Nimue Brown's Blog, page 70

Poetry gets in sideways

One of the things that makes poetry especially powerful is that it engages our brains in a somewhat different way. That can make it possible to express things that otherwise aren’t easily conveyed, or that are otherwise difficult to hear. Poetry can thus have some really powerful healing properties, especially around emotional and spiritual issues.

In terms of emotional and spiritual wellness, one of the big problems is simply that of shutting down. If you aren’t feeling, connecting and being present in your own life you’re going to suffer and miss out on a lot of what you need. However, being overwhelmed, distressed beyond anything you can bear, exhausted or ground down from anxiety drives people into protective states of shutting down. It’s an entirely reasonable response. We aren’t supposed to suffer in the way that modern life hurts us, and the shutdown was supposed to be temporary relief, not a way to live.

Poetry can get in when other things do not. It has the potential to slip softly through our shields. It can come at you sideways in ways you were not ready to block. The way poetry can surprise you can be restorative. Shutting down can only ever be a temporary solution. What we all need in response to pain and difficulty, is things that can act as balm for our hearts, souls and minds.

If you’re on the bard path, this is an invitation to think about what you can write that another person might find restorative. While this can be undertaken in a personal and specific sort of way, we can also think about it more broadly. Mary Oliver is a good example of a poet whose understanding of the world is restorative and she’s someone many people turn to for comfort. I can also recommend the work of Adam Horozitz, who also has the magical ability to capture aspects of the natural world in his writing and presents those details in powerful ways.

I have some poetry collections in my ko-fi store. I can’t promise that they will help everyone, but there’s always a chance something in there will resonate, and they are free as ebooks. I hope, that if you are hurting, you are able to find something that comforts you and gives you a way forward. https://ko-fi.com/O4O3AI4T/shop

Unexpected visions and being eaten by owls

Many people seek visions and spiritual, otherworldly experiences in deliberate ways. Obviously if you can find someone to guide you and teach you in person, that’s ideal. There are lots of other resources out there, and with patience and sense, a person can learn a lot from books, guided meditations and so forth.

Of course it doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes things just happen. It’s most likely that unexpected spiritual experiences will come in times of crisis, brought on by fever, sleep deprivation, extreme stress and the like. It’s when life breaks us open that we’re most likely to have these unsought experiences, and to be obliged to question our own sanity. 

When you’ve gone on a deliberate process of visualisation, there’s nothing unsettling about having visions. When your brain feels like it is falling apart because you’ve not slept in days, and you don’t think the wolf you can see is real even though it looks real… that’s a whole other kind of experience. It’s widely said that the difference between spiritual practices and madness is that the spiritual stuff you do deliberately and can come back from on your own terms. I’ve also read a few people exploring what happens to you when what occurs is more like madness. I’ve found Jez Hughes especially helpful on this score, and Gabor Mate has powerful things to say about it too.

There’s a power in being ambushed by the unexpected. When you’re doing things in an organised and controlled way it can all feel like a pleasant psychological process. That can be fine – there’s a lot of benefit to be had from visualising and contemplating in deliberate ways. But at the same time, if you want experiences of wildness, of the numinous, or the divine, that’s never going to feel entirely safe or within your control. Spiritual experiences are often at their most real and affecting when you haven’t actively sought them or tried to shape them.

It helps a lot if you have some support for all of this. If your culture frames visions as insanity, then you have limited options for how to deal with your experiences. It’s good to connect with likeminded people and find what support you can. It’s good to have people you can trust to help you make sense of things in a spiritual context when it feels like you might be going mad. People who can be there for you during the days when you have to get on with your ordinary life even though you have been eaten by owls. People who can help you be in pieces when a spiritual experience has torn you apart in a needful way. People who can hear you when something on the edge of dream stitched you into the landscape.

