Nimue Brown's Blog, page 59

Feeling Druidic

(Nimue)

In the photo I am standing outside a yurt, where I spent a few days recently. The view before me is more dramatic than the photo shows. There were kites, ravens, owls and butterflies. It’s entirely possible that I saw my first wild pine marten. Faced with a few days living close to nature, with traffic sounds only rarely audible, it’s not so difficult to feel like a Druid. I did a lot of contemplating, meditating and connecting with the land, I was inspired and a lot of what happened felt magical.

If you can give yourself time and space to feed your soul in this way, then definitely do it. Take the space and the time, give yourself opportunity for wild encounters and deep communion.

The trickier question is what to do if that isn’t available to you. I can say from experience that it’s much harder to feel magical and inspired when you can’t reliably stand up, much less go outside. When ‘nature’ is a bit of sky and trees visible from the window, it is harder feeling connected. When you don’t have resources – time, health, energy, money or some combination thereof – going away for a magical retreat just isn’t an option. I’ve had quite a few years when that was the size of it, and that means I’m deeply aware of how blessed and privileged I am to now have opportunities like this.

One of the things it’s really important to be alert to around spirituality, is the role of privilege. The more you have to begin with, the easier it is to go to a Druid Camp, or a retreat, to go and do yoga on an exotic beach (which seems popular), to visit sacred sites and to invest in getting to feel spiritual. 

Lack of resources can limit you in all sorts of ways. Doing rituals at home is difficult through to impossible if you have little or no space and privacy. Attending community rituals may be impossible if you don’t have the resources. 

I’ve lived my Paganism every day, in all kinds of ways. Meditation, contemplation, activism, seeking to live responsibly and honourably, working with inspiration – it’s always been part of my everyday life. However, those parts of your Druidry are easily woven into the everyday living, but they won’t necessarily make you feel special, magical, uplifted or like a spiritual person. Meanwhile better resourced people may be online posting photos of the beautiful robes they wore to the beautiful ritual in the beautiful place… and it can make someone who can’t do or afford that feel second rate. I’ve been there enough times.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel glamorous, nor is there anything wrong in seeking to be uplifted and to feel good about what you do. There should be joy in the path, and scope to take pleasure in what we’re doing. It’s good to celebrate the experiences that nourish and inspire us. At the same time there are balances to strike around recognising privilege, and the ways in which our experiences act on us.

It’s easier to feel like a Druid in some contexts. Feeling like a Druid it is then easier to feel like what you do matters and that your efforts are worthy and worthwhile. It can be a lot harder feeling like a Druid when you’re slogging away at a day job, or hauling yourself through another day of pain and dysfunction. No matter what you’re doing, it’s worth taking the time to ask whether it makes you feel special, or makes you feel banal. Make sure your special feelings aren’t just manifestations of privilege, and make sure you aren’t undermining the real and valuable things you do just because you don’t have the ideal trappings top support it.

Animist reflections

“The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity — then we will treat each other with greater respect. Thus is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective.”

David Suzuki

David Bridger chose this quote to share. His thoughts are as follows: “I respect and admire David Suzuki, so I’m not surprised that this challenge of his describes so succinctly my entire philosophy. I aim to live my life this way, seeing everything from this perspective and treating the world accordingly. I believe it is the best I can do to play my part in healing a part of the great harm that humanity has done to our planet.”

Nimue adds: “If you start from the assumption that everything – animate or inanimate – might be capable of feelings and preferences, it helps you navigate kindly. Treating the inanimate with kindness gets a lot done. It’s a gentler way of being, and it helps a person slow down and appreciate what’s around them. Cause no harm that you can avoid, take no more than you need, don’t waste anything, don’t take anything for granted. These are better ways of living. I think this approach enriches your life because it involves investing more meaning and worth in everything you encounter.”

Thoughts from Llyn Tegid

(Nimue)

Llyn Tegid, or Lake Bala in North Wales is the setting for the story of Cerridwen. If this isn’t familiar, I urge you to seek out a few versions (the internet will provide) because this is very much a key tale for bards. For the purposes of this post I’m going to assume you’ve read it.

