Nimue Brown's Blog, page 7

Adventures with food

(Nimue)

CW for struggles with food

One of the things I’ve been working on in recent months is my relationship with food. Our food has a huge environmental impact. It has physical health issues, social aspects, it impacts on mental health. From a Druidry perspective it’s also a regular encounter with nature. All of our food comes from the living world, connects us with other beings, and landscapes, and impacts on the world. There’s a lot to think about.

I’ve spent my life struggling with the relationship between food and body shape. If I under-eat I get sluggish and I store fat. To maintain a healthy weight I have to make sure I’m eating enough – which always feels weird. My gut doesn’t work very well. I’ve made a lot of progress on that in the last year, avoiding wheat when it hasn’t been pre-digested by sourdough yeast and being careful to cook brassicas to death! I’m trying to build a better relationship with food that will be healthy for me.

Somewhere early on I internalised a feeling that food was somehow bad. I carry a toxic notion that I shouldn’t need to eat. Eating sometimes feels like a moral failure – especially if I am stressed and/or depressed. This is clearly mad. Part of me feels like I should be bone thin – or actually bones. This is not good or healthy stuff. I actually prefer my body when I’m carrying more muscle weight, and to do that I need to eat well. I acknowledge that I am not a plant and cannot photosynthesise. I’m trying to do a better job of accepting my mammal self and the realities of a mammal body, and I am making progress.

I’ve established that I feel better in myself when I eat a broad array of plants. Five a day is now the bare minimum, and I often manage a far bigger range than that. I find my body feels better for this and there is a positive impact on my mental health. We need diverse nutrients and eating widely really helps with that. I acknowledge the privilege issues here – to eat the way I am now eating you have to be able to afford decent food and the means to store it.

At the moment I’m undertaking to increase my protein intake and my overall calorie intake. I learned a lot last winter when Keith was going through cancer treatment about what bodies need for healing. The calorie and protein demands for healing a body are high. I’ve spent a lot of the last five years or so being unwell, and I’m exploring the idea that these diet changes might help with recovery. So far that seems to be the case. My energy levels have improved, and I’m experiencing less pain. I’m doing this alongside resting more so I’m not sure exactly what is getting things done, but my understanding is that both aspects are necessary.

I’m focusing on increasing my plant protein intake. I do eat creature-derived proteins, and need to because I cannot maintain my iron levels by any other means.

Alongside the dietary shifts, I’ve taken to adding more food-related meditation into my day. I often take the time to contemplate what I’ve eaten, to express gratitude, and to think about the different energies I’m bringing into my body. I’m trying to listen to my body more as well and to understand what I need as an embodied creature. This is part of a bigger project about trying to dismantle the brain/body dualism ideal, so as to experience myself as a whole and physical being, but that’s going to take a while.

Winter reflections

(Nimue)

It’s been very cold here recently. I’m lucky in that we can afford to heat the flat and also eat. Obviously the colder it gets the harder this is and the more people cross the line into not being able to take care of themselves. Cold weather kills people.

These are not simply private tragedies. These are political choices, and need addressing as such. We have the resources to make sure everyone has a decent standard of living, but we don’t share our resources based on need.

Austerity is a choice. We take resources from those who have least and refuse to tax those who have far more wealth than they could ever need. We keep wages low even as inflation rises, as the rich protest that raising wages would drive up inflation – all the evidence says that it is the desire to make profits for shareholders and pay massive sums to CEOs that really causes the issue. Our rules allow this to happen, it is a political choice.

We could make home insulation mandatory. We could require solar panels on new build, or on any rented property with its own roof. We could require power companies to deliver affordable electricity and set wages and benefits alike so that no one would ever have to do without warmth in bitterly cold weather.

We could all have nice things. We could all have gentler and more comfortable lives if we were willing to slightly inconvenience the people who have more wealth than they can use.

As individuals there’s not a lot we can do to quickly change cruel and unjust societies. But, we can talk about it. We can take what opportunities come along to point out what the system does and to refute the idea that these are personal choices or problems. Being too poor to afford both heating and eating is not a personal failure, it’s part of a system designed to crush people.

The underlying logic is that without the fear of freezing to death, without the threat of homelessness, none of us would do any work. This also is a lie. Most people are deeply motivated to do meaningful things with their time. We do not need to be punished or bludgeoned into it. Unfortunately, with lazy, greedy, selfish people in charge, the expectation is that the rest of us are just the same as them. Capitalism is underpinned by ideas that assume the absolute worst of humans, and that rewards some of us for acting in the worst ways.

We could change this. We need better stories about who we are and what we’re capable of. A lot of people would be capable of far more if they were bodily comfortable, better fed and not living precariously. Our toxic stories only limit our potential.

