Nimue Brown's Blog, page 51

How we get to be well

(Nimue)

The human mind is a fragile thing. We’re easily broken, far more easily broken than anyone who hasn’t experienced that might want to believe. Pain and suffering are inevitable in life, but being broken by those experiences isn’t. What’s key in this isn’t the strength and fortitude of the individual, but what happens to us when things go wrong.

When the system is unjust and our suffering is upheld by structures we are obliged to deal with, we are more vulnerable to breaking. Capitalism does this to all of us. If you experience something horrendous, the necessity of staying economically active will deny you the opportunity to heal in the most effective ways. The threat of poverty obliges to many people to endure toxic workplaces. The reality of poverty causes huge stress and distress.

When distress is met by minimising and shaming, it’s hard to recovery. Internalised guilt, victim blaming and a lack of available resources all contribute to making it harder to recover. Modest problems left undealt with turn into massive problems. The cumulative weight of many small setbacks can become crushing over time.

Many of the things contributing to poor mental health call for dramatic change. Poverty, work stress, insecurity and the many impacts of climate chaos all need dealing with politically and on a global scale. In the meantime though, we are not powerless.

Every small kindness is meaningful. Anything we can do to support, comfort and nurture each other is worth doing.

Affirm the right to rest, heal and recover. Recognise that people may not be allowed to do so – don’t blame them if they can’t, but make sure you aren’t one of the people adding to this.

Recognise that anyone will break under enough pressure. Be kind to yourself, be kind to others and don’t blame the sufferer for what is done to them.

Talk about the pressures you face, support others in talking about their struggles. We won’t change any of this without acknowledging what the problems are.

Don’t be tempted to celebrate working yourself into the ground, working unpaid, burning out or anything else of that ilk. Do not be persuaded to take pride in these things or to feel inadequate if you aren’t busy killing yourself for someone else’s benefit.

Celebrate the things that are restful and restorative. Don’t denigrate anyone else’s harmless fun, try not to undermine what others take joy in even if it isn’t for you. Let people have their small pleasures. Don’t shame people for things you think are silly, trivial, low brow or pointless. Let them have whatever comforts them.

(It’s not the small joys that are wrecking the planet, it’s the private jets, yachts, etc).

Affirming, supporting and encouraging people gets more done than criticism and knocking down. No one saves, fixes or even helps anyone else by demoralising them. Be kind, and you can give people space to sort themselves out. Letting go of the idea that you have to change, improve and save people is also a good way of being kinder to yourself, if that’s something you struggle with.

Human minds can be desperately fragile things. When we take care of each other and support each other, our collective strength and resilience can be powerful indeed. Our best resistance against what’s harmful lies in kindness and taking care of each other. We do not have to be willing participants in causing each other harm, even when the systems surrounding us lend themselves to that. We can choose not to compete, not to put others down, not to make unreasonable demands of each other and not to shame each other for being human.

Mental healthiness is something we’re going to have to build together, and is something we can create.

Druid philosophy

(Nimue)

For me, the key thing about philosophy is that if you’re on the Druid path, this is something you do. It’s not about adopting a particular view, it’s the undertaking to think about things. Reflection, contemplation, questioning, and curiosity are all important parts of this. To be a Druid is to live a reflective life in a considered way. It means knowing why you do what you do, being self aware and deliberate in your actions.

For most, if not all Druids this will mean figuring out what your values and priorities are. You will ask yourself (probably many times) what it means to live honourably. You’ll question the ethics of things, probably many times as your experiences evolve and the world changes. You’ll ask yourself questions about what it means to live well, and you’ll try and figure out how to judge what is good, or needed or worthwhile.

As a Druid you will consider how your choices and actions have played out so as to learn from them. You’ll be alert to your own motives and curious about any unconscious things thar may drive you or limit you. You’ll think about how your ancestors have impacted on you and the things thy have passed down, which may led you into work around healing ancestral trauma and changing the stories you live by.

Along the way you’ll think about the terms on which you are willing to trust people. You’ll become alert to the spiritual equivalent of snake-oil salesmen, to ego-driven gurus and poor research. You’ll learn when to question, how to think critically, how to judge and how to value. We treasure knowledge and wisdom. In this age of misinformation, manipulation and the easy spread of errors through the internet, the Druid path demands that we hone our thinking skills, and seek integrity. Iolo Morgannwg had things to say about the truth against the world, and that seems highly relevant right now. There’s a shortage of truth out there, and integrity has never been more important.