I had the blessing of being able to visit Llyn Tegid recently, and was struck by some thoughts. I make no claim whatsoever for having stumbled upon a truth,

While I was at the lake, I was thinking about the shape of the landscape, and the way in which the surrounding hills are suggestive of a cauldron. Now, if the landscape itself was the cauldron, then the lake would be the potion in the cauldron. This brought up two further lines of thought. The potion is made for Cerridwen’s son – Morfran. The name means cormorant. A potion that is a lake made for a son who is a cormorant is a very different sort of story. It also struck me that with this interpretation, the breaking of the cauldron and the poisoning of the horses works in a somewhat different way, although drowning seems a more likely outcome if a landscape breaks open and releases water.

What makes this even more interesting is that Llyn Tegid is itself a glacial lake. The Welsh name of Llyn Tegid is associated with Cerriden’s giant husband Tegid Foel whose court site is now under the lake. Given how often giants are associated in folklore with landscape features and in mythology with landscape creation stories, it is tempting to make some connections. It suggests to me powers in the landscape, gods or other primordial creator figures whose beings, bodies and lives create the land.

I came away from the lake with strong feelings about the possibility that Cerridwen’s story might be far more to do with the landscape of the lake than I had previously considered. 

I wondered what it might mean for the lake to be the potion and the source of inspiration. I wondered about whether this might be a story of how something made for the wild things, for the cormorant son, and the daughter who I associate with flowers (although I have no idea where I got this association) became something for humans. 

It is all speculation, all dreaming and wondering and responding to an experience of a landscape.

As I was leaving the lake, I was fairly sure I saw a cormorant flying low over the water. It seemed significant.

Stories and a sense of self

The stories we tell about ourselves not only reflect who we are, but inform it. This isn’t just about the things we say to other people, it also includes the things we tell ourselves inside our own heads. How we understand events and translate them into stories about who we are and what our lives are like has a huge impact on us. People can experience the same events and turn them into very different stories with entirely different meanings and consequences.

I remember many years ago being caught out in a rainstorm and getting drenched. It was summer, so not that big a deal I thought. I laughed as it happened, and hauled my soggy self home and dealt with the wet. The person I was with – who was not any more physically fragile than me – was horrified by the experience, needed a hot bath and had to go to bed, convinced they were going to be terribly ill from a chill. They weren’t ill but they did lose the rest of the day to feeling very sorry for themself.

It’s always tempting to want to tell the stories that cast you in the best possible light. That can mean missing out the details that might undermine such a story. Many things look different if you remove them from their context, or don’t explain how they started. You don’t have to go far down that line to pass beyond wanting to think well of yourself and into active lying with the potential to harm other people.

It’s also far too easy to internalise stories that make us feel powerless. When all of the power seems to lie outside of us, not only is nothing our fault, but we’ll also persuade ourselves we don’t have the means to fix or improve anything. It’s hard if you’ve had a lot of encouragement to think that you can’t do anything, but taking control of your life and your story is really important.

It is worth stopping every now and then to think about the kinds of stories you tell about your own life. Are you mostly looking for praise, or for sympathy? Do you want people to be impressed by you, or entertained? Do you tell stories out of empathy, or are you trying to prove something? What kinds of stories do you think other people want or need to hear? Which stories do you come back to most often? Is there one big story you have to keep telling people because it defines you?

And then ask what those stories give you and what they allow. Ask if you’re letting yourself get away with things, or punishing yourself unnecessarily. Ask if your stories about yourself are true, or whether they might be someone else’s story, put on to you at your expense.

Consider the things your culture, family etc tell you about what your stories mean, and whether any of that is fair or helpful. 

Think about the kinds of stories that would help you most. What could you say to yourself that would help you live a happier and better life?  I had quite a few years where I had to retrain myself using ideas of adequacy – I am ok, I am good enough, I am tolerable, and things of that ilk. If you’ve been crushed, holding big positive stories can be impossible. Small, modest stories can get you through. Telling yourself stories that suggest it is worth keeping going, worth trying, and worth hanging on to hope can be the difference between life and death.

Advice for new bards

Some suggestions of where to start if you want to follow the bard path.

