Nimue Brown's Blog, page 64

Becoming an outlaw

This is something I’ve been working towards for some time and I’m very excited about it. What you’re seeing in this photo, is Jessica Law and the Outlaws. I’m an Outlaw now, and this makes me very happy. It’s not obvious in the photo, but James is doing backing vocals and percussion.

I first encountered Jessica Law through her work as a voice actress on the horror podcast The Magnus Archives. I met her for the first time at steampunk festival Raising Steam last year, where I heard her performing her own entirely fabulous songs. We spent some time together at a steampunk event in Shrewsbury last autumn, where she mentioned wanting a band. I desperately wanted to offer to be part of that, but we were living a long way apart, neither of us drives and I was only just getting back into playing the viola. 

However, we’re now in the same geographical area, and both in easy striking distance of Gloucester. This photo was taken of us rehearsing at The Folk of Gloucester – a wonderful place where a lot of local steampunk events happen. 

Jessica is one of those people I find it incredibly easy to accompany. Her melodies are really unusual, but the music makes sense to me at a gut level, and I can work with her in fairly intuitive ways. If you aren’t familiar with her work I heartily recommend sticking her name in a search engine and looking her up.

We’ll be gigging a few times this summer, and hopefully beyond. It’s an exciting prospect, and we gel nicely as a band. It’s a good sound, and a good working dynamic, and also a lot of fun.

This is being a year for chasing things that call to my heart and for making radical changes in my life. There have been quite a few of those already. Becoming an Outlaw is something I’m very excited about, and is very much the kind of direction I want to keep moving in.

Unable to visualise

Regular commenter Richard Finney asked for advice about what to do if you have a hard time visualising. As I’m one of those people, too, this is something I can speak to. I generally struggle to hold visual images in my head, or to work with them which has huge implications for a lot of meditation and pathworking activities.

One option is to use a similar approach to whatever you do when reading. I can hold the information in my head in a way that allows me to feel a sense of an environment without trying to see it. If you have a strategy for dealing with visual content in fiction, I recommend trying to do similar things with visual content in meditations.

Some people find it works for them to focus on other senses – that’s something to experiment with. 

Sometimes I use existing visual material. Either I’ll have a visual prompt in front of me (oracle cards are ideal) or I’ll work with visual content I can remember. So, I might draw on my visual memory of a place I know well,or something from a creative source. Ilike using Miyazaki settings for meditations, for example. I don’t have a great visual memory, but if I focus on visual content I can build up a memory of it.

I think there is one significant advantage to not being able to visualise easily, and that’s what happens when things become visual. One of the questions around this kind of spiritual work is how you tell the difference between your ego creating things, and an actual spiritual experience. Just occasionally, I find that my meditation work will suddenly shift into something much more visual and intense as an experience. This is a strong indicator that I’ve moved beyond my own ability to imagine and into something more substantial. It’s really obvious when this happens as a direct result of my inability to visualise.

Meditations tend to be presented in visually-focused ways, but that’s not the only way to do things. You can create material that relates to your own strengths and needs. One of my favourite meditations for relaxing is to imagine that I am floating in warm water. There’s no visual aspect to it. 

If you are able to visualise, there’s a lot to be said for opening up your meditations to the rest of your senses, and exploring other parts of yourself. 

(Thank you Richard for the prompt, I’m always up for this kind of thing if people have questions on topics I’m equal to.)

Contemplating magical tools

(Nimue)

David’s post on magical tools got me thinking about what I use in my own work. Animism is at the heart of my world view, so in my interactions with objects, I don’t tend to think of them as tools so much as I think of them as friends. There are inanimate people in my life who have been with me for a long time – runes, oracle cards, jewellery, fossils, a dripstone quartz with a naturally formed hole through the centre, and things that belonged to my grandmother. There are often nuts, stones and other small local friends who find their way into my pockets. I don’t usually have any specific intentions for working with them, it’s more about a companionable way of being and the connectedness this gives me.