As you build your personal philosophy, you’ll decide how to weight various issues. You may think about service, justice and compassion. You might want to develop a life that is earth centred, you may be most interested in teaching and supporting others. Your life choices and personal philosophy will help define how you choose to walk your path, and what will open up before you as you do so. And as we follow our paths and the world around us changes, what we’re called upon to do may also change. I think it’s important as a Druid to be open to change and willing to rethink things in face of new evidence or need.

Body confidence, nature and Druidry

(Nimue)

Making us feel inadequate about how we look underpins how a great deal of advertising works. We’re sold things on the basis that either they will make us look better, or will compensate socially for our not looking photoshopped enough. Living a greener life is a lot easier if you aren’t persuaded by this in the first place. Living a happier life is more feasible if you aren’t being manipulated by this kind of material and have some resilience against how it plays out socially.

Druidry can do a lot to help a person with body confidence. When you spend time outside, encountering that which is not human, it will change your beauty standards. All trees are beautiful, and old trees have the most character. Wild creatures come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Further, the land absolutely does not give a shit how you look.

When we’re focused on the living world, filing your hair and skin with microplastics becomes a lot less appealing. Using problematic chemicals to try and look younger impacts on your relationship with the planet. Druidry celebrates wisdom, diversity and authenticity and helps show us how we can be at peace with our natural selves. Nature is part of us, too. The impact of time on the human body is part of how nature manifests in us, and walking the Druid path makes that a much more comfortable process.

Humans can be cruel when it comes to body shaming, and it’s a common way of attacking and trying to hut people. It doesn’t really matter how you look, those intent on causing distress this way will find something to take issue with. There’s an extra layer for anyone female, or female presenting because there’s such a long history of reducing femininity to attractiveness and making opportunity conditional on beauty. The way in which older women are so often overlooked and made invisible is an ongoing problem.

A fair percentage of how anyone looks is an accident over which they had no control. Our faces and body shapes owe considerably to our genetics. How we respond to food, exercise and stress is also something we don’t get much of a vote in. Not all bodies react the same way. Mine responds very badly to a reduced calorie diet as I am clearly designed to survive famines and I store hard. So I can end up having no energy while gaining weight. I do much better if I eat well and have the energy to be physically active. Working out what your particular body needs is an individual process and one that isn’t well supported by the largely unscientific assertions of the massive and lucrative diet industry.

There’s no one right shape to have. Figuring out how you want to be and what makes you happy is also a process. Seeking self knowledge is good Druidic work, as is figuring out how to be at peace with yourself and how to work with nature as it manifests in your body. Working out how to look after your body so that it supports you in living as you wish to live is good Druidic work. For me, this includes being strong enough to walk and dance because these are both important spiritual expressions for me. I’m happiest with myself when I feel strong, I like there to be some softness in my body, and those are the key things for me.

Spending time visualising yourself as a tree is a popular Druid meditation, and one of the best ways to teach you to think kindly about your own form.

Contemplative drawing

(Nimue)

I’m exploring the potential of drawing as a way of contemplating. I’m interested in the way in which trying to draw something leads to intense concentration on it for some length of time. This works especially well when applied to things that might otherwise be overlooked. I recently had a go at a half used bulb of garlic as well. Radishes aren’t the kinds of things I normally spend a lot of time looking at, so paying this kind of focused attention proved interesting.

There are many ways of drawing things, and all of them involve compromises. You get to think about shape, colour, light, shadow, and texture. When you’re working with a single pencil, you can’t catch everything, and I often find there’s a really interesting tension between trying to describe the shape of something and trying to describe its texture.

I spend a lot of time online looking at the work of other artists and seeing how they draw. In recent months I’ve been particularly looking at the work Jason Eckhardt does – his pencil sketches of trees and landscapes have made me want to get outside and have a go, although I’ve yet to do that. I’m also learning a lot from art by Martin Hayward-Harris, whose pencil studies of birds and other wildlife are stunning.

Whether I’m looking at things to try and draw them, or booking at drawings to try and understand the techniques involved, it all takes me into places of deep contemplation. What it brings up are thoughts about what makes something recognisibly itself. What is the essence of whatever I’m trying to capture? What makes a specific example of it individually itself? Each of the radishes I drew was distinctly different from all of the others. Spending time exploring that difference and getting to know the radishes was a peaceful process and a rewarding one.