There are things we cannot be taught and cannot be prepared for. Some things can only be known through experience. I’ve been walking a druidic path for twenty years at this point, and was actively Pagan for years before that. I’ve studied meditation, I’ve taken guided journeys and I’ve read a lot of books. In recent weeks I’ve had to re-learn a lesson about being open to extremity. I cannot both protect myself carefully, and be torn apart by owls. I’ve had quite a few years of living cautiously and being very shut down, and I know that’s changing. 

I’m not here to teach anyone how to do what I’m doing, but I feel strongly called to share the stories of what is happening. I have no definite sense of what my current journey is about, or for, but I do have a strong feeling that I should write about it and share whatever comes to me. I won’t necessarily explain what comes from where, I think I just need to put these visions into the world and trust to that process.

Where to find me

When I’m not sat cross-legged on the sofa, making things or arsing about, I’m out and about – often at local events and sometimes further afield. I have all sorts of things going on around books and new things coming out in different forms. There are a number of sites online where I post things, and I don’t post the same things in all the places because that would be dull. 

If you’re interested in keeping up with all of the things I do, I’ve set up a presence on substack and I’m going to be using that to put out a Friday newsletter with a quick roundup of whatever I’ve been doing and any gigs and events I have coming up. It’s an email subscription thing and will land in your inbox. Also, I think this is a pretty neat platform if you’re looking for content to read – as Twitter has been dying I’ve been having a harder time finding good articles on a broad array of topics, so I’m excited about substack as a reader, too. https://substack.com/profile/125442922-nimue-brown?utm_source=substack_profile

I’m regularly putting small pieces of fiction on the Hopeless, Maine blog – https://hopelessvendetta.wordpress.com/

There are lots of free ebooks in my ko-fi store. Poetry, Druidry and fiction. Do get in there and grab anything you fancy. Donations are nice, but this is about gift economy so if you’re not in a great place financially, please enjoy the free things. https://ko-fi.com/O4O3AI4T/shop

My Youtube channel is an eclectic mix of things from the different facets of my life, so, it’s best to look at the playlists. https://www.youtube.com/nimue_brown 

I’m on Instagram, where I post photos of whatever I’ve been up to – https://www.instagram.com/nimuebrown/ I’m also on Twitter https://twitter.com/Nimue_B and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/nimue.brown/ and I’m on Mastodon although I don’t use it as much as the others – https://mastodon.social/@Nimue_B

I’m also on Patreon, where I post content every week. The lowest, cheapest tier is very good value for money in that you get new content twice in the month and first dibs on any free ebooks I’m doing. Other tiers have extra monthly content and there’s one where I physically post things out a few times every year – for people who are really keen! https://www.patreon.com/NimueB

Aside from the predictable stuff, there are a lot of one offs – I’ve done a couple of podcast interviews recently, for example, and those will show up online at some point. I don’t always share new book reviews here as I don’t want to bore people with that. I guest blog sometimes, there are magazine articles and videos other people take at events and all manner of things. All of those will be going in the substack newsletter if any of them happen each week. So if you’re into low level stalking, this is very much for you. (I never feel easy about calling people fans, that feels a bit weird to me. But you’re probably folk horror people too, or cosy cosmic horror people, or excessive and obsessed in the way I can be, and ‘stalking’ makes me think of herons and big cats, so it’s all good.)

Learning lessons, finding silver linings

I’m not the sort of person who believes that everything happens for a reason. I don’t think anyone is obliged to find meaning in any particular experience they have. Sometimes things are just awful and unfair and it is kinder to label them as such. Sometimes the only lesson is to get out.

However, obviously we have to learn from at least some of our experiences if we’re going to have any kind of meaningful interaction with the rest of the world. Most of the time what we learn isn’t self announcing. We pick up small environmental cues all the time about what and who to be, and if we aren’t careful, those can shape us without our noticing. We are trained by television, adverts, the music we hear and the cultures in our workplaces. We check things out because they seem popular.

