Nimue Brown's Blog, page 67

Sanity and shared responsibility

I’ve mostly gone through life feeling that if I can do something, then it’s a job with my name on. If no one else will make changes to try and fix things or make things work, then I will. I won’t say that I can’t, unless I’m so ill I can’t move, or so burned out that I can’t think coherently. I’m aware that plenty of other people say “can’t” at the point when something looks too costly, not at the point where they are too broken to function. 

This has gone badly for me in a number of situations, both work related and personal. There were several people in my history who made me responsible for things I had no way of shouldering, but was left to fix, over and over. To be blamed when you had no power to avert the problem, and to be made responsible for fixing other people’s messes and mistakes, is not a great place to be. I know it happens a lot in workplaces. Having responsibility without the power to act is an incredibly stressful thing – I’ve seen content around this in relation to how little real pressure there can be in the ‘responsibility’ of management compared to the impact on people who will bear the brunt of the blame when things go wrong but have no power to direct their own working lives.

At the moment I’m learning a lot about how to share responsibility. This is turning up in conversations with my offspring, as he increasingly stands in his own power. We’re talking about where he might still need input from me and what he can manage for himself and he’s being wonderfully explicit about where he thinks the limits of my responsibility should be. It’s an experience I feel profoundly grateful for. 

I’ve had other exciting conversations about how to share things out, and when to say that I’m not coping. Being allowed to be a bit fragile is a very lovely thing. I’ve done a lot of coping, and toughing things out and slogging on, and that’s in part come from a place of not knowing when it might be safe to stop. Having explicit conversations about where the boundaries are is really helpful. Knowing what isn’t mine to deal with, and what can be shared, and what I can put down in the short term is making this a lot easier for me.

When it comes to mental health, I’m seeing everything in collective terms. We do not get ill on our own, we get ill because of situations, systems, other people, misfortune – there’s a context for the majority of it. Getting better on your own is hard because as a solitary person your odds of overcoming the external factors harming you aren’t great. Teamwork gets things done.Holding boundaries on your own is hard, holding those edges together is much easier. When someone else needs you to be well, and safe, and for their own wellbeing needs the edges held that allow that, it gets easier to work things out.

I have a lot to learn about where my own boundaries need to be. The easiest way for me to learn and to think about it is to consider how I’m relating to other people’s responsibilities and boundaries. I’m watching friends exploring similar issues, and seeing how much we can do for each other just by affirming that it is ok to say no, and that there are limits to what any of us can shoulder. When we shoulder things together, the load is always easier to bear and no one is crushed by it.

Responsibility and power have to be aligned for things to be sane and functional. When the person with the power is not the person with the responsibility, things are never going to work well, and the toll on the person who is forced to bear responsibility without having enough power to really do that, is huge. The tendency of governments to blame those who are poor, ill, disabled and otherwise struggling for circumstances they have no power over is very much a case in point.

Love and orchids

I am surprised by how expansive a feeling it is. I keep being surprised such that this seems to be a reliable part of the experience. Love opens me up and it is always unexpected. Then, when I feel more open, there are more things able to move me.

The beauty of the wild orchid catches me by surprise, and then the rippling songs of larks flood my heart and then I realise just how big the sky is, and then… and then…

Feeling love changes my relationship with the world. I experience warmth and joy which colours my interactions and perceptions. I have a lot of thoughts about the way each of us is just a tiny fragment of the universe, and that how we experience reality as a whole is very much shaped by those parts nearest to us. That means each of us in turn has the power to choose how to embody the universe, or which bits to embody.

We all have scope to make beauty or delight. When we show each other kindness, this is also the universe speaking. When we choose to embody the qualities of goddesses, heroes, archetypes and ideas, we choose what kind of magic others might be able to find in the world. In each choice, we shape what existence is. Therefore every time we choose warmth, beauty or compassion we’re acting to make that more true of how things really are. It’s a giddy line of thought.

Orchids are easy to love, with their vibrant colours amidst the grasses on the common. It isn’t quite bee orchid season yet, and those are definitely my favourites. Skylarks are easy to love, too, with their joyful and melodious singing. They fly over the common and their song flows down like some kind of blessing or enchantment from on high. It is easy to love the wide open sky and the sweep of the landscape revealed from a hilltop.

