Nimue Brown's Blog, page 65

Fast Fashion at the Centre of the World

Quite some years ago, I wrote a novel called Fast Food at the Centre of the World. It went out as audio on a podcast, and then that podcast died the death so I migrated the project over to Bandcamp. It’s still there, if you feel moved to hunt it out, and if you listen to the episodes without downloading them, there’s no cost.

That novel is finally going to come out on paper, which is exciting. The publisher wondered if I might be willing to write a sequel. There’s nothing like being asked for something to get me motivated. So, the characters are about ten years older, because that’s about how much time has passed in my life since the first one. We’ve moved from fast food to fast fashion as a theme, but really this is hopepunk territory – slightly futuristic with people dealing with the collapse of civilization as we know it in amusing and upbeat ways.

The whole project draws a lot on things I’ve learned through the Transition Towns movement. There’s also steampunk elements, not least an actual steam train at the centre of the story. I’m intending there to be a fair amount of humour and levity.

The thing is, I haven’t written this book. I’ve started serialising it on Patreon but I’m only a few months ahead of what I need to post, so it’s going to involve some leaping about without a safety net. I’ve only had one novel I couldn’t finish – there was very nearly a second, but I went back to it last year and sorted it out. The odds are I can make this work. Being accountable to people tends to help me come up with ideas, as well.

It also means there’s scope to give feedback as I go along. I’m not inviting people to try and steer the story, but at the same time, I’m someone who is responsive to enthusiasm, and am likely to dig in if anyone gets especially interested in some aspect or another of the tale. My hope is that this book will stand alone, and if it works out well, I might go for some more stand-alones in the same setting. 

If you fancy being in for the journey, become a Dustcat over on Patreon, or a Steampunk Druid (which gives you the fic and non-fic content I’m creating each month. If you’re really keen, you can be a glass heron and have all the electronic stuff plus things in the post.

https://www.patreon.com/NimueB

Log Rhythm

(David)

Gently, dawn whispers into the mist;

imagines fleeting shadow shapes

in voile scarf-skin;

drops lighted silk drapes

from a glistening canopy,

skirting and flirting around the boles

of forbidding tree trunks,

teasing and pleasing

to dryadic creaking;

revealing a log:

a hollow log of deadwood,

cave-in full of leaf mould,

home to generations of tiny horrors,

a fossilized image of former splendour

living a kind of life

after a kind of death,

outside time,

unaffected by seasons

yet painfully aware

of every tick and every tock.

Shafts of virgin sunlight

pierce the glowing haze,

sear away the negligee,

bind the dryads until dusk.

Night surrenders all to day.

A butterfly dances in a beam,

dressed in golden, molten honey:

grace and beauty,

lighter than a feather,

breathtaking choreography.

Can a log hold breath?

Can a hollow log,

outside time,

conceive of the urgency

in a brief life of beauty?

Can a log wish so hard

that the grass around it scorches?

Can a butterfly hear that wish,

or does she simply, lightly, land

and kiss the smiling log to sleep?

Gently, evening draws a velvet curtain

Over the ticking earth.

Mist issues from the soil

and playful wisps caress the dryads

until even they notice the hush, and still.

In a hollow log,

in a pocket of leaf mould,

new life has been born.

A seed has been planted:

a buddleia seed.

The call of birds

Moving around a bit of late, I’ve become conscious of just how specific a thing a soundscape is. I tend to start my days listening to birdsong – often the dawn chorus. This varies quite a lot depending on who the singers are. Waking up to sparrows is very different to waking up with blackbirds. I’ve woken to the calls of gulls, which was memorable. 

The landscape itself informs the bird voices likely to appear. Last week there was a lot of marshland in my surroundings, and I’m fairly sure I was hearing oystercatchers and curlews. When I lived on a boat, wild cranes were part of my soundscape and their calling was haunting and beautiful. Living near trees, I often hear owls in the evening and I’ve never lived somewhere where larks dominated the sound of the place – although I love to visit the places larks frequent.