If you want to be deliberate about what you’re learning from your experiences, you have to take time out to think about it. Deliberate reflection on what’s happened means getting to choose how to interpret an experience. We’re more likely to do this around dramatic times in our lives, but in terms of shaping who we are, that day to day stuff is well worth keeping an eye on.

We don’t have to learn the lessons other people want us to learn. Usually those are about being quieter, more biddable, taking up less space, asking for less and accepting less. Lessons about working harder for the same money, giving up more of your free time and accepting stress are rife in workplaces, and we learn to do as we’re instructed at our peril.

There’s one kind of lesson I think it’s worth learning from any experience we have, and that’s how to be more compassionate. Everything we go through has something to teach us about who we are, and often about other people’s lives and experiences as well. There’s always room to learn something that lets you be more compassionate – towards yourself as well as other people. Any opportunity to see something from a different perspective helps with this. Any situation where we can look for the kindest response we can offer, we’ve got scope to learn about compassion. 

I think if you’re focused on whatever’s kindest, then whatever other meanings you take from a situation, it probably won’t lead you astray. The habit of looking for compassion leads to a gentler, and more peaceful way of being in the world. It’s a lot better than trying to learn how to fit in, or how to get ahead, or how to knock someone else down.

Children in ritual

Back when I regularly ran rituals in the Midlands (UK) I made a point of including children. If you don’t include children, you exclude their parents and the burden of that falls disproportionately on women. 

It helps that Druid rituals are often public facing, community oriented and celebratory, because it’s a lot easier to include children in that, than in intense, focused magical workings. Even so, you can’t expect children to stand quietly in ritual for an hour or two – sometimes they will, but you can’t count on it and there has to be room for who and how they are.

Most of my rituals were held in woodlands, with room for our younger humans to be around but not obliged to join in. Having them free range outside the circle worked well. They did what they needed to do and were only disruptive if they were unhappy – which was usually about tiredness, temperature or hunger, which is fair enough. I think it’s really valuable to give children space where they can be themselves and do their own things while also asking them to be responsible and considerate.

It can be tempting in ritual to want to focus inwards. You face the centre of the circle, in your magical time out of time, and you step away from the world. That might make sense for some kinds of magic, but for a Druid group honouring the wheel of the year it makes little sense. Most of nature is outside of that circle, surrounding it. It’s good to let that in – all the sights and sounds of it – and absorb that into the ritual experience. Children can be part of that.

Children can be powerful forces of nature in their own right. Children can be enchanting and magical. It depends a lot on how they are growing up, whether they feel able to explore and to express themselves and whether they have learned to do that cooperatively rather than trying to run roughshod over everyone else. Children being natural are not necessarily loud or inconsiderate. I’m inclined to think that most children in history would have learned to be quiet so as not to be eaten by large mammals. Being noisy is only an option if there are no predators.

On one occasion, the children at the edge of the ritual decided they were a wolf pack, and howled accordingly. It was a surprising thing for those of us in circle, but actually lovely, and felt right.

If you give children the chance to participate in a ritual, a lot of them will. They have things to say and to share, they want to be taken seriously and they like to join in, is my experience. Let a child stand in ritual with the same dignity as an adult, and many of them will. And you can absolutely count on them appearing, as if by magic, whenever the bread, cake and ritual drinks appear.

When I’ve been able to work with children, I’ve found them fantastic at actually making circles – going round the edge with something noisy to mark out the space for example. If you want to bless people in mirth and reverence by flicking water at them, children are often far better at doing this than adults are. Give them a chance to learn and participate, and they will.

When one of the adults felt unable to call a quarter during a funeral, my then very small son said he could and would do that – and he was magnificent. Don’t under-estimate what your youngest folk in circle can do or will want to do. Give them the opportunity and they can bring a great deal.

Albatross stories

An albatross takes up a lot of space. Being the biggest seabird has implications for size. You can’t appreciate an albatross without actively liking how big the bird is. You do not want an albatross if you keep wishing the albatross was smaller and did not weigh so much.