I’ve been reading a lot of Maria DeBlassie’s work around everyday and domestic magic, and this has impacted on how I think about some of the more mundane objects in my life. Knitting needles, sewing needles, rag rugging tools, wooden spoons in the kitchen and so forth. I’m currently making friends with a pressure cooker, and learning its ways and habits, confident that it will prove to be an excellent kitchen ally when I properly understand it. There’s everyday magic to be had in treating spaces kindly and living in gentle community with the objects that are part of my ordinary life.

When it comes to making magic, what’s most important to me are my bardic friends. The computers I write on. Pens, paper, notebooks, my viola, and the large spoons I use for percussion. These are the objects that allow me to bring my own magic into the world. I have a deep love of them all as physical items, and as collaborators in my own creative processes. I’m aware of how other objects around me support all of this – good places to sit being key. Most importantly, The Cushions Of Power (because they deserve a title) which allow me to sit anywhere comfortably and which protect my dodgy circulation from hard surfaces. 

For me, tools are collaborators. Sometimes they are the inspiration – that’s especially true of musical instruments. Their presence makes me want to create. A beautiful notebook invites poetry. A really good pen helps the story flow.

The Cruel Mother

I’ve been singing this song for many years – I’m not sure how many. When my child was a baby, it was one of the songs he reliably responded to, and I have sung him to sleep with it. The other one he especially liked was Byker Hill – which is a loud, stompy sort of song.

When we got The Ominous Folk going, this one went in the first show, and the humorous potential of singing it with James, was irresistible. It’s an odd choice of song to play for laughs, but there we go.

I believe this is a Welsh version of the song – there are a lot of Cruel Mother variants out there. I got this tune from Vicki Williams, and I’m not at all sure where she got it from. 

James and I recorded it because we’re going to be singing it with the big band at the next gig in Gloucester – an Ominous Folk of six people rather than what had been the usual four. We needed to make sure the extra Folk have the right version. It’s fun having the bigger sound, and we’re delighted to have Keith Errington and Jessica Law performing with us for the next event. I suspect we’re going to be a big band for Raising Steam at the end of July as well.

James and I have sung together from very early in his life. He’s always been a confident performer, and at this point he has a considerable vocal range and performance skills. It was very hot when we took the video, so it’s a slightly undead take on the whole song, but that’s not wholly inappropriate.

In A Hedge Druid’s Grove

David’s new book – a 12-month nature journal and memoir, In A Hedge Druid’s Grove, release date 1st July 2023, is available for pre-order!

Beaten Track book listing:

https://www.beatentrackpublishing.com/hedgedruid

Preorder paperback:

http://www.beatentrackpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php…

Preorder ebook:

http://www.beatentrackpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php…

Smashwords (ebook): https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1345396?ref=b10track

ISBN:

Paperback: 978-1-78645-587-1

eBook: 978-1-78645-588-8

This is a review from Nimue, which was written last year, when we were not working quite so closely together. No claims for objectivity are made here, but its also been the sharing of this book and others that has brought us to a place of sharing this blog and being very involved in each other’s work…

Many authors and teachers focus heavily on the festivals when it comes to defining what a Druid does. On top of that, Druidry is also often defined by the idea of collective ritual – possibly to include dazzlingly white robes and an impressive beard. I remember asking about ten years ago what the right term for a solitary Druid might be, and someone replied ‘a hedgewitch’.

What does it mean to live as a solitary Druid? What does it look like to make Druidry part of your everyday life? These are questions to which David Bridger provides substantial answers as he tracks his own experience of hedge druidry through a cycle of the seasons. 

This is not a book designed to tell other people what to do. It is however an engagingly written map of the territory, exploring what lived Druidry can look like. Much of the text is occupied with ancestral work, taking in ancestors of blood, of land and tradition and how it might be possible to work with them. Observing nature in his immediate environment, David has a much more involved process than a focus on the festivals allows a person. Nature is around us all the time, and the wheel of the year turns a little each day, not in eight dramatic jolts. Other aspects of the book are more personal and reflective, illustrating what it means in practice to live a self aware and contemplative life.

For anyone wanting a companion for their own solitary journey, this book has a great deal to offer.