I’m fortunate in that I have mostly spent my time in places quiet enough for bird song to be audible. Even so, I note the differences between the small town I call home, and the wilder places I have been spending my time. So many of us are used to impoverished landscapes where we don’t hear much that is natural. Recently I’ve walked places where the air hummed with the activity of bees and other insects – something that was normal in my childhood, but isn’t normal now.

I wonder what this landscape would have sounded like a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. I have an increasing sense of what’s missing, I’ve been feeling that a lot lately. How little life there is compared to how things must have been in the past. 

Castlerigg stone circle

Castlerigg is a stone circle near Keswick, in the Lake District (UK). I first went there in my late teens, and haven’t visited in a good twenty years. I didn’t think it was a place I would ever be likely to see again. Getting to have a brief visit on the way back from Northumberland was an absolute blessing and I was quite emotional about it.

I haven’t got a photo of the whole circle because there were a lot of people there, including a picnic happening in the middle. My feeling is that this circle has always been a place for people to gather and hang out. The location is incredibly dramatic, with a ring of high fells surrounding the much smaller hill where the circle stands.

I did not perform a ritual or attempt any deep communication with the place. But it was good to walk the circle of stones, to stand with a few of them, and put my hands on some of them. It was wonderfully good to see the landscape, and simply to be in it for a while.

My life is changing a lot at the moment. It’s going to involve more being out in the world, this much is clear. More walking, and more time to explore landscapes. More scope to go out and do things that feel inherently Druidic and that have more of a spiritual aspect to them. Ritual has featured more in the last year than it has in the last decade, and I’m interested in exploring it as something expressive and as a way of making beauty. 

For the first time in a very long time, it makes sense to ask what I want, and not to be so focused on trying to fit in around what everyone else wants. My heart longs for something more expansive, something wilder and more exciting, a life with more possibilities in it. More prehistoric sites, more wide open views, and more adventure.

Fairytales, Families & Forests

Georginana Keable and Dawne McFarlane have created a brilliant resource for anyone who wants to wants to tell stories to small children. I’ve come to this as a reviewer and I don’t currently have any small children in my life, but I have had some experience of parenting, storytelling and of dealing with children in Pagan settings.

This book does a number of things and it does them all very well. It makes a case for why storytelling with children is a good idea – exploring what spoken stories offer to children emotionally, psychologically, socially and in terms of their learning and development. The book offers the reader a selection of stories, organised by age and with tips on how to share them The stories come from around the world, and are gentle and eco-friendly tales selected to help a child develop a good relationship with the natural world. There’s good content on story sourcing and avoiding appropriation.

You would be able to just read the stories to a child if you aren’t confident about telling them, and the book has a lot of charming child-friendly illustrations for anyone who goes that route.

Where the book really shines is that it includes really good pointers for how to get inside a story. There’s a lot more to storytelling than just memorising the words. To be a good storyteller you need much more of a relationship with the story you are telling. Getting to know a story and building a relationship with it isn’t an obvious process nor is it something most of us have been taught. These insights are really substantial. Understanding how to engage with a story opens the way to being able to tell it from the inside, rather than just reciting it.

There’s also a wealth of wisdom here about how to work with children of different ages. These aren’t just storytelling tips, but guidance for living and parenting that I have no doubt many people would find helpful. Small children can be terrifying with their combination of total need and limited means to communicate, and so many people come to parenting with little experience of small children. Guidance for how to deflate tensions, manage behaviour and handle your own emotions in a gentle way are valuable things to have in your toolbox, making this a good choice of a gift for new parents.

This book has applications for anyone working with young children – babies through to about seven years of age. It’s equally going to be useful to anyone parenting, or otherwise involved in the life of a small person. If you don’t have family story traditions to draw on, and want to access

traditions and fairy stories then this is an ideal book to get. It’s very much written for people in that position, who want their families to reconnect with nature, and with more traditional ways of being in the world, but haven’t had that knowledge passed down to them.

There’s a lot of guidance for building community and running events, too. All of that is relevant for anyone exploring storytelling in a community setting, regardless of the age of participants.

If you’re on the bard path and you don’t have a family background that featured story and fairytales, you might find this a very helpful book even if you aren’t particularly considering working with children. Many of us have inner children in need of nurturing, and understanding what those children might have needed and missed out on can be relevant when working with adults. I found a lot here to contemplate in that regard.

