life, in civvy street, I’ve remained a rebel. An eco-activist. A social justice warrior. In theory, the sort of person who might be called by The Morrigan.

In practice, however, my thirty years (plus) of paganism have been deliberately both solitary and having no involvement with any deities.

So, yes, I’m cautious. Because of course it’s perfectly possible that losing control through dedication and service might be the first thing I am required to accept. But it’s equally possible that romanticism is leading me astray. And even if the call is real, I’m very aware that The Morrigan isn’t a comfortable presence in anyone’s life. She is demanding, to say the least.

So I’m going to read and read and read, to scry and see and experience, to wait and listen and learn.

Signs of winter

(Nimue)

Of all the seasonal shifts in the UK, I find the journey from autumn to winter the hardest to define. First frosts are very much part of autumn. We don’t reliably get snow or live where I live, some winters here are very mild. Some are harsh. It’s hard to know how to define them.

One of the big signs of winter for me has been the arrival of migrant swans. They come in to the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust at Slimbridge, and seeing them is an important part of how I honour the season. Normally they start arriving around the end of October. This years they’ve only just started arriving at the end of November.

Most of the trees around me look autumnal, while some still have green leaves. It is uncomfortably cold, that’s definitely a sign of winter. But, not cold enough for ice, we’re just above freezing still.

I haven’t seen any fieldfares yet – another migrant bird whose presence symbolises winter to me. 

What represents this season for you? What gives you a sense of the shift from autumn to winter? Or, if your seasons are entirely different to mine, do comment and share what you’re experiencing.

Cave Painting

(Nimue)

Sometimes there is nothing sensible to be done

And so you turn to magic, to poetry, ritual and rhyme

Sometimes what you do is gather up art supplies

Torches, provisions and then you walk into darkness

Climb, scramble, make impossible journeys

Into the most preposterous places where light

Does not normally venture and there, there

In the places of deepest darkness you set down

Your lamp and get out your tools and paint something.

Maybe just the outline of your own hand.

Maybe your art isn’t great yet, although you may become

A genius for form and movement but the most important

Has to be done thing of all is that you’ve gone

Right to the back of the darkest most ridiculous place

You could get yourself and you’re making art

Almost no one else is ever going to see.

How many times do you head into the darkness

Of your cave before you work out where the place

Is that needs you to make art in it?

Sometimes you go into the darkness with only the tune

On your lips, whispered against the places of deep

Time and fear and weight but if you are lucky

You will find the sweet spot where the rock sings back

And you will hear voices that are not your voice

And are your voice as thought you are making music

With the very bones of the earth and there will be

Comfort in that, somehow, a sense of being heard.

Sometimes you aren’t even sure that there is a cave

Because the darkness is thick and heavy all the time

But there you are anyway, in the long dark night

Of the soul and all you have to bring with you

Are words that you have gathered together and tried

To weave into some sort of sense that is also somehow

A cloak of protection and the kind of ball of wool you

Might get handed by a Goddess for finding the way back

But you didn’t get a Goddess, only your own clumsy spinning

And a desire to be less lost than this, and a handful

Of words that neither scan nor rhyme but will have to do

For now in lieu of a poem because sometimes 

All you can do is weave a charm with spelling after spelling

And hope the intention is strong enough

For it to do some good.

How trauma stays with us

(Nimue)

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about how to express what it is that trauma does. Putting the past down, letting go and moving on isn’t simple. There are things that happened to me that are in me and have become part of me, which isn’t quick or easy to sort out. These are things I want to change my relationship with, but it takes time.

Writing poetry can make it possible to express experiences that aren’t easy to convey by other means. It’s also a way of talking to myself, to the less conscious parts of my mind where the changes need to happen. There are reasons that poetry is used for spells, and one of those reasons is that poetry acts on our minds in a different way to prose, and can be more powerful for shifting how we feel. I’m sharing this for anyone else who needs to figure out how to cough up what they’ve ingested.

You are what you eat

For many years I ingested poison

Choked down needle sharp

Indigestible things.

I swallowed pollution wrapped tight

In barbed wire served with shards

Of broken hearts and ribs.

I ate illusions and lies so that when

I believed there was food, I chewed

Empty mirages.

No wonder I was hungry all the time

Thinking of bone soup and feeling

I only had myself to canibalise.

I fed from trash cans and sewers,

Put smashed bottles between

My ever aching lips.

You are what you eat

What you take in

Becomes you.

I’ve become a trashcan horror

The things I consumed

Became my whole being.

Coughing up painful mess

Like owl pellets, but uglier

Expelling the toxins.

Unspeakable things fall from

My mouth, I heave them up

Spit them out.