Spend as much time as you can with other people’s creativity. Even if you know how you want to express yourself, there’s a lot you can learn from others. Exploring creativity that isn’t the sort of thing you mean to do will broaden and deepen your understanding of how people work with inspiration, and will enrich your life with beauty.

Invest time in learning your craft. Invest time in practice and exploration. Give yourself permission to try things, and permission to make mistakes. Put in the time, but don’t feel obliged to stick with something if it doesn’t work for you.

Find fellow travellers. It’s good to have people you can share the journey with. Find people who will encourage you and cheer you on, and people whose work you love and want to support and encourage. Make praise and enthusiasm part of what you do.

Be curious about everything. Take interest in life, in humanity, in the land, and in anything that you find beautiful or moving. Inspiration will find you if you do this. Make space for inspiration to come to you, take time to practise and experiment, to ponder and daydream.

Read folklore and fairytales. Seek out traditional stories and do so with respect if you’re exploring stories that don’t belong to you. Dedicate yourself to learning – anything at all. History, politics, herbalism, sweet making, dance, potato sculpture, art movements, the structure of cells, the structure of soap operas, the details of the lives of bats, or porcupines or snails… any subject that calls to you is relevant. Follow your heart. Don’t worry about what’s worthy or significant, just trust that what speaks to you is valid. 

Find people you want to create for. Think about what you want to bring into the world and what you want to change with your creativity. Recognise and embrace the power you already have to make a difference. Take risks. Show up. Try.

Relationships, accountability and free passes

Many years ago, there was a man in my life who told me that he couldn’t bear to hurt people. What this meant to him was he felt that if he did cause me pain, I should not tell him because that would be far too traumatic to him. That relationship did not go anywhere. It’s an experience that has stayed with me over the years because it raises so many questions for me about what any of us feel entitled to do in response to our own distress.

Clearly in this example a line has been crossed. Refusal to take responsibility for causing harm isn’t acceptable, no matter what horrors you have in your back history. He certainly had a few, and they entirely justified him in asking for slack to be cut. They did not entitle him to a free pass on shitty behaviour.

There are a lot of people out there who struggle with all kinds of things – the trials and traumas of neurodiversity, chronic pain, limiting conditions, the constant frustrations of bodies that don’t work. There are many people living with ongoing trauma and with trauma legacies, dealing with mental illness, and with appalling levels of stress and pressure. Anyone dealing with troubles on those scales is going to mess up sometimes. We all mess up. Hurting and flailing, anyone can make serious mistakes.

There is however a world of difference between asking for understanding when you’ve messed up, and asking for a free pass. We can afford to be patient and compassionate in face of each other’s struggles. There is absolutely nothing that you can struggle with that makes it ok to take that out on someone else or otherwise cause someone harm. If you’ve got to a point where you genuinely can no longer control yourself (it happens, I’ve been there twice) that raises significant issues. 

Needing someone else to be responsible for you because you are unable to take responsibility for yourself isn’t asking for a free pass. Babies do not get a free pass, they get support around the things where they have no options at all. This is a state of being that goes with having little or no power over yourself, as with being seriously ill. If however you are able to use your issues as a way to hold power over other people – as with the example I offered at the start of this blog – it is simply a power move.

Human minds are shockingly fragile things. I don’t think it’s possible to understand just how fragile we are without having experienced a breakdown of mental functioning. It’s a hideous, terrifying thing to go through. It robs you of dignity, autonomy and the ability to trust yourself. There but for the grace of (god, goddess, the universe, sheer blind luck) goes any of us. Part of the path back from all of that involves being able to reclaim your power and take responsibility for your actions, and the consequences of your actions.

Being accountable and taking responsibility is the foundation of relationships. If you don’t have that, you don’t really have anything. People might choose to take care of you, but you can’t have equitable relationships without those things. The desire to be comfortable, not to be challenged and to be free from all criticism is a really unhealthy impulse that robs a person of any scope for real human engagement. It’s what takes people into narcissism – a condition that is entirely built out of the choices of the person suffering from it. No matter how uncomfortable, it is better to own things and deal with them, and thus get to have the fullest and most meaningful relationships you can.