I’m not a neutral outsider coming to this project. My name crops up a few times on these pages. It has been an honour to have been part of this, in a small way.

More on the publisher’s website https://www.beatentrackpublishing.com/?ref=hedgedruid

Magical Tools

(David)

Do you use any?

My set of tools is small, quite modest in nature and limited to my regular practice. Most things on my altar are natural, like the pieces of granite that help me to ground myself in various circumstances and also exist as anchors for my returns from journeying in the Otherworld. My wand is a 6-inch length of Sweet Pippin, the apple tree in my grove whose spirit guided me upon my request to this particular piece of a slender branch lying on the ground below. My candles are tealights, and their holder rough ceramic. My scrying mirror is just a piece of dark glass. The only technology involved in anything is my electric salt lamp. Nothing is fancy.

I’m certainly not claiming any sort of purity in this. No sort of moral superiority. Everything is simply simple, which suits my personality and my practice.

I’ve got a bit of a thing about practitioners on various platforms whose product is always shiny sparkling perfect. Because, truly? Life isn’t like that. Often, it’s messy. Things rarely go right first time around. Nothing is ever perfect, except perhaps in appearance with the aid of technology. I’ll give some of those practitioners credit for their effective glamour magic.

An occurrence in our house yesterday was a good example of the messy nature of nearly everything, when I tried to dress my apple wand with one of my stone bracelets.

I regularly charge several items, including my wand and my everyday jewellery (a gold ring and two bracelets of stones from Africa, one blue and one green, both of them dedicated originally to saving trees in their respective countries) with energy from Earth, Moon, Planets, Sun, and Stars for my strength and protection, and I visualise that with them every day in my shower ritual. It’s important to me.

Well, the blue bracelet is threaded on string that is still firmly knotted and good, while the green one’s string has been ever closer to disintegrating.

I’m aware of the theory that when a piece of enchanted jewellery breaks—an enchanted anything that is—it means the spell is done, and all that remains to be decided then is how to dispose of the ingredients.

But I feel the strength of this charging and direction remains in both the bracelets, and the ring, and the wand. All together. So, yesterday morning I cut the green bracelet’s thread and prepared to glue it along the length of my wand.

I didn’t intend it to be a fancy dressing. Just wished to keep them together in my ongoing work.

My wife had to take over, because we only had one bottle of glue in the house and she’s worked with it before. She said it’s a nightmare, gets everywhere, takes hours to go off during which time the two things if they have any weight will inevitably slide under gravity and fall apart before they’re set together. But mostly, she said, it’s a bloody mess and you’ll end up with your arthritic fingers all glued up for days.

She did it for me. She’s practical and excellent at making stuff happen, but it all went exactly as she predicted. Ugh.

We left the wand and bracelet outside where the glue fumes wouldn’t make me ill and any run-off wouldn’t harm anything. And when I went out for a look only a few minutes later they had indeed parted company already. Ugh.

I intended to let the glue go off for maybe 24 hours, then bind the bracelet to the wand with thread. Which I decided should have bloody done from the start as soon as she warned me about the glue.

And that, I thought, was my day.

Except that five hours later, my wife passed the wand to me through our study window. Unbeknown to me she’d had another go at it, and the glue had set. My wand and bracelet are joined together. Not perfectly, as if shop bought, but firmly and with love and belief. Happy David!

How about you? Do you use any tools? What are they, and do things sometimes get messy for you too?

With the sweat of your brow

(Nimue)

There is a scene in a Star Trek film that has stayed with me, where someone explains to Picard why they are choosing to do things in slower and more traditional ways. In this future setting, machines can do anything for you, but we often see Star Trek characters choosing to do things the slow way instead. As that scene made explicit, it’s because for everything a machine gives you, it also takes something away. There’s a realness in making things by hand.

These words are fragile, ephemeral things. A hand written document has a better chance at long term survival than something on a website. Technology moves on, and things that relate to the old technology become obsolete and are forgotten.

