Nimue Brown's Blog, page 58

Considering the harvest

I don’t know if it was a good harvest

The fields stretch bare and dry

Under fierce August sun.

Shorn dry sticks greet the sky.

Nothing moves.

After the harvest is barren time.

How does the bounty taken

Compare to the desolation

That remains.

I’m on the margins, always

With wild oats and woodspurge

Gleeful scarlet pimpernel

Wild rye, and clover.

Here is wealth and abundance

Dancing butterflies.

If I pluck ripe fruit from hedgerows

I will leave lushness behind me.

Abundance for all, berry rich.

Out in the field I glean stalks

As ancestors of poverty would

Have done in centuries past

Backs bent for hours, seeking

The fallen grains that might

Nourish the most desperate.

Three heads only do I take

For the symbolism, not the need.

The land remembers reaping

A community in harvest,

Working together to bring the grain

Home in glorious sheaves.

I have made harvest loaves

But never walked the wheat field

For the gathering in.

Machine driven, we take all

Leave the dry and empty remains

A harvest of life, without stories

Diversity only at the margins

After the crop is taken.

Tempting to see the human tale

Of bad choices made.

We take too much, too much

In our excess we make a world 

Too barren for our flourishing

Too dry, and lifeless.

Coax back the cheerful pimpernel

The living abundance of nature

Bring back from the margins

What should be in all places.

Flowers, insects, birds, life.

Life is what we are missing

From these mistaken harvests.

We sacrifice so much to gain

So very little.

Singing to the castle

The photo above was taken at Dover Castle. This was an unexpected gig, as someone else had to drop out unexpectedly and as I was around it made sense to drop me in. I was able to borrow some kit – so once again I’m crossdressing and a bit in yellow!

I find it really interesting to get to sing songs in places where they make some particular sense. For this gig, I pulled out my more relevant Childe ballads and what smattering of medieval songs I know and I went for it. The one that turned out most resonant was a song called Ned of The Hill.

“Dark is the evening, silent the hour,

Oh who is the minstrel by yonder high tower”

I’ve sung this song since childhood. It was rather lovely getting to *be* the minstrel stood under the castle wall, the disruptive peasant at the gate.

“Young Ned of the hill has no castle, nor hall

No bowman nor spearman to hurry at his call”.

Singing outside with no amplification isn’t easy. I was able to get a little help from the ramparts and walls, but not much. I had wind to contend with. I picked songs with tunes that had a smaller range because those are easier to belt out. I also slowed everything right down – using my breath for volume not speed, and because the slower words are easier to hear for an audience that is mostly wandering about. I maintain a suspicion that this kind of barding would be a lot easier with a period appropriate amount of beer in the mix, but there we go!

Goblin Romance

I will bring you bounty from the hedgerow

Shiny berries, fat and sweet,

Really nice feathers.

I will make you funny, chewy goblin cake

Full of peanut butter

And sticky things.

I will bring you cool rocks that I find.

Some with dead things in

Some that sparkle.

I will show you the best slugs and spiders

The really cool toadstools

The nicest moss.

I will bring you stories I have scavenged

Others I have made up

Songs I like to sing.

I will take your rubbish and turn it into

Goblin treasure, happy things

Made from your old trousers.

I will bring you myself, for all the years

That I can, gladly

Be your scummy goblin.

Peacefulness and riches

As I write this, I’m sitting outside in beautiful, peaceful surroundings, taking a break from a more involved project. This is a way of being that has featured repeatedly for me this year and it’s opening up all kinds of new things for me. It’s possible to slow down in this situation. No one needs my time or attention, and there’s nothing to interrupt the flow of my thoughts. I can contemplate slowly, deeply and in the manner of my choosing.

Most of the time I really like having company – as long as it’s the right company. I’m blessed with a few people in my life who I love spending time with and whose company I find delightful. I don’t actually need much time to myself in the normal scheme of things. However, these deep dives into solitude are good and rewarding and make an interesting contrast with busier times.

If I want to, I can dip into the internet and chat with a friend – I’ve always found the internet good for social contact. It’s the quality of the exchange that matters most to me. I like physical presence too, I like sharing space. It’s wonderful to be able to fall into quietness with someone else, and to surface when there’s something substantial to share.

This year I’ve learned a lot about what my body needs to feel relaxed and peaceful. Outside time is critically important for me. Slow time and gentle time are vital, too. It’s so important not to be constantly busy, and not to be flat out busy for too long when I am working. I’m capable of considerable speed and focus, but it takes a toll and I’m no longer sure that’s a price worth paying. I’m more interested in richness than in productivity right now. I’m conscious of being incredibly privileged to have any choice in how I do things.