The great thing about this is that it really doesn’t matter how good your drawing skills are. There’s no end goal here beyond the experience. It’s about taking the time, immersing in something and seeking to understand it. The focus of pencil on paper can be a real aid to contemplation, and whatever comes out of that is fine.

It’s also a good way of digging into the magic of the everyday. Taking small, familiar things and studying them can reveal their beauty and value. Making the ordinary into a subject worthy of your study and your drawing is rather lovely. And of course if you do a lot of drawing, you get better at it. Like anything else, time spent on creating gets more done than any innate talent you might have.

Survivors

(Nimue)

The final graphic novel in the Hopeless, Maine series is now out. It marks the end of an era, because this project has been part of my life for more than ten years. It’s not the end of the Hopeless, Maine project – there are books set after the graphic novels and I need to figure out how to get them out into the world.

The series as a whole is very much about different kinds of evil. Refining the script for the final book took me further into those questions than I’d been before. There are three ways in which evil shows up in these books.

There are the people who do nothing, and who look away. There are a lot of them on the island and they consider themselves to be perfectly alright, and that inaction isn’t something they have to feel responsible for. There’s a lot of that in the world. The people who see injustice and ignore it enable truly evil things to flourish. You can cause a lot of harm by doing nothing.

There are people who think they know best about what would be right and good for everyone else and who crack on accordingly. They fail to see the problems in their choices, and can be a mix of good and harmful. Some of the worst things that people do come from a belief that what they are doing is good, right and justified. This often goes with a belief that other people are not capable of knowing what’s in their best interests. Both Reverend Davies and Annamarie Nightshade have some of this going on. It’s one of the things the main character – Salamandra – really struggles with. She has a lot of power and could make people do things, and she resists doing that and does not persuade herself that her power entitles her to be in charge.

There are people who actively want power over others and who enjoy causing pain. That includes Durosimi, Melisandra, and Doc Willoughby. It’s with the desire to control and use that I’ve really dug in during the last book. 

The things that most reliably make people happy come from our relationships – the human desire for love, respect, admiration and appreciation is really powerful and a major motivator for many people. However, as soon as you start forcing people to behave in certain ways, you lose all of that. You can never trust the adoration of someone you manipulated, intimidated, bribed or blackmailed into doing what you want. Not only is this behaviour at odds with any scope for joy in the people who are victims of it, but it also leaves the perpetrators in a very grim place.

I have some first hand experience of people who were keen on having power over others, and none of them were happy. Taking is so very different from receiving. People who take seem to end up with a relentless hunger that cannot be satisfied. So much of what makes life genuinely good comes from what we can give, and share, and what is freely given to us. Taking is incredibly lonely. When people choose to be cruel and to wield power over others, they also suffer.

I was (so far as I know) the third author to come in on the Hopeless, Maine project. There have been a lot of other authors involved since I started, one of whom – Merry Debonnaire – also has material in the graphic novels. I very much like the way the project as a whole has expanded to include input from so many people. It’s been good to be part of that and to get to work in so many different ways with so many people. 

If you’re curious about Hopeless, Maine, you can find out more over here – https://hopeless-maine.co.uk/ 

You can get the graphic novels from places that sell books – they’re in a lot of online stores, and can be ordered from book and comic shops.

Depression and community

(Nimue)

When people are depressed, they can struggle to find the will and energy to take care of themselves. However, lack of self-care will contribute to all of the feelings that feed depression, so this can have the effect of digging a person in with their struggles.

If you want to support someone who is struggling with their mental health, practical interventions can be a really good idea. You don’t need to understand what a person is going through or why to be able to get in for this. You may well not be able to do anything about the underlying causes, but dealing with practical issues solves practical problems and can help a person get back on top of things.

It’s really important if you are getting in for practical stuff not to make the person who is struggling feel useless. There are lots of ways of handling this, and it pays giving some serious thought. If you treat the mental health crisis the same way you would a serious bout of the flu, that can be a good approach. Encouraging ill people to relate to being ill as though they had flu, or worse, can of itself be a helpful tool for coping. Rest, comfort, good food, warm drinks, gentle distractions – all the things you might consider helpful for someone who is bodily ill will also aid recovery when their brain is in trouble. 

It is very difficult sometimes doing this stuff for yourself, because depression makes it harder to care about yourself, harder to see any point trying, or to act. However, if you can be kind to yourself it aids recovery. If the depression is longer term it needs treating like recovering from a long term illness.