Some things done the slow way are less fun than others. I admit that handwashing hasn’t been much of a joy to me, and it’s tough on my hands, and I’m not honestly sorry to take that one off my list. I’d like to do more cooking from scratch – I used to cook everything from scratch, and that hasn’t been feasible for a while, because my energy levels have been so limited.

It is my understanding that when machinery was introduced into the weaving trade, that what it did at the beginning was to replace the scope for workers doing the creative part of the job, while continuing to expose them to every hazard of the process, and requiring them to keep doing the really dull bits. Technology isn’t always much of a benefit.

Often the focus when we replace something with technology, is saving money. Specifically, saving money for whoever owns the business. We’d use technology very differently if the primary aim was to enhance everyone’s quality of life. Replacing human effort with machine labour doesn’t automatically do that, because there are intrinsic rewards in making something for yourself. There’s creativity to explore, pride, delight and social reward to be had when we make things for ourselves. 

John Ruskin had some interesting things to say about the ways in which it is the imperfection of the work that expresses its humanity and aliveness to us. We can get machines to churn out identical things in a way that people can’t, but there’s an anonymous, impersonal quality to such objects. When we demand that people act like machines and churn out identical things, that’s dehumanising to both the maker and the person buying whatever is produced.

When eyeing up a piece of technology, it may be obvious what the machine is supposed to give us. It is also worth asking what the machine will take away. What would we have more of without it? There’s a power in being able to make and repair things with our own hands and often that’s worth more than just dealing with something quickly and with little effort.

If the technology enables you to do more or frees you from doing something that makes you unhappy, that’s well worth a thought. We all value different things, and most of us don’t have the resources of time and energy to do everything from scratch. It makes sense to pick the things that most appeal and dodge the things that don’t.

My latest trip around the sun

(Nimue)

Birthdays are always an interesting time for a check in, to think about where life is going, and what would be good. This last year has been something of a roller coaster. I had covid for my birthday in 2022, having spent much of that spring physically very ill. I was in a very bad place with my mental health, and had lost my sense of direction and purpose.

Things have changed a lot for me as I’ve worked out what’s been underlying some of my health problems. I’ve done some substantial work getting to grips with underlying mental health issues and I’m in a much stronger place than I was. There are things I need to change in my own thinking, but that’s going to be a process. Having experiences that counter the things that were messing me up has given me the raw material I needed to do this work.

I’m in a good place with my work at the moment, exploring writing projects I’m excited about, and with some really interesting new musical projects on the go as well. I’ll be talking about this more as I go along, no doubt.

Improving health means more scope to walk, which is an exciting prospect for me. I’m also intending to get back into dancing – this is another form of embodied expression of spirituality and creativity that I need to reclaim. I’m hopeful on that score.

After a week on Hadrian’s Wall with a great deal of solitude, I’m reconsidering how I function socially. I’ve cut back on social media time, trying to find what actually works for me there, as well. I’m an omnivert, I like to be solitary and quiet, and I like deep engagement with other people. Too much time where I have to be sociable but nothing substantial is happening, is really expensive for me. I’m useless at small talk and I find superficial social interactions tiring. The people I’m closest to and who I enjoy connecting with are very intense, and our interactions are usually based around sharing substantial things, which works for me in a very different way.

I’m feeling more protective of my time and energy. One of my resolutions back in January was to take better care of myself and be more willing to assert my own needs. I’ve made progress on that score. I’m having to do a lot of thinking about the limits of my responsibility, and things I’m prepared to treat as my problem. Saying no remains challenging, but I’m doing it, and I have good support in not shouldering more than I can bear. I’m using more of my resources for my own benefit. That includes things like taking time off when I need to, seeking things that make me happy and deploying resources in a way that improves my quality of life. These are things I’ve previously had a hard time thinking about.

I want to be happier. It’s obvious at this point that being profoundly unhappy has undermined my physical and mental health for years. Having the elements in my life that make me happy and help me to be well is essential and is no longer something I’m prepared to compromise over for anyone else’s convenience. I’m in a position where I have every chance at creating the life I want. At the moment, I’m in the process of working out what sort of things I need in that mix, what needs to change and what I want to keep.

