Nimue Brown's Blog, page 56

Yeast Magic

(Nimue)

Yeast is at the heart of settled human civilization. Staying put gave us steady grain supplies, but yeast is the wild magic that turns grain into bread and beer. Given what a tiny organism it is, I wonder how our ancestors through history related to this magical entity that shows up and makes good things happen. I’m aware of stories that identify mead and wine as gifts of the gods.

Fermentation leading to alcohol gives us pleasure, relief from pain, relaxation and comfort. It invites jollity, and while it can cause all kinds of problems I feel that has more to do with how we now collectively use it than anything else. 

Fermentation in the bread making process helps us digest grains and get maximum nutrition from them. This again is a huge gift, and is why bread has been such a valuable staple for humans.

I don’t have a good relationship with wheat, and have had to cut back on grains significantly in recent years as a consequence. However, recent reading has led me to the possibility that the problem is less the grains, more the fast, modern yeasts. To test this, I’m experimenting with sourdough. I’m one of those rare people who did not start making sourdough bread in lockdown.

The wild yeast is part of my environment. It’s in the air and on my skin. I already have a physical relationship with it. Being an animist, I talked to the wild yeast as I was setting up my starter, inviting it to live in the space I was making and asking it to work with me. Within twenty fours hours, I had bubbles and it was clear that the yeast had indeed moved in. I look forward to working with the yeast as a collaborator in my kitchen and in my cooking. I look forward to exploring the relationship between yeast and the friendly bacteria I need to maintain in my own digestive system.

It’s one of those processes that reminds me how intensely collaborative it is being alive and having a body. Bacteria play a huge role in human existence. The relationship between friendly bacteria and the yeast in the bread may be an important one. We’re constantly interacting with all kinds of things too tiny for us to see. I find that magical, and a source of wonder.

A wild thing has come to live in my kitchen, and if we work together, I might be able to heal more of my troubled body and create things of joy and delight. Everyday magic.

Lessons from plants

(Nimue)

Put a shade loving houseplant that doesn’t like to be damp outside in the rain, and it will suffer.Leave it out for the frosts, the slugs and getting waterlogged and it will probably die.This has been an important lesson for me this week.

I am not, just to clarify, the person who left the houseplant out to die. I’m the person who rescued the plant and brought it indoors and am trying to coax it back to life. 

The thing about plants is that they have really specific needs. These include the right light levels, the kind of soil they like, how much water they need and when and how they need it. Some of them need feeding. Some need cutting back, or re-potting at certain times. Look after a plant in the way that it wants to be taken care of, and it can thrive. Ignore what it needs and it will struggle, and may well die.

People are much the same. Some of us are hardy weeds capable of thriving almost anywhere. Some of us are not. When it comes to plants, we often prize the delicate exotic ones that need a lot of care and attention. It doesn’t always work the same way with people. Rather than being prized, you can find that you’ve been dumped in an unsuitable environment that is harmful to your very nature.

Plants need sun, soil and water to thrive, but they don’t all need the same amounts of it. People have the same issues – what we need to survive is fairly similar in a broad sense, but what we need to thrive depends so much on who and how we are.

Care for people, like care for plants means taking the time to find out about those specific things. Some of us would very much like to be stood out in the rain, and some of us would be damaged by that. Some of us ripen at the first frosts and some of us wither up and die. Care has to be specific and it has to be based on a genuine understanding of who and what you are dealing with.

It’s an issue for how we treat ourselves, too. You aren’t a generic thing with generic needs. You’re someone very specific, and will thrive in environments that support you, and struggle when you don’t have exactly what you need. Putting down all those things we’ve been told about how we are supposed to be, and what we are supposed to want and need isn’t easy. However, it’s a necessary first step towards finding out who you are and what actually works for you.

And if you are a delicate houseplant I hope there’s someone to bring you in out of the rain and help you dry your roots out. If you are the sort of plant that needs to spread with wild abandon, I hope there’s someone to help you out of your small pot and into the space you need.

Counting your blessings

(Nimue)

Gratitude for the cool mornings that speak of the autumn to come, for the cheering voices that make up the dawn chorus outside my home, for the spider on my wall and the trees beyond my window.

Gratitude for days that start gently, in warmth and companionship, with tenderness and sweetness. Gratitude for a life rich with love and joy.

I’ve always paid attention to the small things, and to the details of everyday life that bring joy. Small beauties and everyday magic are worthy of celebration, and most of our lives are made up from these little, everyday things. Embrace those daily wonders and life is richer and happier.