It takes ill people time to rebuild strength. Confidence can be badly knocked by illness and this is just as true when depression wipes someone out. Doing normal things can be intimidating and overwhelming when you’re ill, and it can take a little while to build back up again. Help and support around this can really make a difference.

It’s not unusual for depression to be linked to long term illness. People who are physically ill or have been injured or who are struggling with physical pain for other reasons can often become depressed, because that stuff will grind you down. Doing as much as you can to deal with the practical issues is always a good idea. Exhaustion will also cause depression, and rest is a very good answer in face of this. When people experience massive life upheavals, they often need time to process that. It helps in the face of loss and grief to be able to move gently, and again, practical support is a really good idea.

In my experience, depression is an ailment that responds well to practical care. I say this having lived with depression over more than a decade, and having supported other people through periods of mental health crisis. When people are given time to rest and recover, the odds of getting over depression and getting back on top of things are greatly improved. Being required to slog on while depressed really entrenches it, and not being able to put your mental health first is itself a harsh thing to deal with that further undermines mental health.

We can do a lot of good for each other by encouraging and supporting rest and recovery whenever someone is struggling. Small gestures of care are helpful and are worth making if that’s what you can manage. Taking people seriously when they’re struggling and need to rest is a good choice. Simply by being kind to each other we create spaces where good mental health is more possible.

Comfort for Druids

(Nimue)

It’s all too common to hear things around spirituality about getting uncomfortable. Being outside your comfort zone, challenged, raw and exposed is where the wildness and the magic have to be, right? Sometimes that’s true, although not always. Even when it is, there’s only so much of it that your soft animal body can deal with before it needs respite. So yes, howling naked in a winter storm might have its place if you want that, but you absolutely cannot live there.

Comfort allows us to reflect, contemplate, meditate and pray. It’s very difficult to do any of those things well if you’re in a state of distress or unmet need. I’ve tried doing rituals in highly adverse weather conditions and I can’t honestly say I recommend it. If you want to teach, or create, or serve in some other way then you need a calm and comfortable place from which to do that.

With all the challenges we face right now, and all the horrors in the world, offering comfort is a meaningful thing to do. It’s hard to make good decisions when you’re struggling all the time. If you’re overwhelmed, it’s hard to think clearly or to act well. Creating sanctuary space, for yourself and others, is a good choice.

It’s always worth asking what we can do to make the spaces we spend time in safer and more comfortable. It’s worth thinking about that in terms of physical comfort, accessibility and social issues. What can we do to be more welcoming, and to reassure people? Treating spaces kindly and with respect can have a massive impact on the people sharing those spaces, who may feel supported, uplifted and inspired by really basic physical interventions.

One October many years ago, I spent a lot of time painting the outside woodwork at my then local school. I was surprised by the feedback I got from teachers about how it improved morale for them. Coming into work and seeing the place looking better was meaningful. What I did would help keep the wood in good condition for years to come, making it more useful to the school. It was a simple intervention, but it saved money and cheered people up.

My local Transition Towns folk have put in raised beds at the train station, brightening an otherwise not so cheery space. Murals in run-down areas can totally change the character of a place. Tree planting makes a huge difference to spaces. Picking up litter makes a huge difference. There are many different ways to approach this issue, and they’re all worth exploring. 

Doing something to make a place a bit nicer can seem like too small a gesture in response to the state of the world. When we improve comfort, we increase resilience. We share hope, and we build a sense of mutual responsibility and mutual care. When people feel cared for, and have reason to care for those around them, that has consequences. Experiences of gentleness can be powerful teachers.

A love of life

(Nimue)

Recently on the Contemplative Inquiry blog, James Nichol concluded a post with the following words:

“Although I am contemplating images and not immersed in the landscape I have a strong sense of living presence in a field of living presence. In this state I feel a conceivably irrational confidence in life and the world.. A fragile kind of faith, that my heart cannot resist.”  https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2023/10/11/liminal-beauty-and-the-faith-of-a-druid

It’s a statement I found deeply resonant, and I encourage you to read the whole post. I’ve experienced that same irrational confidence. There is a hopefulness in me that declines to surrender despite all of the many reasons for abandoning hope.

When it comes to personal matters, there’s a lot to be said for knowing when to give up. Admitting defeat frees up energy to move on to something new. Success depends on recognising when you’re wasting your time and energy. I’m a big fan of admitting defeat and wish it was something I was better at. I’m more stubborn than is good for me. However, when we’re talking about the state of humanity and the state of the planet, giving up strikes me as a very bad choice.

