Nimue Brown's Blog, page 68

The Animist Household

I don’t own a great deal of stuff – I’ve lived in small spaces for the last twelve years or so and there’s only so much I can squeeze in. Anything that shares my space has to be valuable to me, and I try to do regular clearouts to make sure I’m not clogging the place up with things that aren’t needed or loved.

As an animist, I have a relationship with the space and what’s in it that includes a sense of spirit. There are stories to tell about many of the items that live with me – including where they came from and who gave them to me. I have a lot of things that belonged to my grandmother – household items including plates and cutlery. Their presence gives me an ongoing sense of connection to her, and it feels good to still be using things that she used. I have a bookcase that belonged to a great grandmother, and I also have her teapot. 

As a consequence, places I’ve called home have always felt like communities. The objects that are in my life often feel like companions. Especially those that have been with me for longer. I also like having things that I made myself, imbued with my intentions to make a homely, comforting space. My living space is full of things that relate to my friends, to my passions, and the things that delight me. There’s a lot of colour, books written by friends, things other people have made. 

For me, a home is a very deliberate thing, made over time. I’m not interested in decorating fashions, and I’ve never cultivated a style. That everything is cobbled together and much of it is old means that I tend towards a cottagecore look, but not as an affectation. This is just how I am. 

A home is never a lonely place, from my perspective. Get it right, and the community of presences and memories makes it rich and friendly.

Inspiration and the future (mine, and everyone else’s)

Inspiration isn’t something that always turns up on demand. For a person attempting to work creatively this can be a bit of an issue. It’s certainly the case that trying to create can be a way of inviting inspiration to come to you. If you aren’t making room for inspiration to happen, it’s not so likely to show up. Time contemplating can also work. Getting on with life and hoping inspiration will strike isn’t very effective at all.

My major source of inspiration has always been other people. That can work in a number of ways. Sometimes I get very excited about a person and that fills my head with ideas and makes me want to write. Some of the things I’ve written have been for specific people – that can mean writing blog posts on request, writing poems for people. I wrote my most recent book – Beyond Sustainability, because my lovely publisher Trevor Greenfield asked me to. There’s nothing like someone wanting something from me to get me motivated and inspired.

Sometimes I write for groups of people. I write this blog because I know there are people reading it, and that’s a reason to keep finding topics and ideas day by day. One of the ways in which I find Patreon helpful is the accountability of having people to write for. At times when I’ve been struggling creatively, knowing that I need to produce things for my Patreon supporters has given me much needed focus, and that often opens the way to inspiration.

There are a handful of people who are always on my mind when I’m writing fiction. People who I know like my stuff and who I would like to be able to engage and entertain. Thinking about what they’d enjoy and wanting to create books for them to enjoy is important to my being able to do what I do.

When I was first writing, as a much younger human, a lot of my inspiration came out of my hopes and daydreams. As is always the way for young humans, I didn’t have much experience to draw on, and found a lot of my writing ideas in what might happen. Writing from a place of hope is different from writing from a place of experience. At this point in my writing I think I’m on the edge of a significant change. I need to dream more, but instead of trying to dream my own future, I need to dream a future that I can engage more people with. Unlike younger me, I’m not interested in my own trajectory much – certainly not as a source of writing ideas. I am deeply concerned with the trajectory of humanity as a whole. So I think that moving forward I’ll be doing more to combine younger me’s hope and future-facing ideas with older me’s interest in writing primarily for other people, and see where that takes me.

Childhood and divination

I first encountered divination as a child. It came about as a result of the novel The Way of Wyrd, which led my father to an interest in runes. A rune set followed, in a charming little bag. While the rest of my family soon lost interest in runes, I stayed keen, and I learned how to read them.

As an aside, The Way of Wyrd by Brian Bates has been an entry point into Paganism for a great many people over the years. And as a second aside, I had the rune set and book that I’ve since widely seen described as rather fantastical and not relevant to historical runes at all. Having read around on runes, I’ve ended up with an idiosyncratic way of reading, which works for me.