Richness for me means having a lot of different things going on. Physical activities, things that use my hands, my imagination, my heart. Social time and quiet time, being both performer and audience. Being still and being in motion. The familiar and the unfamiliar. I need a lot going on, and the more variety there is in my life, and in any given day, the happier I am. I’m learning how to deploy my time accordingly, and I’m seeking that richness every day. With it comes peacefulness and satisfaction, and the sense of a life well lived.

Time passes differently for me when there’s more variety in what I do. Having more going on actually slows the day down for me, and gives me feelings of expansiveness. I have greater feelings of abundance. I’m discovering greater feelings of richness in very simple things because I’m investing more time and care in what I do. Giving myself time for reflection gives me more feelings of appreciation and gratitude. Changing pace between intense involvement with something, and gentle reflection serves me well. 

Spending time alone, I’ve built up a much clearer sense of what I need in my life for me to feel content. None of it is terribly difficult to achieve. Having the quiet space puts the rest of life into perspective, and creates room to ask questions and interrogate experiences. It’s too easy when you’re constantly on the go to keep doing things that don’t work just because there’s no time to think of something better. But on the flip side, there’s the beautiful experience of taking time to think about things and conclude that it is very much what it should be, that life is good, meaningful and pleasing, and that there is now a great deal that I have every reason to celebrate.

Trust and healing

(Nimue)

When it comes to healing emotional and psychological wounds, the tools you are most likely to be given (CBT therapy) are both theoretically very good and practically quite useless. If you get something generic and no individual support it can have the effect of making you feel to blame and like you just aren’t trying hard enough. For survivors of gaslighting it can actually make things worse.

Where CBT is right, is that overcoming trauma depends on establishing that the traumatic experiences are not the only options available. You can’t do that if you are still in the situation that is making you sick and distressed. You can’t overcome a toxic workplace with the power of positive thinking, nor can you become healthy if you’re trapped in an unhealthy relationship. A lot of resources for healing trauma assume you’re dealing with a single traumatic event. If it wasn’t that, and it’s complex then much of the advice doesn’t work and the whole thing takes a lot more unpicking.

If you can establish with evidence that the things you are terrified of aren’t normal and won’t keep happening, this is a solid foundation for healing. Now, if your fear goes ‘if I go outside I will be hit by a car and dreadfully injured’ you can test that pretty easily and start building evidence. If what you’re afraid of is that you don’t deserve love, or that people will use you, or that people are only being nice to you because they’re setting you up… these things are hard to evidence against. What can you even do to test those things? If your fears and traumas have everything to do with the intimate details of relationships, how can you build a sense of safety?

As far as I can make out, recovery from this kind of emotional trauma depends on having time in safe spaces. That in turn calls for having people you can trust enough to work with on examining and testing those personal fears. If you’re working with a professional, clearly they can do that, but not everyone has the resources needed for getting that kind of help. 

Survivors groups can be good – I have some experience of this. Sharing what you’ve been through and seeing how blameless other people in similar situations clearly are can help overcome feelings of shame and responsibility.

The problem with abuse of trust is that the thing you need for healing is to be able to trust someone enough to be able to explore those issues with them. This is hard and it is a lot to ask of yourself. Exposing your vulnerabilities to another person is really difficult, and there are no guarantees that you won’t Innocently pick another harmful, toxic person to bear your soul to, and end up right back where you were. That’s not your fault or your failing, but feeling like you can’t trust yourself is an understandable response. You can’t magically know what people are really like, this is mostly a matter of luck.

Good people are out there. Some people will prove worthy of your trust. There will be people you can heal with, and grow with and share your journey with. Finding them may not be easy, and taking more wounds on top of the existing ones is awful. I wish there was some sure fire way round it, but as far as I can tell, there isn’t.

Healing emotionally depends on building trust. That means learning how to trust yourself as much as it does trusting other people. If you’ve been betrayed – and abuse is always an act of betrayal – then trusting your own judgment about people becomes harder. Learning how to trust yourself again is an important part of this healing process.

Crow knowledge

A collaboration between Nimue Brown and Imelda Almqvist

Stand before the light, invite darkness

Your very presence begets shadows

To let the light touch self is to know

How bodies form night shapes also.

Become crow, become evening

Wing and feather, beak and claw

Become midnight manifest at noon

Step into your shadow, inhabit it.

Be the absence that is presence

Covering to reveal enchantments

Stand between stone and sky

To become stone and sky.

There are infinite forms to wear

All the stories in the world

Willing to enter your being

Weave richness into your soul.

It was not enough to write one tale

So many voices on the sea breeze

A tide of tales, a torrent calling

To be heard, known, embodied.

Come to the shore, let the crows

Teach you to be your other self

Your many imaginable lives

Breathing together in one skin.