More adventures. More music. More laughter. More creativity. More fun with food, and clothes and the details of day to day life. More walking, and dancing, and being comfortable in my own skin. More frivolity and playfulness. It’s not exactly a plan, but it is a sense of direction.

Permeable Space

I’ve long been attracted to the idea of permeable space, places that are neither entirely inside nor properly outside. Much of this comes from having a body that isn’t always mobile and can’t handle being out in all weathers. Being able to sit somewhere I can feel connected to the outside, is a real blessing. I used to sit in doorways a lot, for that reason.

Camping creates those liminal spaces of not quite in or out. I’m also aware that for a lot of human history, if you were crafting pre-glass windows in any less-warm part of the world, you’d sit at the edges. Crafting is something to do in doorways, so as to have both light and shelter, or under the eaves. There’s a sense of ancestral connection in taking up that kind of position, I have found.

I’m drawn to sensory interactions with the world. Enclosed human spaces tend to be fairly sterile, in terms of the experiences we can have. I crave the feeling of wind in my hair, sun on my skin. I want to smell petrichor in the air, the fragrance of flowers, the watery smell of the stream. I need the songs of birds in my soundscape, the rain and the stream, the wind in the trees. To be in between, not entirely exposed and not entirely insulated really speaks to me.

In my time on Hadrian’s Wall, I had a great doorway for sitting in. At the moment there are exciting glass doors that open onto greenery and it’s a bit like living in a treehouse. I like the idea of living in a treehouse, or in some building that intersects with wildness in deliberate and responsible ways. Oddly enough, living on a boat didn’t give me that, the boat felt like a very closed thing, and there was only watery movement in stormy conditions.

And of course there are all those riddling, folkloric, fairytale motifs around things that are neither one thing nor the other. Neither barefoot nor shod, neither riding or walking, one foot on a goat and one foot on a well… these are the places where the magic gets in. I wish to live on that margin.

Choosing a magical reality

The cows were guardians of the holy well. For whatever reasons, they did not want me to take the path through their field. As soon as I turned away, they stopped harassing me. In folklore, fairy cows are certainly a thing, and holy wells are bound to be magical places.

The hare who stopped in the lane and watched me for a while might have been a shapeshifter, a witch. It was an uncanny encounter.

We choose the stories we tell about our own experiences. I could tell you much less romantic stories about the cows who were in the way and the hare who stopped for a while, but where does that get me? My ability to interact effectively with the world isn’t compromised by me thinking of the cows as guardians who did not welcome my presence. The pragmatic thing to do was to get out of the field and not antagonise cows with lively calves, all of whom were equal to doing me considerable damage.

The thing to be cautious about is when the magical reality you pick largely functions to make you feel important. When you start attaching meanings to things that cast you in the role of most-important-thing-in-the-scene then choosing a magical reality can be problematic. Not everything has to be read as a message for you, or a sign. You are just one of the myriad entities moving through the world, and while encounters can be meaningful, there’s no reason to assume that the world is mostly busy trying to give you messages.

Choosing a magical reality is more about being open to possibility and having room for wonder. The world is a brighter, richer and more wonderful place if you have room for a little enchantment here and there. It doesn’t have to mean anything in particular. The hare on the lane might have been a witch, but we were merely curious about each other, it’s not something I want to attach huge symbolic importance to.

Hearing the calls of curlews but not seeing them had an otherworldly feeling to it. A call to soul, and to adventure. Because I find curlews affecting and enchanting, there’s a part of me that wants to hear their cry as a personal summons. I can feel the magic in that while knowing perfectly well that my desire is very much part of what’s going on.

When I heard the muntjak deer calling long and loud at night, I knew he wasn’t calling me. He had his own business, and I wondered what that might be. I was glad to know he was out there. I knew it was him because I’ve seen him stand at the top of the bank and make his hoarse barking sound. Just because I find no personal significance in his call does not suggest that it lacks meaning. The meaning is all his.

I do not have to believe that the wind in the leaves is there just to tell me a story. But if I find a story, or sense a possibility, I can accept that gift for what it is.