There have been a lot of years when doing that also felt like surviving on a diet of crumbs. Always hungry, never sufficient. I tried to double down on the gratitude, but there’s only so far that can take you. The harder you have to work to find things to be grateful for, the less satisfying it is.

These days I wake up grateful for the blessings of good sleep and a body that feels rested. This is a huge life shift for me, and is helping with healing, reduced body pain and better mental health. Grateful for kind words, warmth, generosity and being treated with care. Looking back at things that never felt like enough, and acknowledging that there was every reason to feel that way. Gratitude in face of insufficiency is a lot like gaslighting yourself and it isn’t a good path to take. Being grateful for the crumbs that don’t sustain you when you are starving is not a good place to be.

Gratitude is a natural, easy response to joy, beauty and abundance. Sometimes what we have to do is push through our own jadedness to be aware of what’s good in our lives. Sometimes what we need is more goodness. Counting your blessings is a really good thing when you have blessings to count. In a life that lacks joy and abundance, no amount of trying to be more grateful will actually increase what you have. It isn’t easy to tell what’s going on if you aren’t feeling blessed. Some of us default to asking more of the world, and some of us default to asking more of ourselves and we can all be wrong about that.

Today the sun through the window feels good on my skin. I’m glad of opportunities and adventures, of the richness in my life and the many things that bring me joy. I don’t have to try hard to find things to appreciate. I’m deeply grateful for all of the small, good things that I am blessed with every day, and for the enormities of goodness that have come into my life and changed everything for me.

Creative adventures

(Nimue)

Here I am with fabulous Japanese wizard Dr Abbey, looking at his most recent art. If you’ve followed the blog for a while you may remember there was a time when I was regularly writing small pieces to go with Abbey’s pictures. We’ve both been busy with other things for a while now, but I am working on a novel based on some of the ideas we developed together.

I hadn’t seen Dr Abbey in person for about three years, and it’s been wonderful having some time with him to plot, plan and catch up. We’re thinking about performing together next year.

As a creative collaboration we’ve so far not quite got things to work. We both get very excited about each other’s ideas, and we’ve both created a lot of things in response to each other – mostly art in Abbey’s case, poetry and stories in mine. The trouble is that we work in such different ways. Abbey tends to have intense bursts of creativity where he produces a lot of art and has a lot of ideas. I tend to work at a fairly consistent pace, and I’m a lot slower. I’m still working out how to turn into a story some of the ideas we were sharing more than a year ago.

It’s the differences between people that often make collaborations rich and exciting. Figuring out how to work with someone is always a big part of the challenge. Perhaps performance will put us into the same creative timeframes – it will be interesting to find out.

It may well be that creatively speaking, what we do best is spark off ideas in each other, and then let that go where it will in different directions. There’s no one right way of being inspired, no one right way of connecting with another person, or co-creating with them. 

Relationships like that have always been at the heart of my creativity. People who I can connect with deeply, where there is mutual understanding and a rich flow of ideas. I write for the people I can relate to in this way, and I write about the ideas and possibilities that come out of those rich connections. One of the reasons I’m so invested in the steampunk community is that this is so often where I find my people, my inspiration and motivation.

Seeking ancestors of place

(Nimue)

One of the best tools you can get for working with ancestors of place (certainly in the UK) is an ordnance survey map. Failing that, any online map that shows a lot of details can help you with this, and there are all sorts of things that the more technologically minded folk can use on phones to help identify what’s around.

I’ve always been fond of maps, and I get a lot out of siting down with physical ones to look at what’s in the land. Ordnance survey maps are good for showing historical and prehistoric sites in the landscape. This is a great place to start if you want to get out and make physical connections with whatever is around you.

Maps are also an excellent source of place names, and place names can reveal a lot about the history of a site. ‘Cester’ at the end of a UK place name indicates a former Roman settlement. ‘Bury’ goes with hillforts. The language a place name derives from can tell you a lot about who was there in the past. Places may be named after activities that occurred in them. You can’t always determine a lot from just the place name, but it can be an excellent jumping off point for finding out more of the history of a place.

What remains to us of history is only ever a tiny percentage of what was there in the past. Places are more likely to be named after famous white men who went there once, than after one of the workers who lived and died in the same place. (We have a King Street in Stroud). Conquerors erase the history of those who went before them, changing names and languages as they go. Famous events can dominate our sense of a place while we lose sight of the great mass of smaller events that may have been more important to people who actually lived in the landscape. I think this is especially true around historic battles, where the death of a prominent figure dominates our sense of a landscape, and we lose sight of all the quiet, ordinary lives lived out over hundreds of years.