Divination can be a really appealing thing for children, both to experience it and as practitioners. I have done divination sessions in school contexts. It’s not easy reading a child’s future because they have so much potential. I had one very memorable child I read for where the whole cast was awful looking – which is the last thing you want to tell a child. I paused, drew breathe, looked at her, tried to find something appropriate to say… and then intuition struck.

“You’re going to be the sort of person who saves orphans or cares for sick animals or goes to war zones to rescue people, aren’t you?” I said.

She looked at me with big, serious eyes, and said yes, that was the sort of thing she was thinking of. I pointed out that this was a very hard kind of life, and she said she knew. It was a powerful moment, and I was struck then by her seriousness and courage. She’ll be an adult now, and I hope she’s doing well.

The difficulty with being a child doing divination is that you just don’t know enough about life to be confident about what you’re reading. I remember a reading I did as a young human for an adult friend of the family, and I could see there were some serious issues in her life and my feeling was that it was about the relationship she was in at the time, but I didn’t feel able to say what I thought and said some things about her workplace instead. I remember this, because I was entirely right about the relationship issues. 

The important thing to remember with divination is that the future isn’t fixed in stone. What we get from a reading is a sense of where things might be going and what the options are. It’s a tool, not pronouncements from some rigid destiny. That’s why there’s room for interpretation, and what we each bring to the interpretation process is really important. If you’re doing divination for yourself, then how you interpret is part of how you’re choosing things should be. It can be a really good tool for problem solving and helping you figure stuff out.

It’d be wary of putting a rune set or a tarot deck in the hands of a child. These are powerful tools and can be scarily accurate, in my experience.  It can however be a lot of fun learning about the many different forms of divination out there, and many of the simpler tools are fine to play with under supervision. The important thing is to never ask a question you don’t want to know the answer to. 

What I would recommend for children is oracle decks – you can get a feel for them fairly easily. Something with art the child likes, and an uplifting set of interpretations can be ideal. It’s a way of making a little magic in a day without doing anything overwhelming.

Connecting with the landscape

Over the last few years I’ve had massive problems with low blood pressure. This has significantly compromised my ability to walk – which is my primary mode of transport. Walking has, for most of my life, been key to how I connect with the land, and with the cycle of the seasons. Not being able to walk far or reliably has been tough.

Not being able to walk has impacted on my sense of self. It’s undermined my confidence, and my relationship with the land, and it’s robbed me of a key part of my Druidry and this has been tough. However, in the last month or so, things have started to shift.

I’m fairly confident at this point that I’ve figured out what’s been causing the problems, and alongside that, how to fix it. I think this is a body chemistry issue, and if I’m right, then solutions are available. Based on recent successful walking activities, the evidence suggests that I’ve cracked it. If that’s really the case then all I have to do now is rebuild my strength and stamina so that I can manage longer walks.

It’s given me back a significant piece of myself. Not being able to relate to my local landscape by wandering about in it has felt like an amputation. I feel more complete and more properly myself for being able to walk. There’s joy in being able to get out into the world, with wonder and small beauties available at every turn. Before I got ill, walking was a major tool for dealing with my wonky mental health as well as it being a significant contributor to how I used to exercise. Low blood pressure is an absolute arse in that it makes physical exercise difficult and actually hazardous, but not being able to exercise makes everything worse. Living in a no-win scenario is not a mood improver.

There’s an absolute joy in being able to walk further and more easily. I’m not as groggy first thing in the morning, and most of the time I’m not needing to use caffeine or sugar to boost my blood pressure in the ways that I had been. It’s a huge relief. I’m starting to hope that one day I might be able to get back to the really big walks that were once such an important part of my life. 

I feel like I’m properly back on the Druid path, after many years of being stuck. I literally have my feet under me, I can bodily walk my path in the way that I want to, and I’m absolutely rejoicing in this.

Questioning Everything

I’m very much an advocate for doing deliberate check ins. For me, reflection and self awareness are important parts of what it means to be a Druid. Usually checking in can be a brief thing – taking the time to just pay some attention to how you’re feeling, how things are going, where you are with the Druid path, what’s good, what’s working, what isn’t. A little while in contemplation around all of this gets a lot done.