Love isn’t something we have to wait for. It isn’t something that can only happen to us in a way beyond our control – we can choose it. Love as a response to life, to living things, to the land and to beauty is something we can all choose to be open to. There’s delight to be had, and open hearted joy.

The Jovial Crew

This photo is of some of The Jovial Crew, taken at Woodchester Mansion at Beltain. This is a mumming side, pulled together for a non-traditional play that I wrote to include a mix of traditional and local character, plus the villain of the piece, Baron De Peffle. I’m not in the play, but I ended up in the photo (back row on the left). I have no recollection of what Robin and I were plotting when the photo was taken.

Robin gave me a list of possible characters to work with, and the play itself was something of a collaboration. I do better often when I have people to work with, or for. This was not my first mumming play – during my Midlands period I wrote a number of non-traditional plays using local figures, folklore figures and place names as characters, as well as versions of several Arthurian stories – Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain and the Loathly Lady, Gawain and the Invisible Knight. I like mumming as a form – the short and anarchic nature of it, the invitation to improvisation and audience participation.

One of the things Robin Burton and I have in common is a love for playing with tradition. It’s proved a good basis for collaboration. If all you can do is replicate the folk-things previous people were doing, what you have is a museum piece. Folk is supposed to be alive. Mummers used to disguise themselves in no small part so that they could do satire, poke fun at authority and critique those with power. For that to be relevant, you have to bring in elements of what’s happening now, which we’ve done with this play.

With protest increasingly difficult in the UK, and some aspects of it being criminalised, we’re going to need the means to come at issues sideways, and the means to engage people.

Staff of Laurel, Staff of Ash

Dianna Rhyan’s book, Staff of Laurel, Staff of Ash is an exploration of myth and landscape. Drawing on stories from the fertile crescent, this is a wide ranging book exploring the role of landscape in myth, and myth in landscape. It’s a book about relationship and wonder, sacredness in the landscape and the complexity of human relationships with all of that – historical and modern.

However, this is by no means your regular investigative text picking through the evidence and suggesting interpretations. This is a highly poetic book and much more of a felt response to myth and landscape alike. The writing is stunningly beautiful. There were many lines that caused me to make audible gasping noises. The text is rich with ideas and inspiration – so rich that you need to read it slowly, dipping in for a taste before surfacing to draw breath and contemplate it all. I feel I read it too quickly, and would ideally have spent weeks on it, slowly savouring each small chapter. Had I not been sent it as a review book I would probably have taken a very different approach to reading it.

This is very much a book for bards, with sacred inspiration infusing every page. It’s both inspiring, and suggestive of ways in which we might want to explore our own craft and inspiration. For the Druid, there is a great deal to think about philosophically around relationships with the land – human and godly relationships alike. For anyone interested in the myths that come from the lands around the Mediterranean, it’s a fascinating read.

This is the sort of book that reads like a spell. It may slip inside you, acting on you in ways that you cannot quite name. It is a spell of falling in love with the land, and seeing the sacred in the world around us. This is a beautiful book and like nothing else I have ever read. If you are someone who can relish prose that is also poetry, and who welcomes writing that is more evocative and more mystical, this is definitely for you.

More on the publisher’s website – https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/staff-laurel-staff-ash

At the Tinglestone

I don’t know why it’s called the Tinglestone, and the internet has not proved helpful. It is however an unusual configuration – a standing stone on top of a barrow. The barrow itself is covered in beech trees with gnarly roots so the whole thing has a decidedly magical feel to it.

The barrow and stone are on land owned by Princess Anne – it’s in Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire. These days there’s a gate for accessing the field, but it used to be a climb over a wall with risk of security people showing up if you wanted to get this close. That’s left me wary about spending any serious time here. I like sitting out at ancient sites, but I’ve never done that with this place. Visits have always been brief, with a dash of anxiety and class rage in the mix.

The beech trees with their newly opened leaves were especially beautiful, and the field itself was lush with new grass, and full of yarrow leaves. Other fields nearby were full of buttercups and it all felt incredibly vibrant.