Sharing a song

I’ve recorded this song because I’m hoping to do it with Carnival of Cryptids. It’s a piece that would lend itself well to multiple voices, and is amusing to boot. However, I struggled to find a recording that I could recommend to the cryptids, so put down a version myself. I don’t know much about the origins of this song, and a brief hunt about online did not improve that.

what I do kno is that chastity belts were always more about jokes and satire than any kind of physical reality.

I’ve taken to describing Carnival of Cryptids as a feral folk choir. It’s like a choir in the sense that it’s often quite a few people singing different parts. It tends towards folk. It is a bit feral because of the somewhat anarchic structure – James and I run it, but we seldom tell anyone what to do. It’s more about creating a space where people can decide what they want to do and then throw that into the mix. That’s a chaotic way of working, but increases the amount of creativity and helps participants build their confidence. It’s also a lot less work than arranging parts for everything and then teaching those to people.

Fiction and inspiration

(Nimue)

Where do you get your inspiration? It’s a question that authors get asked far too often, and that bards need to consider carefully. Inspiration can come from anything if you’re open to it, but the quality of the inspiration will inform what you can do with it.

I read a lot of non-fiction because I want my fiction to be grounded and well informed. I also really like non-fic.

Fiction can be an incredible source of inspiration. The ideas and visions of other people can inspire us to act. How many people study physics because of Star Trek, or the desire to build a lightsaber? How many people come to Paganism because of fiction? The Way of Wyrd brought a lot of people to Heathenry, and many people found inspiration from Terry Pratchett to explore witchcraft. Fiction has the capacity to open new doors for us, and bring us wonderful possibility.

At the same time, if fiction is your primary source of information, then you are very much at the mercy of the author’s grasp of reality. If you then go on to write based on what you’ve learned solely from fiction you can end up perpetuating things that aren’t true and real. Even in fiction this can be problematic. It can be an appropriation issue, and it can badly mislead people. Here we might want to think about misrepresentations of Irish fairy lore in certain kinds of fantasy. We might consider the whitewashing of history by colonial writers. It’s a widespread issue and not an obvious one if you are only reading fiction.

I feel strongly that if you set out on the bard path you have responsibilities where your stories are concerned. We’re not in it for the money or the fame (not that there’s much of either to be had!). Being a bard is about service, about what we bring to our communities and to the world. For a bard, knowing the truth is really important. It’s important to think about where we get our information. When we’re working within existing genres and traditions, it’s important to think about what those do, and what issues they might have.

If someone is traditionally published, the odds are that they have a lot of privilege. They are likely to be formally educated, from a more affluent background, and the odds of being white, cis, straight and a bloke are high. Especially when you include older works. The more marginal you are, the less likely you are to be published. This creates biases about the kinds of stories we encounter and how people are represented. The assumption that white, cis, straight middle class men are entirely qualified to write about anyone’s experience and can do so just be imagining it is a source of a huge amount of misrepresentation. It’s worth being alert to this.

The more privileged an author has, the less pressure they will be under to either write what they know, or to be able to establish that they know what they are writing about. It’s important to factor this in when drawing inspiration from fiction.

Druid Philosophy

(Nimue)

It’s often said that Druidry is as much a philosophy as a spiritual path. For me, the idea of taking a philosophical approach to life has been an important part of how I do the Druidry, and I’m certainly not unusual in that regard. Contemplative approaches to Druidry also lend themselves to philosophical approaches.

At the moment I’m working on a book about making Druidry part of your everyday life. I’m writing about values and how to live them, so this is quite a philosophical book. The process has been educational – that’s often the way of it with the non-fiction writing. I started out with a lot of headings I thought were relevant – things like patience, generosity, justice, kindness – topics I’ve explored on here repeatedly. I’m trying to distil what I know down into statements of a few hundred words about how to live each of these things.

What I’m finding as I go along is how connected each of these ideas is. I’d not sat down beforehand to try and create an overarching vision of what Druidry is, but apparently that’s what I’ve got. There’s a coherence to this, and every idea I want to explore is part of an interconnected web of ideas. I’m seeing how each of the concepts I think is important is connected to all the others.

I’m not bringing any radically new ideas to the mix here. Some of the ideas I’m talking about are found in most spiritual traditions. Some relate to what we know about the ancient Druids, others draw on qualities that modern Druidry embraces. I’m not offering any kind of hot new take on what it means to be a Druid. What the book does is get into the details of a lot of ideas, and explores how we can bring those into our daily lives. Increasingly it’s also about the interconnections. This week for example I’ve been thinking a lot about the interplay between kindness and justice.

At the moment this book is going out in sections of Patreon each month but once it is finished I will make it more widely available.

Meditation Bookiversary

(Nimue)

Druidry and Meditation is 13 years old this month. It was my first non-fiction title and is still very much available from Moon Books.