More on the publisher’s website – https://www.hawthornpress.com/books/storytelling/fairytales-families-forests/

Daydreaming for Druids

Any serious action begins with an idea. Anything new that humans do will start with a thought, a vision, a dash of hope, a sense of possibility. If we are to do more than repeat the same things unquestioningly, day after day then we need the time to ask questions, to wonder… what if….?

Daring begins with dreaming. Transformation emerges from the desire for something different. Making change is best done deliberately and with intent. It’s easier to do that well if you first dream up a direction to go in and some sense of what you want.

I’m not a big fan of sitting around waiting for life to change by magic. I don’t expect to put a paintbrush to a canvas and have a remarkable piece of art turn up with no planning. I wouldn’t sit down at a piano and expect to be able to compose a sonata off the cuff. While I like winging things when I’m writing, I spend a lot of time developing settings, characters, themes and intentions before I start trying to figure the story out.

All of life works this way. Anything that isn’t either repetition or reaction starts with wondering. What would be better? How can have more joy in my life? What seems exciting to me? What do I need more of? Having time to both ask these questions and to reflect on possible answers is essential to me. I also like to think about what the people around me want and need. What are the people in my life excited about? What do they need more of? What can we do together?

There have been times in my life when stress and urgency hasn’t left me any time for wondering. When all you’re doing is firefighting one day to the next, there isn’t time to think about how to handle things better, or what the priorities should be. If you find you do have time for a little daydreaming and contemplation, use some of that to think about whether the people around you have time for that, too. Mental labour isn’t always visible, and women carry a disproportionate amount of it, so spare a thought for anyone who may be carrying more of the thinking load and try to make sure that your space for contemplation doesn’t exist because someone else lacks for time to themselves.

Daydreaming is easier when you have time alone and some occasional freedom from responsibilities. Without that space, the freedom to choose and act may itself seem unthinkable. Daydreaming thus turns out to be something that has aspects of privilege, power and politics to it. In some jobs, no one will question your need for time spent staring into the middle distance thinking about things. Low paid jobs may also require thought and reflection, but it’s seldom valued in the same way.

There’s nothing wrong with daydreaming about small and mundane things. If what you long for is modest, that’s no less valid than craving some more expensive and exotic thing. Allowing yourself space for longing makes room for the possibility of seeking what you need, which is really important for wellbeing. Daydreaming can also give you space for gratitude, for reflecting on what you do have and on what’s bringing you joy and richness. Life is more rewarding when there’s time to think about what has happened to you, and what you want to have happen, exploring experience and desire in gentle ways.

When you know what you want and value, that also makes you harder to manipulate. When there isn’t time to dream and reflect, unconscious desires can easily be tugged on to send you off buying things that promise to fill the gap. It’s better to know and name those gaps and stop people pouring snake oil into them.

Acceptance and Challenge

Acceptance of another person can be a very powerful gift to give. Being fine with how someone is can be affirming. For the person who has experienced being unacceptable, it can be a restorative thing simply to have someone not find you a problem. This has obvious applications around how we collectively treat people from minorities, and people who are disadvantaged or simply different.

However, acceptance doesn’t work in all circumstances. It can mean leaving a person stuck. If all a person knows comes from trauma, limited opportunity or bad examples, then accepting them may deny them the scope for change. When we don’t challenge each other, we can deny each other opportunities for growth, for healing and for better understanding.

Challenges like this are essential for overcoming traumatic experiences. People take most damage from trauma when the trauma becomes normal to them and informs their expectations. When that’s happening, the suggestion that you might actually be safe right now can be challenging. Being told that the thing you fear most isn’t happening, when you are triggered, can help a lot with healing, but isn’t easy having your reality challenged that way. For the person unpicking the effects of being gaslit, hearing things that don’t fit with your distorted and damaged sense of reality can be painful, but it is the only way of recovering.

It can be good to be challenged to be a better person. That’s not always easy. There’s real discomfort in having to look hard at your own behaviour and admit that you could do better. It’s also hard when not being able to do better wasn’t lack of effort, but lack of opportunity – that can be a painful place to find yourself. The challenge of not accepting what’s been normal for you can mean breaking with family norms, your background, your culture in order to strike out and do better.