Also, I knitted the jumper I’m wearing in this photo, it’s a hodge podge of left over wool.

Children and ghosts

When my grandmother was a child, she went to stay with relatives in Bristol. She woke in the night, to find a classic white lady ghost at the end of her bed. As far as I can make out she wasn’t really worried about this, but mentioned it at breakfast. She was moved to a different bedroom and nothing was said about it, so as an adult she concluded that they knew there was a ghost and no one wanted to discuss it. I think it says a lot about my grandmother that she had this experience, went back to sleep and was totally chilled about it.

My grandmother’s house was also haunted, and I knew this as a child and knew the names of the ghosts – one family member and their former lodger. I was never afraid of them or alarmed by thinking they were around.

For some children, the idea of dead people is really scary and problematic. However, if you grow up aware of death as part of life, then ghosts aren’t so threatening to begin with. Outside of horror films, there’s no reason to expect them to be horrifying or threatening in any way. When you look at the folklore, most ghost stories don’t involve anything especially alarming. 

I don’t know what ghosts are – whether something of some people remains, or whether places remember, or something else entirely is going on. I don’t believe in ghosts, because I’ve seen and heard too much to feel anything other than confident that something is going on. I’m not inclined to assert anything about what ghosts are, but my feeling is that they might be all kinds of different things, present for all kinds of different reasons.

I’ve also experienced beings who were definitely cats and definitely non-corporeal – although not as a child. I have had multiple cats on my bed at times when there was definitely only one cat living in the house, and there was no catflap. On top of this, I’ve had one sleep paralysis experience where the thing standing on top of me so that I couldn’t move or speak, pudded me with their feet and purred loudly. Rather than being a frightening experience, it was actually entirely charming!

It is important when you are a child to feel safe in your home and comfortable with any non-human presences who happen to be around. As a parent it’s important to be clear that only friendly things are welcome in your home, and that anything unfriendly will be banished. I think this is really important regardless of whether you think there’s anything present. Children who are afraid of the dark, of imagined monsters or the idea of scary things aren’t reliably comforted by adults telling them it isn’t real. It can be much more effective to tell the monster under the bed what the rules are and to make sure the ghosts understand that they’re welcome if they behave nicely. It is also likely to make your child more confident about telling you when they are afraid without worrying whether you will take them seriously.

After all, if you don’t take the monster under the bed seriously, what else might you shrug off as them making stuff up? It’s better to tackle the fear than to try and persuade a child there’s no basis for it, I tend to think.

Contemplating Anger

I’ve never had a good relationship with anger. I’m the sort of person who is far more likely to cry than to shout and to respond with distress rather than by defending myself. There are reasons for this and I know what they are, but it’s something that runs deep for me. Injustice does make me angry, and when the injustice is directed towards other people, I can pull myself together and act. It’s easier to think about whether someone else is being treated fairly, and whether it would be right to speak out, and I try to do that where I can. I also try to do that in a calm and responsible way because feeling anger and expressing it unpleasantly are two different things.

In the past, I’ve let a lot of my anger go inwards. I’ve taken responsibility for things that weren’t mine to carry, It’s not an original way to malfunction. I’ve been working on trying to befriend my anger and make room for it, rather than taking out on myself the things that hurt and distress me. This also means dealing with the panic that anger causes, so it’s complicated stuff. This in turn all relates to how I handle things around my own needs and wants, which historically I haven’t dealt with very well either.

To have a sense of integrity and personhood, you need to be able to feel all of your own emotions and have room for your needs. As with all things, this works a lot better when we actively support each other in having feelings. Anger of course is challenging and no one really enjoys being on the receiving end. However, when anger itself is always treated as the problem, rather than the cause of the anger, there are going to be problems. When there is injustice, it is the injustice that needs dealing with, while objecting to the anger perpetuates the injustice. All too often, we police the wrong things.

Meeting someone else’s anger calls for being able to own mistakes and apologise, and also go beyond that into something restorative. When we’re prepared to make things better, it’s easier not to be threatened or intimidated by reasonable anger. When anger functions as something healthy and protective – not as an excuse to terrify someone – then it’s easier to respond to it with respect and compassion. People whose needs are not met should be allowed to be angry. The answer to such anger is to solve the problems.