I wrote it because it was the book I could have done with some years previously. When I first started running meditation spaces, I found there weren’t a lot of books to help an inexperienced Pagan do that. As is so often the way of it, I had little choice but to learn by trying. Over many years prior to that I had developed a personal meditation practice. I’d cobbled it together from workshops, books, articles and so forth. Many of these I tinkered with and adapted.

What I needed and did not have, was more of a set of tools to use to create my own meditations, for myself, or for the groups I led. A lot of meditation material gives you meditations to do, but not so much in terms of how to develop your own, so I tried to offer some of that with this book, derived from my own experiments.

I’ve never been especially interested in trying to clear my head of thoughts. My inclination has always been towards a more dynamic approach. I like meditations that relax my body, that deepen my understanding through contemplation, and open the way to inspiration and spiritual experiences.  It frustrates me that mindfulness dominates how we talk about meditation when other approaches also have a huge amount to offer as well.

At the moment, Moon Books still has a sale on, so you can get the book of Druidry and Meditation half price with the code WINTER50 https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/moon-books/our-books/druidry-and-meditation

Healing, kindness and joy

(Nimue)

In the photo we’re in the Quantocks, having climbed a hill. It was steep, muddy, icy in places and more ambitious than any walking I’ve done in years. Behind us the wonderful view stretches away, and below but not visible is Halsway Manor where we spent the weekend on a music retreat.

Climbing a huge hill, reading music from the sheet to sing it, singing high, playing the violin with a bunch of other musicians, percussing – these are all things I used to do, and lost, and for a long time thought I would never get back. Consolidating all of those returns over a single weekend was a powerful, magical experience. I’ve come a very long way in the last couple of years, and that’s very much thanks to Keith.

I’m learning all the time about how better to support my own health. I have a few experiments on the go to see what further improvements I can make, as well. At this point it feels realistic to think that I can recover from what stress and trauma did to my body and my mental health over so many years. It’s not unlike the feeling of having fought my way to the top of a steep hill, able at last to look out over a magnificent view and appreciate what’s around me.

Kindness, support and the scope to rest when I need to have been the key factors in transforming my life. These are the answers to depression, anxiety, and to healing from or managing physical ailments. Kindness is a prerequisite for joy, I have found. If your circumstances are not kind to you, then there is little scope for joy. If you cannot be kind to yourself then again, there no room for joy. When we are kind to ourselves and each other, both joy and healing become possible.

Healing doesn’t always mean total recovery. It can well mean partial recovery, or adapting, or figuring out how to manage things in a sustainable way.  All of these call for kindness. Pressure to try and achieve a full recovery isn’t always kind, although the people who do it usually imagine they are being helpful and supportive. Some of the things that are awry with my body will always be issues – but I can manage that better.

The world knocks us all about and setbacks are inevitable. Healing is something that everyone needs to do from time to time. Many of us are carrying deeper wounds – handed down family traumas, stress damage, grief over the state of the planet and more. An older friend of mine talked to me recently about how his parents, and many like them were encouraged to leave their babies to cry. How many people had early abandonment issues and insecurity thanks to this? We’re all living in unjust and unkind systems that impact on us. Finding ways to recover is an ongoing issue.

Simply being kind means we can support each other in whatever healing and recovery work we’re doing. You don’t have to know what another person is dealing with to treat them kindly, and to support them in doing what they need to do. Joy is important for healing, and a lot of mental health struggles can be tackled to at least some degree just by having time for things that make us happy.

If healing is of interest to you as part of your Druidry, this focus on kindness has a lot to offer. Simply by holding safe space where people feel allowed and supported in doing what they need to do, we can get a lot done. Slowing down and taking things gently enables healing, and this calls for us to resist capitalist pressures to be busy and ‘productive’ all the time. Seeking joy is part of the healing process, and that’s an easy thing to support each other in.

Looking for omens

(Nimue)

The start of a new calendar year is a popular time for omens as we wonder what the year will bring. I had a go at an omen walk. This is a simple process where you set out on a walk and take what omens you find. Obviously this is all about personal interpretation. My son did rather well at this, spotting a pair of magpies, – two for joy. So that was an easy one.

How do you decide what constitutes a meaningful omen? The new spring? The difficulty of walking the path that the spring now flows onto as a stream? The grey day? The rain? Birds singing in the rain? I tend to look for unexpected things, but they don’t always lend themselves to interpretation.  

As I was wandering about, I came to the conclusion that omens themselves really aren’t worth much. We know there is going to be crap coming because there is always crap coming. Life delivers setbacks and challenges all the time, it’s one of the few things you can count on. There will be good things – or less bad things, because there always are. Glimmers of hope and possibility abound How we navigate between hope and disaster may, to some degree be up to us.