Conversations with the Tarot

(Nimue)

Maria DeBlassie’s Conversations with the Tarot is a beautifully written, inspiring and insightful book. You could use it as a divination tool, as inspiration for your own journey or to deepen your own tarot practice. There is a wealth of gentle wisdom here and compassionate insight and I heartily recommend reading it.

I’m a big fan of Maria’s work – her fiction and nonfiction books alike are always things of beauty and thoughtfulness. Everyday magic is the heart of her practice, and her tarot book also reflects this. It’s not about big drama and dramatic life changes, it’s about the day to day choices that truly shape our lives. In this book, Maria offers tarot as a way of enriching your life and exploring the possibilities around you. It’s an uplifting read, full of good advice delivered with warmth and understanding.

I’m not a serious tarot user – although I’ve had enough exposure to it over the years to have a sense of how it works. Maria’s insights into the cards focus on the idea of using them for personal growth rather than for telling the future or for trying to guide other people. This means her exploration of each card is rooted in the realities of daily life. I really enjoyed this, and it meant that every card felt relevant and had things to offer me. I don’t always find that with tarot, and I’m very attracted to this everyday approach to life and magic.

Whether you normally use tarot or not, this book is a great tool for reflection and contemplation. It’s an invitation to make room for magic in your daily life, and to create your life deliberately. The deliberate life is something I’m very keen on as part of my Druidry, as is the invitation to magic, so this really worked for me as a reader. I see a lot of scope for just opening the book at random and taking whatever wisdom the page in question has to offer, and using it much like a divination set. It may also appeal as a map to undertaking a similar project. If you’re involved with tarot, you might enjoy reading this as a first step in taking a similar journey and writing your own meditations on each card.

Find out more on the authors website https://mariadeblassie.com/

Magic and Druidry

(Nimue)

David’s recent post on high magic struck me as significant and something I need to respond to. When most people think of Druids – contemporary or historical – what they tend to envisage is the beardy sage in a white robe, doing some involved ritual, probably at Stonehenge. For many people, Druidry conjures up an image of ceremony, formal ritual, tightly written scripts and pageantry. Unlike witchcraft, Druidry doesn’t always carry those same connotations of spellwork, but may well suggest something high brow, through to pretentious.

What attracted me to the idea of Druidry wasn’t that at all. It had everything to do with my own feeling that Druidry and folklore naturally relate to each other. A feeling I evidently have in common with David. I know this is a notion a lot of modern Druids find resonant. Many of us are drawn to earthier takes on Druidry, to activism, simple living, the image of the bard, to a mix of mirth and reverence, and the idea of raising boils with satires. 

I know many Druids who are deeply invested in their particular landscape, history and local traditions. When you’re thinking about ritual on those terms it makes little sense to go all grandiose and verbose. Talking to the dirt, the mud, the fallen leaves, the dead, the rain and other grubby things, there’s no room to be ‘high’. My rituals have always been low to the ground, more celebration than ceremony.

It is interesting to me that the word ‘druid’ has the power to conjure up such radically different ideas for people. As with anything whose truth is uncertain, there’s room in the idea of Druidry for people to make it be whatever they want. So for some, Druids are awful non-Christians practicing human sacrifice and being barbarous at the edge of the Roman empire. For some, Druids are wise and noble proto-Christians. Some see power and politics, usually alongside the mighty beards and pristine white robes. Some see nature worshiping hippies. History has no definitive answers for us in this regard.

Projecting is a very human sort of activity. We bring what we know and what we feel to anything that isn’t clearly defined for us. It happens with all religions. People who want justifications for violence will find that in their sacred texts. People who want to heal the sick and care for the downtrodden will find the inspiration for that in the exact same sacred texts. What we find when we come to religion is often simply a reflection of ourselves, and I have no idea if it’s even possible to go beyond that.

I find my Druidry at the margins and under the sky. I’m drawn to the patches of dirt closest to me, not the idea of a massive sun cult or an ancient order. I’m not orderly by nature. How we do our Druidry is very likely an expression of who we are, and I find I am fine with that. I don’t know that definitive truth does anyone much good spiritually.

Resources for dealing with pain

Bodily pain has always been an issue for me – hypermobile bodies are all too easy to hurt. Soreness and stiffness are pretty much constant for me, but at the moment it’s tending to be at a level I can cope with. 