It’s worth taking this further every now and then. Sometimes life pressures will make it inevitable. There’s a lot to be said for being open to radical life re-thinks without having to be in crisis first. All too often we only take deep dives into our own lives and choices when we absolutely have to. Humans are creatures of habit, and it is all too easy to get into habits that don’t really serve us and to stay with them because change feels more threatening than whatever is familiar.

Being able to change is sometimes a question of privilege. You can’t make good choices if you don’t have good options. However, it’s always worth looking for the options you do have, because any small margin of improvement is worth having.

It’s worth taking the time every now and then to consider your life as a whole. What’s driving you? What are you passionate about? What do you need? What’s important right now? Are you doing what you intended to do? What’s limiting you? What’s helping you? Question everything. Dismantle your life in a contemplative way and see which bits of it matter to you and what you want to keep. Even if you can’t make radical changes right now, it’s worth knowing what you would change if you could – this means that when opportunities arise, you’ll be ready for them.

Who am I and what do I want? What do I need and where do I want to head with my life? What’s needed from me? What do I do that works? What’s good? I’ve been asking myself this a lot. These are not questions with quick and simple answers – which of itself is indicative. These are things I should know and that I need to take the time to establish. There’s a touch of the existential crisis to it, and it’s hardly the first time I’ve been around one of those. However, from experience, making time for small ones at regular intervals means keeping on top of things. It’s when we don’t look at these things that we can end up living lives that make no sense to us and do not answer our needs.

We’re not fixed things. Life changes, and changes us. We can’t expect to figure ourselves out once and then just live that understanding forever. Existing is a work in progress and needs treating like one. We all need room to grow, learn and change, to discard previous ways of being and to experiment with new possibilities. Change can be terrifying when it feels beyond your control, and is a lot easier when you actively engage with it. The changes we embrace will be adventurous, and may nourish us and help us flourish. Question everything, choose deliberately, live intentionally and craft a life.

Intuition and music

There are lots of technical things a person can learn to help them figure out how to play music with other people. However, it is also possible to do this in a much more intuitive way. You need to be confident about your instrument, or your voice first, ideally. Knowing what you can do and how your instrument works gives you a firmer basis for co-creating.

That said, I’ve run spaces for voices or instruments where people have come along who weren’t massively experienced, and that can also work. It depends a lot on the intent – if the aim is to create a trance-like state through ambient percussion, or to play with your voice, then you definitely don’t need to be an expert. If you’re going to try and pull songs or tunes together, a lot more prior knowledge is required.

I can play or sing from a state of intuition and hyperfocus. This can be a bit intense for the people I’m hyperfocusing on, but as musicians tend to be passionate and bonkers people anyway, it’s rare that this bothers anyone. When singing, I try to make sure I’m breathing with the person I’m following. It can also help to breathe with other musicians, but it’s less critical.

Then it’s a question of being open. I can’t do this by thinking consciously about keys, chord structures or the rules of counterpoint. Instead, I let the music flow through me, I hold myself open to whoever is singing or playing with me – and the more people there are, the harder that tends to be. Finding the notes is a process that feels like magic.

How well this works depends a lot on who I’m working with, and this is another uncanny element to the process. I’ve played and sung with many people over the years, some of whom I knew well, others it was just on-offs in sessions and jamming spaces. Sometimes all I can do is figure out the key and get in for whatever is most logical because nothing happens intuitively. Some people I’ve been able to build more intuitive relationships with over time. Then there are other people who I could follow anywhere, musically speaking, and where I can respond innovatively and easily to whatever they do. This, as an experience can range from making pretty good music through to things that are profoundly magical experiences.

There are a lot of rational explanations for intuition, around how much information we can take in compared to how little of it we can consciously process. However, those don’t really explain experiences like this – if it was simply about what I can take in unconsciously, my ability to respond shouldn’t be so musician specific. I can’t actually explain how any of this works, but it definitely does, and when it really works it is an incredible, magical thing.

Lovebombing and how to survive it

CW abuse and manipulation

My first hand experience of lovebombing has been in the context of female friendships, but I’ve seen the impact it can have on other people. It’s a technique that disorientates and overwhelms the recipient, and gives them a set of inaccurate beliefs about the perpetrator, which can later be used to facilitate abuse.