All too often though, anger becomes an excuse for acting out. Too many of us become angry when we feel embarrassed or exposed and hurry to protect ourselves rather than asking if we should be doing something differently. It’s not an easy thing to do, and again, the answers are collective not individual. If mistakes and failures will be met with punishment or derision, then angry self defence becomes more necessary. If we can trust the people around us to accept us as flawed and human, no one needs to be so defensive in the first place. If we celebrate and welcome problem solving rather than being threatened by it, then there’s less reason for defensive anger. If we’re not so interested in blame and much more interested in fixing things then calling people to account when they need to sort out their mistakes is far less loaded.

There’s a huge power aspect to anger, though. People with power are allowed to express anger, and people with no power are not. Who you are allowed to be angry with, and who it is safe for you to be angry with will reveal a lot about your position in the world. Whether you are allowed to ignore the anger of others, or defend yourself from it, is also rather telling. No doubt without those enormous power imbalances, many of us would have less to be angry about in the first place.

Joining a Grove

The single biggest influence on which Grove you might join is likely to be geography. There are places where multiple Groves exist in viable striking distance of each other, but Druidry is still at a level where this isn’t the norm. 

If you are new to Druidry, a Grove might offer affirmation and support. It would be a space in which you could learn about the path and benefit from the experience of other Druids. In joining a Grove, you might become involved with an Order and through that, a wider community. So the decision to join a Grove might define the kind of Druidry you practice. This is tricky for a new Druid because the odds are you don’t know enough about either your own preferences or how different Orders work to know how or if this is going to work for you.

How representative a Grove is of an Order can vary considerably. There’s diversity within every Order, and much depends on the individuals within the group. 

My recommendation is that first and foremost, you work with people you connect with and find it easy to get along with. If that’s in place, you’ll have the room to explore your own interests and find your own way of being a Druid, with the help and support of other people. If you’re dealing with Druids who are really dogmatic about how things must be done, and who don’t have room for you to find your own way, this is unlikely to work well. Firstly it’s not (in my opinion) terribly good Druidry to be authoritarian. Secondly it’s important in all situations to be able to ask questions about why things are the way they are and whether alternatives exist. Thirdly, a group that can make space for diversity and for the needs of new people is a better place to be.

It isn’t essential to join a Grove. There’s plenty of scope for distance learning and a range of Orders offer different kinds of teaching, focusing on different aspects of Druidry and with various styles and flavours. You don’t have to commit to one Order forever, and you can range widely to meet your needs. 

It is both feasible and valid to work as a solitary Druid. There are lots of ways to connect with other Druids that don’t require a Grove – camps, open rituals, online groups and other social gatherings can answer the need for a community without requiring as much commitment. 

If you really want to be in a Grove and there isn’t a suitable one, sometimes the answer is to start your own. You don’t need to be massively experienced in Druidry or in running things to do this. You just have to be willing to learn. Many of the established Groves exist because at some point, someone took a leap in the dark and set it up. Most of the people who start Groves do so because it’s needed, not because they’ve accumulated so much wisdom and experience that they feel ready for the task. If you feel called to set up a Grove, that’s more than enough reason to give it a try.

Happiness is not a luxury

For a long time, disassociation has been a major part of how I deal with my body. It’s not an ideal solution, and on days when the pain level is high, the amount of brain it takes to tune out pain doesn’t leave me with much to spare. Over the years, I’d got so far into the habit of doing it that a lot of the time I wasn’t feeling my own skin. This in turn has made it impossible to access many of the simple pleasures of everyday life. I used to be a very tactile person, but when you’re trying not to feel your own body too much, touching things is a really bad idea.

I’ve been doing a lot of figuring out in recent months about what’s going on with me and how it all fits together. There are a number of different issues and some of them I’m stuck with – everything relating to the hypermobility. However, not everything awry with me is due to that, and some of it is starting to look fixable. As I’ve been able to explore things that help me, I’ve found myself in some interesting virtue cycles.