If there is an albatross hanging around your neck, do not blame the albatross for being there, or for being heavy or for drawing attention. If your choices have led you to a place where there is an albatross around your neck, do not blame the albatross, it is not in their nature to hang there. They only ever wanted to fly and live.

If you have killed the albatross who is now hanging from your neck, you cannot also blame the albatross. Really, you can’t, there’s no justice in it, and you are only fooling yourself by thinking this way. You’re denying yourself the opportunity to think about how you got here in the first place.The shame is in having shot the albatross, not in being the albatross.

We need to talk about the weight, about the sense of a burden hanging there. This is the weight of your own choices and if you feel it only as a burden placed unfairly upon you, then you’ve missed the point. You’ve missed the bit in the story where opening your heart to love makes the weight of the albatross fall away.

The right answer was to love the albatross. To love the flight of it and its connection to the weather. See it as a blessing, as a wild and lovely thing that simply existed and certainly meant no harm. And if, for some strange reason you end up with an albatross in your arms, count yourself uniquely blessed to have the chance to do some good. 

* * *

I’m having a bit of a wrangle with my ancestors at the moment. I have a story to take apart. I’ve carried this albatross a long way, too. Not resenting it for being an albatross, but fearing my own albatross self. Fearing the weight and burden of my own existence and the harm I might cause simply by taking up space. Unable to ask for help for fear of being the albatross. It’s haunted me, this wonderful bird, and fear of playing that role has been a conscious, explicit sort of thing for me for many years.

I went back and re-read The Ancient Mariner, the source of this image of a person with a dead albatross hanging from their neck. I read it, and I understood what a fundamental misreading it was that had filled my mind. An ancestral understanding of the poem that had been handed down to me in the most damaging way, as ancestral wounding often is. I’ve written about the albatross as part of how I’m changing my relationship with this story, and I’ve no doubt got more work to do.

I found the albatross having done some very intense journey work where I let myself fall, and found that I had fallen from a cliff and broken myself entirely – as I had intended. Crabs, gulls and starfish came to eat me, and then the albatross appeared, entirely unexpected and with things to tell me about the story I had been carrying. Sometimes you have to break radically in order to change things.

There is no shame in need, there is nothing to fear in needing help sometimes. Albatrosses are glorious, and the story about how to overcome guilt is not a story about blaming the victim. 

Leaping into the dark

I need a new story. 

In the story I have lived by, I am a weak and fragile thing. Too dependent on the good opinions of others. A people pleaser, useless at boundaries. It’s my fault I get hurt, and rejected, and used as a doormat or a punchbag. I’m too needy. Too emotional. Too easily persuaded to give all that I have and accept there will be nothing in return. With that story comes the idea that I would have to be firmer, less willing to care, more self protective and less emotional in order to be a healthier, happier sort of person. Whenever I try to go that way, it just all gets worse and the misery is deeper and the self-hatred is stronger.

There are a lot of stories out there about how you are supposed to be in the world, and those stories don’t work for me. If I try to be closed and self protective, I make myself sick. Every time. Perhaps the most significant mistake I’ve made is being persuaded that other people’s ideas about how to be a person are a good match for who I am. 

A new story, then, about all the same things. 

I have loved, passionately and unconditionally people who did not know what to do with that. I have loved people who were afraid of being loved, and whose feelings of not deserving love caused them to push me away. I have loved people who were full of demons and who only knew how to cause pain, but I loved them anyway, for as long as I could, with all that I had. I have loved people who did not know how to love, who were afraid of love, who experienced love as a kind of demand they did not know how to answer, even when that simply isn’t true or real. I have loved people who could only understand love as something small and transactional and limited, to be rationed carefully.