Sometimes acceptance itself can be challenging. “Bring it” is a powerful invitation, when you can tell someone you aren’t just tolerating them but actively welcoming who and how they are. If there hasn’t been space for you as a person, then feeling welcome and learning how to show up as yourself can be challenging. These are good challenges to have and to offer but that doesn’t make them easy.

One of the challenges we can all take on is to consider the ways in which we accept, or do not accept other people’s suffering. How do we react to suffering that can’t be fixed – long term illness and disability aren’t always curable. Do we accept what people tell us about their conditions, or do we put pressure on them because we want them to be well, and we want a cure? Management of chronic illness tends to be kinder than relentlessly pushing for impossible fixes. Do we accept mental illness in those around us? Do we push them to fix themselves because we want to feel better? Are we prepared to find out what’s causing the problems and to tackle that? Are we willing to accept poverty as a political necessity? Are we prepared to

throw a percentage of people under a bus so that the super-rich can continue taking far more than their fair share? Are we willing to accept hunger, and homelessness as issues for other people?

It’s all too easy to accept things for other people and challenge only in face of your own discomfort, but I think often those are the least helpful responses.

Over the hills and far away

(Nimue)

There’s a unique pleasure in coming to the top of a hill with no idea what you’ll see. It’s a giddy joy that I’d almost forgotten feeling, it having been years since I last walked anywhere unfamiliar. I’ve grown used to walking a very limited number of short routes, where I know who and what to be looking for in terms of wildlife. It’s been exciting heading out with no idea of what I might encounter.

There were beach trees with wonderful, twisty roots. Mossy secretive places where water ran. A river sparkling over rocks, dappled with tree shade. My first foxglove of the season. A copper filed maple (I think). I’ve not seen one of those before. Yellow poppies at the woodland’s edge. I don’t have a camera at the moment, I could not bring these wonders back to share.

I am finding that as I rebuild my strength, my confidence is coming back. I haven’t walked alone much since my early twenties, and the last few years had left me a nervous, cautious sort of walker. But, being out in the world alone, and determined to rely on myself I’ve found something of my own former strength. Alongside it I’ve rediscovered my love of adventure. I’ve been thinking a lot about the younger, more daring me who walked alone, and remembering what that person wanted and imagined.

I’ve found a lot of lost parts of myself of late. The person who can perch, pixie-ish and crossed legged just about anywhere. It’s curious how not being able to sit like myself, or get up from the floor had been a loss of self. I’m stronger now than I’ve been in years, and standing up from sitting on the floor is no longer prohibitively difficult.

Out in an unfamiliar landscape, I’ve re-found my capacity to daydream and speculate. There’s room in my head now for ideas and reflections, and that too feels more like a person I know and recognise. I wonder about the lives and stories suggested by the landscape.

After a week of wandering about here, I do know some landmarks. I stopped repeatedly on this most recent walk to see how it connected with other places I’ve been. Picking out lanes, starting to make sense of how roads, hills and waterways connect. Building a sense in myself of the shape of the land. It’s not a deep knowing, those take years to build, but there is delight in piecing together what I do know.

Today I dabbled in the luxury of being a little lost. I’d had a good look at the map before I headed out, but I didn’t carry a map. This is something I used to relish. I was hardly off the beaten track, there were footpath signs and it was easy enough to find my way. However, having reached the place I’d sought, I took a different route back, trusting what I knew of the land to find a way by guessing. I was rewarded with success, with views, and with a close encounter with a hare.

Ancestors in the landscape

I’ve been spending time at Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland and it’s been a great opportunity to encounter ancestors of place. The Romans are very present here – in place names, the wall itself, the roads that follow their routes, and the areas of land they drained. Their presence forms the basis of a long distance walk, with walkers resulting in tourist infrastructure.

Much of the wall isn’t in the wall itself, but has been co-opted to build other walls and buildings. There’s a marker stone in the wall of the farm across the road from where I’m staying. Much of the farm is built from the wall, and apparently you can’t dig far without hitting stone. The Romans are very present in this landscape, and people who live here are very much living with them.