I think I’ve found the underlying issue for the low blood pressure. Tackling that means I can be more physically active, which is improving my mood. I’ve found answers to some of the body stressors that deal with the actual issues, rather than just having to try and tune it all out. That’s helping with sleep – trying to go to sleep while trying to tune out body distress isn’t easy. As I’m sleeping better I have more energy and I’m more relaxed and have more brain function which is opening up more possibilities. I’m increasingly able to do things that make me feel happy and comfortable.

As far as I can make out, it’s happiness that causes the human body to create the hormone and neurotransmitter noradrenaline. This is the chemical that regulates blood pressure. I’d got into a vicious cycle where pain and insufficiency were making me hideously depressed, which was wiping out my blood pressure, which was robbing me of almost all the things I used to do that made me happy. Pushing back the other way is hard sometimes, but I’m getting stronger, and I’m seeing differences day by day.

Mental health is not separate from body health. What happens in our bodies often has a circularity to it – hormones etc don’t work in linear, cause and effect kinds of ways. Mood affects body chemistry and body chemistry affects mood and things can go wrong at any point in the process. Once things go wrong, fixing it isn’t easy, and it really isn’t obvious where to start. It’s taken me a long time to figure out all of the mechanics, along with a lot of reading whatever biological science content I could track down online. Assuming I’ve cracked it at this point – and I think I have. The real test will be whether I keep improving, and how much health and strength I can reclaim.

Happiness isn’t some luxury bonus thing. Not if it’s implicated in how we make the chemicals we need for our bodies to function. Healthy blood pressure is absolutely essential to our bodies, and if happiness is what helps us regulate blood pressure, then clearly this is an essential thing, and the implications for societies in this are huge.

The chemistry of depression

I’m no expert, this is just speculation. 

When it comes to trying to understand the biological basis of depression, I think there’s a tendency to assume there must be one neurotransmitter or other bit of body chemistry involved. The idea that serotonin might be key has underpinned most of the drugs available, and those drugs interrupt what the brain does. There’s a lot of speculation in this intervention and increasingly the evidence is that it isn’t working for a lot of people.

Human bodies are complicated and we have a lot of hormones and neurotransmitters floating about inside us. Chemicals that make us feel good include serotonin, endorphins, dopamine and oxytocin. If our bodies aren’t producing those chemicals effectively, we’re going to feel it. Increasingly the science suggests that depressed people aren’t simply people with wonky chemistry, but are people who have suffered. Trauma, long term stress, illness, pain, disability, and the pressures of poverty are all likely to cause depression. What’s going on seems to be a complex body response to unbearable circumstances – if not for everyone then for a significant percentage of people who suffer with mental health problems.

Part of the problem with how we treat depression is this habit of looking at it as some kind of individual failing, to be solved by fixing the individual. I think we need to look far more closely at the systems and structures that make people ill in the first place. Economic stressors and environmental stressors could be tackled, and these would be obvious places to start. Social cohesion and tackling loneliness are also obvious things to consider. 

Rather than trying to ‘cure’ depression I’m increasingly convinced we need to come at it the other way. We need to support wellness. We need to have a better understanding of what things actually help us to be well and happy, and what we can do to manage those feel-good chemicals in our own bodies.  The role of diet, sleep, movement, social interaction as contributors to better mental health are things we already know about, or at least science has things to tell us. The degree to which an average person grasps the links between lifestyle and mood is another question. The amount of power a person has to change their lifestyle in a way that will promote their mental health, is another question again.

Alongside all of this, we should be looking at what pollution does to us – air pollution, light pollution, noise pollution. We should be looking at the chemicals in our food and in our soil, and we should also be looking at what’s missing. We spend a lot of time and effort killing bacteria, but the human body is a cooperative and we actually depend on friendly bacteria to help us. 

There are also existential questions to ask. Most of us crave meaning and significance. Modern life can be lonely, isolating and alienating. We derive much of our meaning and purpose from social interaction and being valuable to others, and the more we strip that out, the more harm we do ourselves.

Whatever depression is at a biological level, it isn’t simple and there aren’t going to be simple solutions. We need to be looking at the causes that underpin depression as a whole, not treating it as an individual problem.