Lovebombers come in hard and fast and they do and say incredibly intense and dramatic things. It is of course exciting to be swept away by someone else’s passion, be that in a romantic way or in the context of a friendship. For a person who is lonely, wounded or just not very confident, it can be impossible to resist. Suddenly, you are the centre of someone else’s world, and they love you and give to you and would do anything for you. These are not things that encourage a person to think critically.

And so you are captivated, persuaded they are amazing and that they are good for you. This can play out in a number of ways. You may find you’ve been groomed by the lovebomber to support them as a friend while they go on to hurt and bully other people. Abusers don’t just groom their victims. Some abusers like to alternate between the abuse and the lovebombing, to keep victims confused and motivated to please. It’s very hard to think clearly if someone is doing this to you.

The first line of defence is to recognize the behaviour. Normal people are cautious. Even passionate, wild, intense people, are cautious about new relationships. They are more likely to be trying to figure out what you’re open to and comfortable with, rather than hitting you hard with everything they’ve got. Even if you already know each other as friends, there’s a working out period, establishing how everyone feels and what everyone wants. People who are serious about relationships – romantic and friendly alike – will take time to grow that and will want to get to know you. 

Any early statements about love at first sight, instant recognition, twin flames, soul mates, kindred spirits etc should be treated cautiously. It’s very easy for a person to go from here to telling you that they know you better than you know yourself, and that’s a gaslighting move.

Lovebombers pick on people who seem lonely or vulnerable in some way. When you desperately want to be loved, it can be hard to hold boundaries in face of such an appealing kind of attack. Being aware of your own feelings and circumstances means you’ll have a better chance of spotting it. It helps if you can hold enough self esteem not to be waylaid by someone offering overwhelmingly emotional things, but that isn’t easy – having been there. Some lovebombers are simply lonely themselves and also don’t know how to do boundaries, and are only ever weird to deal with rather than intentionally harmful, but it isn’t easy to tell what’s coming.

If you’re faced with this sort of thing, don’t be pressured into moving quickly. Take your time. Try to find out about their relationship history and friendship patterns. It’s always a good idea to take interest in who else someone is friends with – the kinds of friendships we have can say a lot about us. If you’re socially adrift, it’s much more reasonable to expect people to be a teensy bit cautious with you for just those reasons.

Lovebombing can very rapidly turn into asking for far too much. They want to move in. They need money. They want help. Rules and conditions start appearing, or huge demands for your time and other resources. If it feels like someone is trying to take over your life, back away. It can feel romantic to have someone seeming to want to be part of everything, but if that’s happening quickly it’s almost certainly not a good thing.

If you’re dealing with someone you think is amazing, and yet inexplicably you aren’t happy, it’s worth considering that you’re being lied to. If they come in with big dramatic gestures, expensive gifts that make you feel indebted, be cautious. If you feel you can’t say if something doesn’t work for you, because of how great they are or how much effort they’ve gone to, then you’re not in a good situation. Back out gently if you can.

Leaving an abusive situation is always the most dangerous time. Sometimes this is the point at which people find out what their lovebomber is really like. Make sure you have help and support in place if you have any reason to think the person you are leaving is not what they’ve claimed to be.

More Ominous Music

Being a bit addled after the weekend event I managed to set up two blog posts to go out yesterday, when one of them should have been for today. So I’m bringing a low-effort blog – namely the two other videos from the Big Band in Woodchester Mansion.

This House is Not Haunted by The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing – which I feel the house itself rather likes.

And here we are doing Three Ravens. I might rearrange this one at some point because Robin knows all the words and I’d like to try singing a harmony line against his version. We shall see. It’s a lot of fun being able to make this much noise.

I’ve loved this project, this lot are entirely wonderful to work with, and I have no doubt we’ll be doing all sorts of things in various combinations.

And, one of those other configurations, from the same event…

Big Band Adventures

This photo was taken at Woodchester Mansion in Gloucestershire at the weekend. This is The Ominous Folk, in big band mode. It’s also the basis of a number of other projects which we’re still working out. 