I’ve done a bit of walking along the route of the wall. It’s a dramatic landscape, and must be cold and bleak in the winter. In summer, being stationed here might be quite a pleasant gig, but much less so in cold weather. It must have been a bit of a system shock coming here – enough so that Romans stationed here used to wear socks under their sandals, and might even go so far as to don something resembling trousers.

I’ve had the opportunity to learn something about Roman military life. I’ve been surprised by the degree to which it was actually about building things – the wall and the roads – rather than about fighting. I hadn’t previously been aware of who it was in the Roman empire who did the building, so that’s been a significant thing to learn. I’m not especially drawn to the Romans, but I am always interested in ancestors of land, and right now, they are the dominant ancestors in the landscape I’m visiting.

As a young man, my father walked Hadrian’s wall. It’s interesting being in a place where I know he walked. We’ve done very little walking together since I was a child, so there are all kinds of interesting aspects to this for me.

It’s been a great experience for developing the Pagan Pilgrimage book I’m currently writing. It’s also been exciting having time in a landscape unfamiliar to me – not something I’ve been able to do for some years. It’s rekindled in me the desire for adventure, and to walk in places unfamiliar to me. I’ve been sorely limited over the last three years especially. However, life is opening up at the moment and I think there will be more adventures in unfamiliar places.

Venerating the Land

(Nimue)

Picking up David’s wonderful prompt from yesterday… Venerating the land is something I’ve primarily expressed through walking. For most of my life, time spent on foot in the landscape has been a major part of how I do my Paganism, how I connect with the ancestors, with the wild, the elements and the cycle of the seasons. It’s where I find much of my inspiration, think things through, find poetry and philosophy. Walking has been the heart of my Druidry.

Then in 2020 I got really ill – not with covid, but the extra stress the pandemic caused certainly didn’t help. Anaemia contributed to low blood pressure, and in the years that followed there were a lot of days when getting around the flat was as much as I could do. Walking was often unthinkable, and longer walks were impossible. I felt lost and disconnected. With hindsight it’s evident that the misery this caused serve to further mess up my body chemistry, adding to the problems.

Stress and misery aren’t good for a body. Walking was a big part of how I dealt with stress and found things to be happy about. It’s been a tough few years. However, at this point I am definitely healing, which feels like a miracle. I’m still not a very fast walker, and I can only manage a few miles at a time, but my blood pressure is sensible, and I can get out and about without being overwhelmed by dizziness. I haven’t had heart palpitations in quite a while and I’m starting to think I’ve beaten it.

This week I’ve been out and about a lot, managing walks that would have been unthinkable a matter of months ago. I’ve felt confident enough to walk on my own – an act of faith in my own body, and in my ability to deal with whatever I find out on unfamiliar paths. I feel so much more like myself. My heart needs landscape and the open sky. Being unable to walk much has been soul destroying.

Walking allows me to love the land, one foot at a time. I can discover places, and know them slowly, reverencing each encounter, each detail. Birds and orchids, trees and streams, I do my veneration through the act of encountering. Moving through a landscape is an animist conversation, one in which I spend more time listening than talking.

I make no sense to myself when feel cut off from the land and the seasons. I am not myself if I’m not out under the sky. I thought I had lost those parts of myself forever, and am experiencing a deep joy around finding that simply isn’t true. I had not dared to hope I could heal, and yet I am healing.

The chemistry in a body that manages blood pressure is something we make when we’re happy. In 2020, I fell into depths of distress that started to compromise my body in serious ways. Stress has taken a terrible toll on me, and for years I wasn’t in a position to do anything about the situation that was making me so very ill. This year, everything shifted, and I have what I need now for my body to heal and be a lot more well. It’s all the things I thought it was all along, but was not previously able to change.

There is utter joy for me, being out under the sky, encountering wild birds, meeting trees and wildflowers, feeling wind and sun on my skin. I feel alive again. In that joy, I repair the damage done, and continue the healing work that I have every reason to believe will keep me able to go wandering and protect me from being so ill.

I commit myself to the love of landscape, to joy, and to doing what it takes to be able to venerate the land in the way that most calls to me.