Usually I rely on willpower and discipline for managing pain when there’s enough of it to be intrusive. I can push through a lot, and I can tune out a lot. However, those are finite resources and when I’ve been tired, stressed or worse still burned out, I’ve not been able to deal with pain by force of will.

At that point it comes down to how much emotional resilience I have. If I’m in a decent place emotionally I can tough things out, although if I’m in pain for long enough, that will wipe me out emotionally. 

If I’m wiped out emotionally as well, the combination of being in pain and having no resources I can use will tend to push me into panic and distress. Perhaps not unreasonably. At this point I’m trying to come up with strategies for handling that better – there’s not much I can do in that kind of situation, but there may well be things that can be done to help me.

Stress is a major underpinner in all of this. If I’m stressed I’m more likely to tense up and this increases my pain levels. Stress makes it harder to concentrate and robs me of mental capacity for coping. It also significantly undermines me emotionally. I can take modest amounts of stress, I think I’m about average on that score. However, I’ve had to deal with some extremely stressful things along the way, and it takes a toll. My most recent episode with unmanageable pain was clearly stress triggered, and getting one in a context where my general stress levels were much lower has really made the process obvious.

It’s an alarming thing getting to a point of no longer being able to function. Like most people who live with pain, I can stay functional in face of pain far more readily than people who aren’t used to it. The kinds of things I’ve been through mean I’m fairly tough mentally and can endure a lot. I’m coming to the conclusion that I might feel more emotion than is typical, and that the degree to which I get upset about things has everything to do with the degree to which I care about things. That’s not something I have any interest in changing.

It is however interesting to ask questions about what would make me better resourced. Less stress is right at the top of the list. Less stress makes everything more feasible. Being able to rest and sleep radically improves my mental functioning and emotional resilience. I think rather than trying to firefight this, the key is almost certainly to look at how relaxed and how well resourced I am the rest of the time. Trying to deal with this level of malfunction when I’m in the middle of it is nigh on impossible. Having a life where this sort of thing just doesn’t happen would be far more effective. 

Rather than pushing to my limits all of the time I’m going to look more at building inner resources and resilience. I’d be much harder to break if I wasn’t spending most of my time a hair’s breadth from breaking point, and that now seems like a realistic goal. I’m in a position where I can genuinely choose to change this, and that’s an exciting prospect and an enormous privilege.

Lammas and the wheel of the year

This is one of the widely celebrated Pagan festivals that I don’t really connect with. I honour the solstices, Beltain and Samhain. I find equinoxes perplexing. I’ve never found Imbolc or Lugnasadh especially relevant.

During the years when I was part of several ritual groups, I celebrated the usual eight festivals because I had people to celebrate with. For me, community has always been an important aspect of ritual. I’m more drawn to doing ritual as a community endeavor than I am to celebrating the seasons in this way on my own.

My ideal act of celebration for this time of year is to walk somewhere the grain crops are ripening in the fields. This isn’t always possible and mostly happens by chance – use of land being somewhat unpredictable, and not having been able to go out by car in search of grain fields. This year it’s incredibly wet, and while I haven’t had any close encounters with grain at this point, I can’t imagine those crops are doing well.

I don’t have the immediacy of connection with the land and the seasons that mean my prospects for the winter are shaped by what’s in the fields right now. I think that’s part of why Imbolc and Lugnasadh don’t resonate with me – they’re much more about active participation in farming. At Beltain I can connect with the exuberance of May blossom and bluebells. At Samhain I can draw on the folk traditions about ancestry and the dead, those things can be part of my life.

I will not be scything the wheat. I don’t even know where my nearest wheat field is this year. It’s not an easy thing to find out from where I live, and I think that’s likely true for most people living in the UK. I don’t have a good relationship with wheat at this point as I can only eat small amounts without getting ill. When it comes to eating, oats are a much more important food for me. Not that I know where my nearest oats are growing either. There’s a lovely, delicate quality to oats and I’ve enjoyed encountering them in the past. 

There’s no reason to think that ancient Pagans all celebrated all eight festivals anyway. So, if like me you find there are some that don’t really do it for you, that’s fine.