We won’t know the stories of most of the people who are our ancestors of place. It’s good to take the time to think about them, to acknowledge them and to remember that they existed. History as a process erases more than it records. We can honour the unknown ancestors who have shaped the landscape, lived in it, died in it and whose influences we still feel even if we cannot know much of them as individuals.

The universe loves you

(Nimue)

It’s a concept that has tended to bother me – my feeling is that the universe is neutral and impersonal and sometimes existence is challenging. However, I also think that those vague spiritual memes are going about this all wrong.

We are all tiny parts of the universe. We each get to make some decisions about how the universe behaves and how it treats others. If you like the idea of a benevolent universe, you can choose to embody that. Be the love that the universe shows to those who live in it.

We’re small and finite beings – we are certainly limited by time and by our physical bodies. The idea of love might be limitless, but the ways in which you can embody love are much more constricted. But you can choose to embody love, and choose to bring love into the world in a meaningful way. If you are undertaking love as a verb, as something you do rather than something you just feel, then you will have an impact on others.

It feels powerful doing this in a deliberate way. Saying to yourself ‘today I will be how the universe shows love’ and taking on that role. There’s beauty in it, and room to feel meaningful and to experience your own significance, and those are all really good things.

As you are not the whole universe, you don’t have to try and love everything and everyone. You can just reach out to those around you, human, non-human, animate, not so animate… love in whatever way makes sense to you. Manifest care on whatever terms make sense. Feed something, speak kindly to someone, smile warmly at someone, help someone, give your time or other resources to aid something. It all works.

In a beechwood

(Nimue)

I had forgotten the particular quality of light through beech leaves and the feel of last year’s beech mast under my boots. I had forgotten how coppery the ground is as last year’s leaves carpet the soil. Beech tree roots are marvelous, complex things especially on uneven ground.

These are without a doubt the kinds of trees I love most. My part of the world is dominated by beech woods. However, the beeches are mostly on the hilltops and my scope to get to them has been greatly reduced during the recent years of considerable illness. I’ve been blessed in recent years with a good friend who has taken me out into the woods and onto the hills about once a month, and that kept me going when I had otherwise lost my connection to the landscape, but I had lost so much.

Being able to get out on the land nourishes my soul. This is tricky though, because I’m so limited now about how far I can get on foot. While I’m considerably more well than I used to be, I can only walk a couple of miles on the flat, and that makes a great many places I could once walk to entirely inaccessible to me without a car. Public transport is of no use for this. I’m not a fan of cars, and painfully aware of the environmental impact. At the same time, I wouldn’t want to deny anyone else access to the landscape on the basis of limited mobility.

My hope is that I can rebuild my health and strength and be better able to once again walk out from my own front door and go significant distances. I have a lot of work to do rebuilding strength and stamina, it’s going to take a while.

In the meantime, I am blessed with the practical support that means I can get into the trees more often. This is a huge privilege. So many people are denied access to the landscape through poverty – poverty of time and of resources. Too many people do not have green spaces near to where they live. Many people are ill and disabled in ways that sorely limit their capacity to get outside.

It was wonderful to be amongst beech trees again in a wood I had not visited for more than a year. Being cut off from my local landscape so much of the time has felt like losing pieces of myself. Reconnecting is a powerful process.

Getting more done

(Nimue)

I had a request from lovely Halo Quin to talk about how I manage a consistent output. I have a lot of creative projects on the go and I am able to keep up a fairly steady output across a lot of projects and I’ve been doing that for years.

Some of it is that I’m obsessive, and I pour that into my creative life where it won’t inconvenience anyone else. Some of it is that I have a considerable concentration span and a fast brain which means I can get a lot done in a focused way most days. Everything else is strategy.

I plan. I know what I absolutely have to get done in any given week, and I have a plan for each working day. I put daily lists in my diary and check them off as I go. I set myself targets on projects although I try to be gentle with myself because if I’m over-ambitious, I court burnout. I aim for a thousand words a day on creative projects (I don’t usually work weekends on these) plus blogs and whatever practical writing I have to do.

I use the multiple projects to procrastinate. If I’m struggling with one project I will switch over to another. I usually have some arts and craft on the go so that I can lean into that if the words aren’t flowing. I use practical things – laundry, washing up, cooking and so forth as brain breaks from the more thinky work. Being able to break up my working day in this way really helps and is one of the distinct pluses of working from home.

I try to avoid deadlines, and I try to give myself as much room as I can where deadlines are unavoidable so that I don’t get stressed or feel that I have to finish any given thing when I’m not enjoying it.

Accountability really helps me – I write blog content regularly because I know people are reading it. I use Patreon as a place for developing new projects because again there’s an audience waiting for me to deliver. It helps me a lot to know where something is going and what it’s for.