I am by nature extravagant, generous, wholehearted and passionate. I’ve let other people who were themselves in a lot of pain persuade me of all kinds of things – that I am unworthy of love, that there is something creepy, unhealthy or sordid about me. That I am too much, too difficult, too hard to love. All of those things were no doubt true for them, but that doesn’t make for absolute truth. I am allowed to have a story about myself that does not sit neatly alongside those stories.

I love unreasonably. It is in my nature to love, and to do that with no interest in boundaries or limits or rules. It is in my nature to give and not to measure the cost, and to break myself over that, and keep breaking. I am not gentle. How I love is ferocious and bloody. It’s also been lonely, because what my soul craves is other souls as wild, intense and unreasonable as me. I haven’t known how to show many people my true self, how to trust anyone in a sustained way with how my soul is. What I long for are the people who are not afraid to love until it breaks them. 

It’s why my poetry is full of broken bones and violent imagery. I’m looking for the other people who will make bone soup out of themselves when that’s all they have left to give. I’m looking for the people who, when they feel so torn apart by life that they are sure it will kill them this time, take the best and brightest pieces of whatever they have left and try to do something good with it. I’m looking for the people who do not look at what love will cost them, but who throw themselves wholeheartedly into whatever there is, because that’s the only way to live, the only way to be in the world.

Being Lost

Being lost invites surprise and adventure. Back when I was less ill, I relished opportunities to go wandering about and get properly lost, open to whatever I found in my amblings. There’s also a real joy to having been lost and emerging into a place that is familiar.

Being existentially lost could work the same way, and I’m trying to figure out how to approach my own life with the same sense of wonder and possibility. I don’t know where I am right now, or what I’m for, or where I’m going or what to do. I thought I knew, and I thought I was on a meaningful trajectory, but experiences of late have turned that upside down and I have no idea about anything.

It may well be a question of belief. I have no doubt that I need to pour myself wholeheartedly into something, and I don’t know where to do that. I need to be able to imagine that whatever I’m doing is worth doing, but I don’t know how to define or measure worth. I’m enough of an existentialist to think that meaning is something we have to make for ourselves, but right now I also have no idea how to do that.

I feel like I should get a ‘proper’ job. I feel like I should go and live in a tree and pretend to be an owl. My body is fragile and my mind also, and I feel like I should invest in healing as best I can and I feel like I’m probably being silly and should just get out there and act like there’s nothing wrong with me. I have no idea whether to take myself seriously. I should be living in a cave and speaking only with bats. I should apply to become a dinner lady. I should hang from a meathook in the underworld and work out how not to be dead.

I need to believe in something enough that it sets me on fire and gives me a way to make sense of the world. I am not good at belief. I wonder if instead I need someone else to believe in me enough that I can see what I’m for and who to be. I don’t know if I need to let go of everything, or to find some peaceful, certain centre in myself. Am I meant to be chaos?

There is rage and grief in this lostness, and I have no idea what I’m cross with. Except possibly that the work I want to do and the work that pays are not the same things at all. Everything is falling apart, and my own fractal of a tiny crisis inside the much bigger crisis does not help, and sorting myself out will not magically fix anything else.

Perhaps being an owl is a good choice. The yearning for something wilder, and weirder is strong right now. Perhaps my lostness is because I need to be found, perhaps it is not on me to do the finding.

The speakable horrors

CW suicidal ideation

Recently I posted about some of my experiences around tackling suicidal ideation. On the off-chance it might be useful to someone, I thought I’d share more of the story and process.

I don’t know when exactly it was that I started feeling like I had to justify my existence, but it was definitely an issue by the time I was eleven when I started keeping a diary as a way to try and handle it better. I was, by all accounts a weird and often morbid child, and I don’t remember a time when I felt comfortable taking up space. 

What this led to was a sense that I somehow had to balance the books. I had to do enough good to offset the harm I cause, and that includes things like carbon and water use and whatnot. I’ve carried this with me for most of my life, looming large and unquestioned. For a person who thinks about everything a lot, I’ve been shockingly unable to even question the underlying logic of this one. All I’ve ever asked is how to do better and cause less harm and how on earth to balance my accounts on those terms.