*

Image by Imelda Almqvist, words by Nimue. Find out more about Imelda’s work these places…

PREGNANT HAG TEACHINGS (on-line school)

Author of four non-fiction books:

NATURAL BORN SHAMANS:  A Spiritual Toolkit For Life (Using shamanism creatively with young people of all ages) SACRED ART: A Hollow Bone for Spirit  (Where Art Meets Shamanism)

MEDICINE OF THE IMAGINATION: Dwelling In Possibility

North Sea Water In My Veins: The Pre-Christian Spirituality of the Low Countries
www.shaman-healer-painter.co.uk

Greef – a review

(Nimue)

Greef is the second book in The Bloodstone of Cardemon series. This is YA fantasy and I have reviewed book 1 – Tazmand. This is very much the sort of series you need to read in order. There are some recaps neatly embedded into the story, but it is better to start with book 1.

Reviewing a series without spoilering the books that went before is not the easiest thing in the world. This is in essence a tale about a group of young humans who are trying to survive, escape from the things various adults have planned for them and take control of their lives. Unfortunately for them, they’re being hunted – not not all by the same people or for the same reasons. This book is mostly about escaping from threats and learning about magic while travelling through the landscape a bit more. Book 1 had us mostly in a city, for book 2 we’re mostly out in the desert, passing through the necropolis on our way to a trading town at an oasis. 

What I liked most about this book was the magic. Building on the magical aspect of book 1, this novel offers an innovative approach to magic that I think Pagan readers will also find resonant. There’s a distinctly elemental aspect to some of it, while other aspects are very much about communication with the spirits. Even more delightfully, the magic is based on persuasion and negotiation, not on command. There’s a lovely animist vibe with magic users having to talk to whatever they want to work with and persuade it to act in helpful ways. 

Greef has considerably more humour in it than did the first book – Tazmand. There are fight scenes and episodes of considerable peril, and a cliffhanger ending. Still entirely suitable for anyone over the age of 12.

You can find the book over here – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Greef-Book-Two-Bloodstone-Cardemont-ebook/dp/B008A051HO

Contemplating imposter syndrome

To say that you have it, you’d perhaps need to have the sneaking suspicion that you shouldn’t feel like an imposter. Otherwise it’s not imposter syndrome, you just know that you’re somehow getting away with something, or getting something you don’t deserve or that there’s no point trying. At that point it doesn’t feel like a syndrome, it feels like a truth. Therefore anything anyone has to say about imposter syndrome might not even register.

What do you do if you feel fraudulent? The odds are you’re trying to be or do something that matters to you and that you care about wholeheartedly, but you feel like you fall short of the real thing. You aren’t good enough, not authentic, haven’t been doing it long enough, don’t know enough and so on and so forth. To feel like you don’t make the grade you have to care a lot.

People don’t tend to get that insecure on their own. They get there because someone else has rubbished them at some point. Usually when they were too young for it to be an even slightly fair assessment of their potential. It’s not the case that you have to be magically gifted from the age of five to count as good enough. There’s nothing fraudulent about needing to learn, practice and develop. The people who demand instant perfection of you are not the ones who know enough to give informed feedback.

Pretty much anything you might consider doing can be worked on. Love and determination are actually worth far more than raw talent. If you’ve got talent and no will to work with it, you won’t get anywhere. Put in enough dedicated time over enough years and you can develop decent skills in pretty much anything. You might not be the best, but you absolutely can get to a place of being good enough if you’re physically capable of doing the thing and just keep putting in the time. If you love something enough to work at it, that will do.

I honestly think love is the most important thing. If you’re doing something because you love it then there’s absolutely no way you can be an imposter. It is love of the thing you do that defines you as a person authentically doing the thing. It’s the only measure that really counts. If you love writing, and you write, then you are a writer. If you’re doing something you don’t love, out of necessity or to prove a point or for some other unhappy reason, maybe that’s not who you really are and maybe that’s not being authentic. It’s ok to do what you need to do, it’s ok to resent having to do things that don’t speak to you – it’s not a great place to be, but it’s not something to beat yourself up over.

What I haven’t worked out yet is what to do if you feel fraudulent about being a person. What do you do when asking to be treated like a person feels like a scam, and going after something you aren’t entitled to? Again, I don’t think anyone gets here on their own, and having experiences that leave you feeling like you aren’t a proper person isn’t easy to come back from. Violated boundaries, loss of autonomy, loss of dignity and self determination will cause this, but seeing the mechanics of how it happened does not cause the result to change. Feelings of being a fraud are more easily tackled when it’s about things you do rather than fundamentally who you are, but perhaps there are ways through this.

Healing old wounds

There’s an approach I’ve been using for some time now to process old wounds and deal with the past. I’ve found it very powerful, and at times deeply emotional. I’ve also found that offering this to other people can be effective.

I think about what I would say now if I could go back to a previous version of myself. I’ve been doing this recently with a version of myself who existed up until fairly recently. This version of me suffered horrendously with panic attacks and had to choose between the damage caused to chest muscles by extended periods of hyperventilating, or using the only tool that ever worked for getting that under control – pain. I have scars from what I did to myself while trying to fight panic attacks that went on for days.