On the left of the photo is Robin Burton, who I’ve mentioned in other posts. We’ve been playing together for a while, I wrote a mumming play for him last year, I sing occasionally with his Swing Rioters band and he’s the founder of Stroud Wassail.

In the fabulous green coat is Tom Brown – often referred to on this blog. He’s the person who started the Hopeless, Maine project, and is a member of the regular Ominous Folk line up. Tom is an illustrator and has created the defining look for Hopeless, Maine.

Susie Roberts has goggles on her hat and is another regular member of Ominous Folk. Her involvement was really what pulled that project together and she’s a superb harmony singer.

Next to Susie is the entirely fabulous Jessica Law (Magnus Archives, The Mechanisms) who I’m definitely going to be doing more music with in the future, and also some other entirely bonkers performance stuff, all being well. She’s a fine singer songwriter, do look her up.

In the red hat we have Keith Errington – also often mentioned on the blog, and a longstanding contributor to the Hopeless, Maine project. He’s getting more involved with all of the musical projects and will be out and about this year with original songs and a guitar.

Then there’s me. 

On the right hand end of the line we have that most excellent of entities, James Weaselgrease, another regular Ominous Folk member, and my co-conspirator on so many things over the years. People often assume we’re siblings, but he is the James I often mention on the blog, and for those of you who have been here for a long time, he used to be the tigerboy. He’s bigger now.

This is my circus, these are (to my great delight) my monkeys.

Here’s a video from the event taken by Mark Hayes. This is The Magpie by Davey Dodds.

Accepting Joy

I had a lovely prompt from Nicole on substack to explore the issue of accepting joy. I think this is a topic that will take several passes, there’s a lot to say on the subject.

Trust has been a big part of my journey of late. Being able to trust that what’s happening is real, and that I’m not being set up for a future knock down – there are things in my history that have shaped this and it’s hardly an unusual problem. It’s difficult being open to delight if your expression of it might get you into trouble, and I’ve experienced more than one environment where that was the case. That’s often had to do with it seeming unfair or problematic for me to be happy when other people are not. 

I learned to be afraid of my own joy, and to mistrust it. However, what I’ve been finding over recent months is that friends have had a lot to say to me about what I’m able to do when I’m happier and more wholehearted, and how much some of them want me to joyfully throw myself at things and make space for them when I do that. I’m not going to name check everyone but I want to particularly acknowledge the support I’ve had from Mark Hayes recently, and some powerful talking-tos from him about who and what I am and the ways in which I am needed. He’s made me realise that how I impact on other people goes far beyond anything I was perceiving.

I create when I’m joyful. I come up with madcap plans, and when I feel confident I do pull other people into those plots. It’s been made explicitly clear to me – especially in the last few weeks – that this is a good thing and I have people who want and need more of it. If I choose things that make me happy, I will be able to do more good for more people.

Part of the difficulty in accepting joy is that it has felt like the selfish choice. To go after things simply because they make me happy hasn’t felt fair. But, at the same time I’ve been seeing how it impacts on the people around me when I seek happiness. I can do more from a place of delight. I have more to give, and the people who care for me are happier if I am happy. I’m having conversations about how to build a more joyful life, and how to bring more to other people by doing that, and it feels like the right path to take.

Solitary joy – especially at someone else’s expense – is a hard thing to justify. Shared joy, and joy that creates delight for others is a very different sort of consideration. As with so many things, I think so much of this is better explored collectively. When happiness and joy are shared projects, we each have the affirmation of knowing that our joy is welcome and good, rather than selfish and problematic. 

If I can be more open to happiness, I have more scope to make other people happy. I need to put down the crushing lessons I learned from abusive situations, because if my being happy is uncomfortable for people there are reasons to question that. I think by nature I might be an intrinsically joyful sort of person, but I’ve been punished for that in the past and it’s left marks on me. What’s shifting things for me is accepting the idea that my joy is itself trustworthy, and good, rather than something likely to cause harm to others. Having my joy treated as harmful was one of many strategies being used to deliberately hurt and control me in the past. I do not need to fear or mistrust my own delight, I need to welcome and embrace it.