Whatever good we can do, is worth doing. Giving up achieves nothing. It doesn’t protect us from what might happen – not on the way that giving up on a dysfunctional relationship might. It doesn’t solve anything – where quitting a toxic workplace might. There isn’t some better alternative to invest time and effort in. Our species and our home are in a pretty grim state at the moment, but we have nowhere else to go. It makes most sense to dig in, and hope, and try.

The fragile faith James describes is something beautiful, I think. It’s not easy to be hopeful about people, or to see the best in us right now. People can be awful, and the evidence of this is highly visible at the moment. Looking for the best responses, the kindest ways of being in the world and whatever scope there is to support any good thing, is always worth doing. 

Having faith in the planet seems less fragile, because I think life on Earth will continue. What’s really in question is whether we as a species are going to go ahead and make ourselves extinct. It’s a grim line of thought, and one I try not to invest too much time thinking about. I grieve for the damage we do, and for the species we’ve destroyed, and will destroy. Human greed is such an ugly thing, and there is so much of it.

And yet… the irrational confidence and the fragile faith are with me. I have chosen to love life with everything I have. I chose to care, to love, to grieve, to stay present and to stay hopeful rather than trying to numb myself out with a protective disinterest that can only add to the problems. Not caring makes it easy to do nothing, but I don’t want that slide into apathy and powerless despair. Existence is intrinsically beautiful, and worth cherishing and that feeling underpins everything I think and do as a Druid at this point.

Meditating on your body

(Nimue)

There are a lot of meditations that will take you into your own body to some degree. It’s very normal to start with a focus on your breathing as you settle and relax your body. I’ve put quite a few meditations in Druidry and Meditation that help a person experience their own body, relax and experience themselves in a spiritual way. I particularly like meditations that involve relating to the elements as they manifest in the body.

One of the things I’ve been trying recently, is meditating on my body as an ecosystem. We are composite beings, and a great deal of what’s in us isn’t human at all. We depend on friendly bacteria, especially in our guts. Wild yeast lives on us – and as I’m working with wild yeast for sourdough this has been particularly on my mind. Microscopic things live on our skin and in our hair. I haven’t done a deep dive on the science side yet, but I think that would be a good way to add depth to this work.

I’m taking these meditations as a mix of contemplation and conversation. I settle, and I contemplate how much of me isn’t biologically speaking me at all. I reflect on how I depend on my friendly bacteria, and I take time for gratitude. I’ve also started speaking to these beings who are within me and who are not me – in particular asking my gut residents what they would like, and what would make them happy.

I’ve always had a somewhat wonky digestive system. Some of that relates to the hypermobility and of course it’s all been made worse by stress in the past. I also have a lot of ancestral issues around body shape, food, hunger and appetite – things that the women in my family have passed down through generations. Which is hardly unusual. Working on what lives in my gut is a way of exploring different relationships with my body and my ancestors.

I’m enjoying the process of contemplating my body in this way and trying to build my sense that my physical form is a community. I’m finding it a restful thing to investigate, and I’m also finding it joyful. It supports self-care and feeling comfortable in my own skin, along with all the tiny beings who are also (hopefully) comfortable in my skin.

Ancient ancestors of place

(Nimue)

I live on Jurassic limestone, so my non-human ancestors of place include a great deal of sealife. They’re unthinkably old. I can’t really process the time in a meaningful way. The land here is made of ancient life, and the hills are full of it. As the limestone also gets into the water I tend to feel that these ancient creatures are also in my bones, and part of me.

I’ve always been interested in fossils. Walking as a child involved a lot of scrutiny of the ground. I grew up in an area with a lot of seashells, ammonites and belemnites. Around Stroud I’ve also found seaweed, sea urchins and crabs. I get particularly excited about sea urchins.

Stroud has been many things in the distant past. It was at the edge of the ice sheet during the last Ice Age, which is a notion I find powerful and compelling.

Ancestors of place don’t have to be human. If there’s something present in the land that speaks to you, then it speaks. The past forms our landscapes physically, our topsoil is laid down in layers of history, our trees grow their rings year by year. Human ancestors impact on the land, but not so much as other forces and presences will have done over time. 

Thinking about ancestors of place is a wonderful opportunity to open up beyond a human-centric perception and see our place in the world as one that has been shaped by many different kinds of influences.