It feels like my own body

Breaking and falling away

As I cough and retch.

All the damaged parts of me

Made from things indigestible

Can only fail and fall.

Whatever remains afterwards

Will be true and real

If bruised and savaged.

I am uneating all those words

And deeds that were locked

Inside my own skin.

I am uneating, unabsorbing

Lighter by the day.

Reclaiming, healing

Plants and everyday Druidry

(Nimue)

Plants are a great thing to focus on if you’re looking for small, simple things to engage with in an everyday way. Being consistent and predictable, plants are easy to engage with. Finding a plant that lives near you is something most of us can do. I favour trees, but if that’s not what your landscape does, any local plant is a good choice.

Find out what your plant is – the internet makes this easy, you can just take a photo and then search for the image. Visit your plant regularly. Everyday might be ideal, but whatever suits you will be fine. Do a bit of reading, find out about your plant – smaller ones can be seasonal so some relationships are only short term.

Visiting your plant regularly will give you a seasonal practice rooted in day to day experience. Following the wheel of the year through the life of a single plant is a really good way of connecting and engaging. 

The odds are that your plant won’t be solitary. Other plants will exist around it, most likely. Insects may interact with it. If you’ve picked a tree then you might also find birds, fungi and assorted creatures inhabiting either the tree or its vicinity. A single tree can show you a lot over time and help you connect with other wild things.

There may be folklore associated with your plant. It may have magical associations, or applications in herbalism. With trees, you can look at traditional uses for the wood, and for anything else the tree produces. This is the kind of thing you can explore gently and when the fancy takes you, but it will enrich your experience of visiting your plant.

If you have bardic inclinations you can draw, photograph, write about or otherwise let yourself be inspired by your plant.

If meditation is your thing, sitting with a plant to just see how the world is where your plant lives can be really rewarding. You don’t have to do anything complicated, just share the space in a contemplative way. If you need a focus for meditation at other times, contemplating your plant is a good choice.

A few minutes a day can make a lot of odds. Taking a couple of minutes to acknowledge and pay attention to a plant in your garden can show you a great deal. Small walks to the nearest tree can open the wild world up to you without requiring huge amounts of time and effort. Feeling a connection to a wild and living being roots your Druidry. It’s a good way of slowing down and building a relationship with the natural world.

The difficult ancestors

(Nimue)

If you’ve thought about honouring the ancestors for a few minutes it has probably crossed your mind that they weren’t all good. It would be fair to assume that our ancestors represent the full range of human capability both for good and for evil. That recognition is easy. Deciding what to do with it is a good deal more complicated.

Most humans are a mix of things, and whether they seem good or terrible may come down to your relationship with them, or your perspective. The warrior who fights for your people is a hero, the warrior who fights against your people is a monster. How we might judge the actions of our ancestors will not be how they judged themselves, or each other. 

Mostly for this post I want to think about ancestors in the more distant and unknown sense. I should mention though that if you have personal distress involving recent ancestors you absolutely do not have to include them in your Druidry, forgive what they did or anything like that. You can just ignore them and focus on the breadth and depth of your ancestry in a less personal way.

When it comes to those more distant ancestors, I think acceptance is a good place to start. Recognising their flawed and complicated humanity is a compassionate thing to be able to do. It also counts as compassion towards ourselves. We all have ancestors who did terrible things – even if we don’t know them by name. That legacy is in each of us, but we also have the power to respond to that with kindness and to do better. Where the legacy of harm is known to us, we have the power to break ancestral patterns, break family stories, change legacies of trauma and heal our family lines.

Sometimes people do terrible things by accident. Sometimes they do terrible things with really good intentions – war is full of that kind of tragedy. We all make bad choices, or act on the wrong information. We hurt each other when we don’t mean to. Honouring the ancestors calls for recognising all of this and acknowledging it.

We are here because of them. Our lives are shaped and informed by their lives. However, it’s not a simple progress narrative. I like to honour the ancestors who did not bring us to where we are today – ancestors of radical politics who strived for fairness and equality that we still don’t have. Ancestors who resisted the industrial revolution, objected to war, fought slavery, demanded the vote – many of whom never saw their work make changes in their own lives. We’re still a long way from getting much of this right.

When you visit an ancient monument you do not know that the people who raised it were good. Even while you love the site, are inspired by it and feel connected to the ancestors who created it, you don’t know them. I’m not someone who feels you can separate the art from the artists, but what do we do when we can only know the artist through their art? As with cave paintings. We get to see what is good, and enduring, and meaningful. We can honour that.