It doesn’t always work. I’ve had projects falter, I’ve fallen off things. Not everything gets finished. It’s easier to not have that be obvious because I have a lot going on and can point at whatever’s working. It’s really important to have the scope to put down things that don’t work and not to get overwhelmed when a project isn’t moving. Again I find the multi-project approach helps me with this. If something goes horribly wrong, I can invest in something that’s working and I don’t take much of a morale blow as a consequence.

I have some really good support people. This means if I get stuck with something, there are friends I can ask to take a look at it for me, or to throw me curve-ball ideas. This has saved my arse on numerous occasions. Creating consistently is a lot easier with team-mates, I have found. Having people to check in with about how I’m doing is nice, too. Being a lone creator can be lonely and it’s easy to lose sight of why you’re even trying. Being part of a community and engaging with other creators can really help around staying motivated and being reminded of why you’re doing it in the first place.

The times I’ve been least creative have been the times when I could not see any point in what I was doing. What holds me are my relationships with people who are into my stuff. If I know who I’m creating for and why, then that makes it a lot easier to do what I do.

Druid life with leaves

If you’ve been to the site recently rather than reading posts in either wordpress reader or via email, then you’ll have seen a bit of a change to how the blog now looks. The new banner with the leaves is my first visual collaboration with Keith Errington, which has been a really good process for me. Keith has a lot of graphic and design skills but of the two of us, I’m more confident about the drawing.

I’m doing a lot more drawing at the moment than I have in years. I’m trying to make a point of doing that regularly. I like working with pens, pencils and oil pastels, and I used to like painting although I’ve not had a suitable space for that for a long time. There have also been time issues and questions of what energy resources I have, but that’s all improving for me at the moment. 

Working with someone always involves finding out how you are going to work together. That can involve a power imbalance, but I prefer it when that’s not the case. Working out who has what skills and what happens when you combine those is always interesting. I have done a fair amount of art collaboration in the past but I was very much not leading on that, and did not feel much ownership of the process or the results. Working with Keith is really cooperative and feels equitable.

Collaborations are most exciting when the result isn’t anything like what either person would have come up with on their own. I think we’ve hit that with this piece. I like the brighter, fresher colours. The leaf based logo also makes more sense now that I’m sharing this blog space with David, and the design came from that.

Oak trees have strong Druidic associations, as does mistletoe and hazel. To the left of the oak leaves are three beech leaves because that’s the tree I love most. I drew bramley apple leaves for David because that’s a tree that is important to him. So this piece, for me, is more representative of who we are and what we’re doing.

Community, justice and healing

(Nimue)

When a person experiences injustice, they can suffer multiple injuries. Aside from the obvious harm caused by the injustice itself, there can also be damage to sense of self, to confidence, self esteem and things of that ilk. How we handle this as communities can make a great deal of odds to how much damage a person takes. Here are some simple things we can do to help a person recover from experiences of injustice.

Listen. Hear, witness and acknowledge what they’ve been through. Even if it wouldn’t impact on you in the same way, take it seriously. Simply having the distress taken seriously can give a person a lot back.

Be affirming – hearing that other people don’t think it was fair either can really help. If it’s just bad luck, say so. If it was undeserved, say so. Sometimes unjust things happen by chance, and sometimes they are caused deliberately and acknowledging the unfairness either way helps. It means the person suffering knows that no one thinks it is their fault or an appropriate response to them, and this can help a lot.

Don’t talk about silver linings or suggest that everything happens for a reason. This is usually well meant, but it can create needless feelings of responsibility. Sometimes we just need to acknowledge that things are shit and move on. Not everything is a learning experience, not everything will make you a better person, or wiser. Some things we have very little control over. Unless you can see something specific that will be a good outcome from a nasty experience, don’t bring up the idea.

If you are in a position to do something restorative, do it. If someone has been mistreated and you can rebalance things for them, act. Doing nothing always supports bullies, abusers, unfair systems, toxic organisations and problematic cultures. If you say and do nothing you allow injustice to continue. Just saying that you aren’t ok with something helps the person who is injured and helps challenge the culture that enabled the harm.

If you have power, take responsibility. All too often injustices occur and continue because the people with the real power to make change don’t want to do that. It isn’t nice hearing that your company has a sexist culture, or your social group is doing something ableist, and so forth. If you put your comfort ahead of acting justly, then you are part of the problem. If you want to be genuinely good and working for justice you have to be willing to feel uncomfortable. None of us gets everything right, and we need to be forgiving of that while giving ourselves room to improve.