How does planting a tree measure against causing someone accidental discomfort? How good is the good bit if that one act also puts someone else in an awkward place? Is calling someone out good, or bad, or a mix of the two? None of this can be measured, none of it makes sense on those terms. And yet, it’s lived in my head my whole life, whispering that I’m not good enough, that I don’t deserve to live, that I haven’t earned the right to be here. When the not-good outweighs the good, when I’m not actively useful enough, when I mess up… there’s the voice in my head that says someone, maybe everyone would be better off if I didn’t exist. At least that way I wouldn’t be adding to environmental destruction. Stack that alongside the ongoing depression and anxiety issues and what under-stimulation and physical illness and pain do to my body, and I don’t always cope well.

I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough. I feel it’s a consequence of the butterfly ritual and all that has flowed from there. Rather than trying to do impossible accounting, or having to keep a score or prove something to myself, I’ve started being able to think something much gentler. Simply, that it might be enough to do whatever good I can do. It might be enough to exist on those terms. Good enough might be whatever I can manage day by day. So it doesn’t have to mean being all things to all people and doing perfectly everything anyone might ask of me and maybe I don’t have to be overwhelmed with guilt by every mistake and everything I can’t fix.

I’m not entirely free from the suicidal ideation at this point, but it holds considerably less power than it did. I can see it happening and not be drawn into it – which isn’t fun or comfortable, but it is a considerable improvement on how all of this used to play out. If I can hold onto this shift in my thinking then I have a decent chance of getting my mind under control.

I’m generally a lot better at feeling compassion for other people than I am for myself. There isn’t another human on the planet I’d be inclined to treat the way I treat myself. There’s no one else whose existence and humanity I would hold in such utter contempt. I have no doubt that what’s enabled me to change is the ongoing warmth, kindness and compassion of other people. I did not climb out of this on my own, and part of how I’ve been able to climb out is awareness that there are people who care about me enough that my self-hatred is unbearable to them. Which in turn is a consequence of having been able to trust a few people enough to let it be visible to them, making it possible for them to challenge me over it.

Silence keeps a person trapped where they are, locked in with their demons. Talking about it is powerful, so I’m talking about it in the hopes that I can help someone else talk about it and thus change things in their life, too.

Hope is essential

One of the big barriers to becoming more sustainable, is the widespread belief that it’s going to hurt us to do so. We are afraid we’ll have to give up all the nice things, all the good things and spend the rest of our days wearing itchy clothes made out of coconut shells and never being allowed to have holidays and only eating locally grown lentils. 

Part of how we’ve got into this mess in the first place is a culture of selling each other stuff we don’t need while making ourselves feel miserable about the stuff we already have not being good enough. We waste an outrageous amount of physical resources and energy making things that all too quickly wind up in landfill. Meanwhile happiness is in short supply.

What I’ve tried to do with this book is look at the things humans actually find rewarding and how we could better meet those needs while being more sustainable. The question of how to be happy is one that comes up in philosophy, psychology and spirituality alike and I’ve done a lot of reading, contemplating and experimenting around this over the years. I’ve put together a small book that looks at both key areas for sustainability and key issues for human flourishing.

These are basically the same issues. The things that harm the planet also harm us. The things that would most improve the quality of our day to day lives are also better for the planet. We have to overcome the idea that there’s some kind of conflict between us and other living things and reject ideas that what humans need isn’t compatible with what ecosystems need. We’re all in this together.

If we dare to reimagine things, we could have gentler, more comfortable lives. We could spend more time doing things we actually like in the company of people we want to be around, rather than devoting so much life to turning the wheels of consumerism. We could have nice things.

And if you really want to wear coconut husk undergarments while eating only lentils, no one is going to stop you, but you might get some funny looks.

Available from places that sell books, and also directly from the publisher’s website – https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/earth-spirit-beyond-sustainability