I decided that I don’t really need omens for what’s ahead, I need guidance for how to behave. That took me back to the birds singing as the rain came down. Where I live this is not normal behaviour for birds. They normally respond to rain by quietly holing up somewhere and waiting for it to pass. They sing once the rain has stopped. Thrushes can be an exception, but what I heard was a mix of small songbirds, not just thrushes.

This seems like good advice to me. Be the bird who sings in the rain. At the point where things are hard and it might be normal to fall quiet and wait it out, sing. I can work with that, and it seems like a good approach. I also quite like the idea of being the new spring. Come up unexpectedly. Flow. Change things. I like water metaphors, and the many ways water features in the Tao Te Ching. I want to flow, overcome softly, cleanse, heal and disrupt.

If the last week or so has brought you any signs or inspiration, I’d love to hear about it.

Resting and Druidry

(Nimue)

Back in November I wrote about resting as a spiritual activity. It’s something I’ve continued to explore, so I’m updating on how that’s going for me as a practice.

In terms of my spiritual life, resting more has resulted in more time for meditation and contemplation. I’ve been doing more breath-focused meditating, and working on relaxing my body and paying attention to what I might need. Contemplation allows me more time to reflect on experiences, and on what’s going on around me – on the day I wrote this post that meant time spent listening to the rain and to the wind in the tree branches. These have all been good opportunities for connecting with the exterior world and with nature in my own body. I find it soothing on all levels.

This is all good for physical health. I’m doing better with the low blood pressure, and I’ve got through a period of intense migraine. I’m learning more about what my body needs. It’s also given me the space to go head on with some massive inner issues, which in turn is going to help with my mental health. It’s all a bit bumpy and work-in-progress at the moment, but I’ll talk about it once I have something useful to share.

I managed to take slightly over a week off during the festive period. That wasn’t wholly restful as there were assorted family commitments. However, I made good use of the time and managed to do very little on quite a few days, letting my body and my mind rest. It was time well spent. Coming back to writing and other work in this last week I note that I am faster, better able to concentrate, and producing higher quality pieces.

This is raising a lot of questions for me about how I need to spend my time and what I need to prioritise. Again there’s work in progress and things I want to experiment with before I come back and talk about them. One thing I’m absolutely clear about is that I have no interest in looking busy. What I need to do is organise more effectively so that I can act more effectively. That clearly calls for more deliberate rest time.

In terms of the Druidry, rest leads me to feel more peaceful in myself. It definitely improves the quality of my thinking, and my relationship with inspiration. I feel more connected and more open. There’s more time and space for inspiration to come in, and I feel more engaged with my own life. Gentle time makes everyday Druidry a lot more possible, and a lot richer.

Complicity and the greater good

(Nimue)

One of the easiest ways to get people complicit in oppression is to convince them they are acting for the greater good. Most people mean well, and want to do what’s right, or at the very least want to feel comfortable with their choices. Persuade them that the abominations you have in mind are necessary, and you can get them onboard. This often involves demonising the target group so that people feel virtuous about attacking them.

We can see all of this in action around racism, transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia and anti-Sematism. We can think about how, historically, witches were scapegoats. We can think about how some religions have encouraged people to believe that killing other people was going to save souls. It’s there in the politics of austerity as we’re sold the lie that making vulnerable people suffer now will somehow win us a more stable economic future. That manifestly doesn’t work.

There are a number of factors at play here. People want to trust apparent sources of authority, and want to believe in this ‘greater good’ they can build. Many people have limited critical thinking skills, and not enough information or education to challenge what’s asserted in situations like these. We’re communal creatures, so we are predisposed to go along with what everyone else is doing. Scapegoating is a persuasive tactic – so many people are engaged by it, perhaps because it helps them feel better about themselves.

It’s worth bearing in mind that in the UK, people used to go to public executions as a form of entertainment. I suspect that very few people who did so considered themselves evil. What seems normal is of itself persuasive, and with an execution, you’re getting rid of the ‘bad guys’ so that has to be good, right?

Ironically I think the language of good and evil is itself an approach that leads us towards things that are more intrinsically evil. This is in no small part because we will all imagine ourselves as good, and right, and that means anyone opposing us is evil. What seems necessary (because we are good, and they are evil) is already going to be distorted by that thinking. Whenever something is framed as ‘good’ we should ask who it is good for and what it costs.

This is why I prefer to focus on kindness. If you aim for kindness there’s no way you can decide to throw someone under a bus because it allegedly serves a higher cause. If kindness is the only goal, then there is no higher cause that can be served in the short term by cruelty. The idea that there are no alternatives – that we must harm certain people to save others – should itself be highly suspect. There are always alternatives. Presenting a simple choice, a good/evil dynamic, a narrow array of options is itself a tool of oppression. There are always better options, we just need the creativity and determination to find them.