I think that working with our ancestors, in all their complexity, has a lot to teach us about how we deal with each other here and now. What we choose to focus on. What we need. What we refuse to accept. There are many ways of approaching this, what matters is the integrity and the care that you bring to the issue.

(This post was prompted by Babs in the comments, I’m always open to suggestions about topics to tackle).

Gift Economy and The Long Table

(Nimue)

Gift economy is something I’ve been interested in for a long time. It’s a way of exchanging that defies capitalist ways of doing things and brings need and resource level into the equation. It’s based on the idea of giving what we can, and not trying to take more than we need, and looking after each other. I practise this by simply making a lot of my work available. Anyone who wants to support me can do that through Patreon or ko-fi. It’s not transactional or about conventional ways of selling.

Locally, I have a beautiful example of gift economy in action, in the form of a project called The Long Table. In essence it’s a cafe. There’s a recommended price for meals, but if you can’t afford the price, you pay what you can – even if that’s just a few pennies, or nothing at all. You can choose to pay more, to help support people who can’t afford food. The project also has freezers around the area where people can just take what they need and pay what they want – or don’t pay.

The thing is that it works. The LongTable is able to employ people to make food and serve it. People pay to eat, and people eat for free. It’s been going for a while now, and is doing so well that it’s going to try and set up the same thing in a nearby town.

One of the counterarguments you will always hear when anyone suggests anything benevolent is that it won’t work because people will just exploit it. This isn’t true. The Long Table demonstrates this. We have a lot of systems in place that are there because people are greedy, cheaters, exploiters and will grab everything they can and won’t behave fairly unless made to. But apparently that’s not actually true. So long as most people play fair, then a few people playing unfairly doesn’t cause a problem, I suspect. Given the opportunity, many of us will step up and do what good we can. We buy our own meals and put something in the jar to help fund someone who needs help.

Gift economy calls for trust and for faith in each other. It’s an expression of community and of belief in the value of community. It means not always putting a price on things, and trusting people to just give back in whatever way seems right to them. Maybe not straight away, but when they can, or when it makes sense. It means doing what’s needed, or wanted rather than focusing on how to sell your time, your skills and ideas. 

Money certainly has its uses, but I think we let it define far too much. Our sense of self worth as individuals, our sense of where we fit socially, and how we value each other is too informed by how much money we make. There’s something really beautiful about letting go of that, either to pay for someone else’s meal, or to feel ok about letting others take care of you when you need that.

Holding boundaries

(Nimue)

Boundaries are containers. We create them in ritual to establish sacred space and as ways of holding magic. We use them for focus. If everything is infinite and boundless then nothing has shape or meaning. We need edges in all things because humans are finite beings.

We all need boundaries in our lives to be able to function. This can involve being able to set aside time and space for druidic work and study. It can mean being able to hold edges so that our working lives don’t intrude into our personal time. Where it gets most difficult is around the demands other people make on us. The tensions between duty to others and personal need can make it hard to work out where to draw lines. There are further layers on this because being female (or seeming female) often goes with the expectation that you are to sacrifice absolutely everything for your family should that be asked of you.

In theory we should all be able to hold boundaries in ways that allow us to be healthy and functional. If you aren’t able to do so, there’s almost certainly a massive power imbalance going on. Holding good boundaries isn’t possible when there are massive power imbalances, and if you cannot safely say no, that’s a huge issue. Getting out of such situations is the only way of dealing with them, and that’s not always easy.

Saying no is a very powerful thing. Saying yes isn’t meaningful if you can’t say no – it’s not permission or consent. Saying no creates focus and space in much the same way that drawing a circle to make sacred space does. The act of saying no creates edges and focuses intention. While it might seem very ‘negative’ it’s not – it’s enabling and healthy if used in the right way.

You have the right not to do things, not to like things or want things. You have the right to decline to be a resource for other people to use. We do all have duties to the more vulnerable people around us, but if you’re being made to carry an unreasonable workload then at the very least you shouldn’t also have to feel like this is your obligation. 

One of the things I struggle most with is when people around me refuse to be responsible and I end up feeling obliged to pick up the slack. I’m not good at shrugging and walking away when I could do something to sort a situation. This is far too enabling of people who do not play fair or pull their weight when they could, and it’s something I want to change. Currently I’m trying to get comfortable with the idea that I am not obliged to protect people from the consequences of their own actions. I’m thinking about how and when I deploy my energy and how easy I’m prepared to make life for people who are not reciprocal about that.

Just because I could fix things doesn’t mean I have to. Just because I am capable of sorting things out does not make them my responsibility. It might even be ok to let things go wrong and derail, or fall apart if other people aren’t willing to put in their fair share of effort. If I want to focus my own power, I need to cast circles sometimes.