So I go back to that previous me, remembering how afraid that person was and how much pain they were in. I enter into visualisations of the past, and I tell that previous me what they needed to hear – that they were good enough, and deserved better, that they were worthy of love and would find love, and that things would get better. I let myself grieve for the person I was. 

By saying to myself now the things that I needed in the past, I am able to work on healing. I go back to the child I was, bullied, bewildered and struggling to fit in anywhere, and I tell that child what I wish someone had said at the time. 

When you go back to former versions of yourself in this way, it can be harrowing. It can also create compassion for yourself that you might not have been able to feel at the time. It’s a way of bringing current insight to past situations and it definitely gets things done. I find it helps me to loosen the grip of historical things that hurt, and it helps me get old wounds to close over. I can recommend simply bringing words of care, affirmation and hope to your previous self. Speaking to earlier versions of yourself with compassion brings a lot of benefits.

When bringing this to other people, I’ve said; I wish I could go back to that time and tell you these things… and then said whatever needed saying. It seems to be a way of bringing old wounds into the present and up to the surface so that it becomes possible to do something about them.

I haven’t approached ancestral issues with this as yet, but I expect I will. I think it will be an effective way of tackling things that have been passed down, and of making peace with the past. As a practical psychological tool for working through old pain, it definitely works.

There might be a more woo-woo take to have here. If time is not relentlessly linear, if the past is also present, if healing intentions can flow from us into the past, into our own history and into our ancestral lines then maybe there is also a magical kind of healing going on here. 

I’m not so haunted by the child I used to be. She knows that what’s coming is tough, but she also knows that she can get through it and that there will be a lot of good things along the way. She’s starting to hear that she’s capable of being a good thing, able to be good enough, is worthy of care and deserves a chance. I’ve become the kind of adult who can take care of an anxious, awkward child. I can be kind to her, and learning how to do that has helped me considerably.

Going green – play to your strengths

It’s all too easy to end up feeling overwhelmed by all the things you might be doing to live a more sustainable life. However, if you play to your strengths you’ll do the most good you can in a way that has the best chance of being sustainable for you. There’s no point going vegan, giving up the car and pledging never to buy new clothes again if you can only keep that up for a week. Meaningful action has to be for the longer term so it means looking for the things you can most realistically change.

It helps if there’s something you are especially passionate about. Surfers are often passionate about keeping sewerage and plastics out of the sea, as an obvious example. People who are already enthusiastic about walking and cycling are off to a head start for improving their transport choices. If you like sewing, then keeping clothes in use is more realistic for you.

I have a deep love of gift economy. That means keeping things out of landfill via charity shop donations and freegle works well for me. It’s an easy, happy thing.

It’s worth looking around for the options that align with your preferences. If you want to save money, there are plenty of greener choices that will help you do that. If you’re passionate about food, then sourcing well and avoiding food waste are good issues to explore. If you’re into fitness and body health then becoming your own mode of transport as much as possible makes sense.

If there are things you know you would struggle to change or to give up, don’t start there. Do what looks easiest. Make the changes that aren’t going to depress you. Think about the things that would take you towards the kind of life you actually want to lead. That might mean reducing single use packaging in your home by cooking everything from scratch because you love cooking. It might mean making your own soap so as to have nicer soap as well as being more environmentally friendly. You might decide to grow your own fruit because you love gardening, and so forth. 

You won’t be able to do everything from scratch in the most sustainable way. You won’t be able to source everything you need second hand or grow it yourself. It’s important to be realistic. I can’t afford to buy everything I need in optimal ways, but I can get my soap and shampoo from my local eco-shop while supporting a charity I care about, and that’s something, and therefore worth doing. Don’t feel that your efforts are invalid if you can’t go as far as you want – focus on what you can do.

Making changes you can sustain is a really good choice. It helps against feelings of despair and powerlessness. If everyone made the changes they could most easily make we’d get a lot done quickly. It is the people who have most who most urgently need to do that – giving up their cruise holidays, their private jets, yachts, helicopters, second homes, third homes… In face of the resource squandering by those who have most it is important to remember firstly that there is some point in doing what you can and secondly that those doing most harm need to change the most. Refusing to aspire to those toxic, destructive lifestyles is a good place to start, and an easy, sustainable thing that the rest of us can do. Wanting to be envied is certainly part of what’s going on there, and being met instead with disgust might have some effect. Cultures can change and we are not obliged to look up to the people who are killing the planet.

If this sort of approach appeals to you, then do please have a look at my book on going beyond sustainability – https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/moon-books/our-books/earth-spirit-beyond-sustainability

You can get the ebook half price from the publisher at the moment, using the code SUMMER23