Nimue Brown's Blog, page 71

The Weaver

The Weaver came in the night with a broad blue thread the colour of a cautious spring sky. She sewed my guts back together. It was messy sewing, but I was no tidy thing to fix. I had been torn apart, and she reassembled me.

She took my left hand, and plunged her needle all the way through the flesh of my arm, just beneath the wrist. Then she set about stitching me into the landscape. Those stitches in the same pale blue silken thread were even and regular – this was deliberate sewing, not the emergency restoration of my abdomen. She sewed me in place, sewed me into the hills, putting me back into the land where I belong.

It did not hurt. Not really. Not as much as being torn open. Not like being lost and cut adrift had hurt. Sometimes there are no kind or pain free ways of doing things. Sometimes the mending is harsh.

I had been lost for a long time, and needed weaving back into myself, threading into place in some way. Perhaps she could not come to mend me until I was that open. Perhaps it was only when I had been ripped apart that she had reason to sew me together. The breaking was brutal, the mending uneasy and I regret none of it.

I feel the threads of blue tracing through me. I feel where the stitches hold me to the hills. I do not know what this will mean for me. I woke to clear instructions about Awen and the threads of inspiration. Feeling my brokenness sewn together and the necessity of not giving up.

The Invisible Dog

When James was very small, one of his playmates was an invisible dog. The dog arrived in our lives before James was entirely verbal, but there were things about how he played that strongly suggested something dog-like in the equation sometimes. At about this time, a rather high profile Druid at an event asked me if I knew that my child had a dog and I was able to say that yes, I did know this.

As James became more verbal, I learned more about the dog. His name was Jesper, and he was a yellow dog with red ears. Now, if you know your folklore, you’ll be aware that a pale dog with red ears might be a fairy dog, or from the Welsh underworld, or part of The Wild Hunt. I knew this, but it was hardly the kind of folklore my barely verbal child had come into contact with. I treated the dog I could not see with total respect and no small amount of nervousness. I never saw him, but I did have a strong sense of dog-ness sometimes, and he never seemed hostile. Still, it’s quite a thing to have to wonder if you have a fairy dog hanging out in your home.

The funniest Jesper story involved he, James and I walking in a wood. Someone else’s dog approached us with great enthusiasm and barked at us a lot.

“Leave them alone,” the owner called out. “They don’t have a dog.”

James and I looked at each other because we were fairly sure that we did have a dog, and that this other dog could see him. It was an odd and memorable moment.

As James grew up, Jesper appeared less frequently and he’s not been around in quite some time. I have no idea what any of that was about, really. James was never inclined to try and make it mean something – it was just that there was an invisible dog in his life, and he really liked the invisible dog.

It would have been an easy opportunity to rubbish James’s perceptions and self expression and to make him feel uncomfortable about what he was sharing. I don’t have any way of knowing what he experienced, but Jesper was around for some years. He wasn’t an excuse for things James had done, or a way of trying to demand things, he was just an uncanny dog who hung out with us sometimes. Whatever else was going on, Jesper did not exist as a way for James to try and control or manipulate the world.

I tend to trust things more when they don’t make a great deal of sense. I think when things are tidy and easy to explain, they’re often what they appear to be. I think when we’re able to load things with meaning and significance it’s a good idea to be more wary of them. Things that just are, seem a lot more trustworthy to me, and so I never suggested to James that Jesper was silly or unwelcome, and when he was old enough to hear it, I told him the folklore about pale dogs with red ears. It’s interesting to note that he just found this really interesting and a bit exciting, and it in no way changed how he talked about the dog in his life.

(I’m sharing childhood stories about James with his permission, and I’m running with a theme of childhood experiences and magic).

Shapeshifting – a story

You have shifted again. Today you are a small box in a warehouse full of thousands of small boxes. You are sure that you are ordinary and unremarkable and that there is nothing inside you worth finding.

In a warehouse of a thousand small boxes, you are the only one that glows. You are still numinous, even today. There is brightness in you, even when you are least able to believe in yourself. It is not impossible to find you when you are just a small box. Even when you don’t want to be found. When I pick you up, you tell me to put you down, that you are nothing, that I misunderstood you. I do not tease you about being a talking box, but you are miraculous, whatever form you take.

You turn into a small bird. Just a little wren, plain as can be, and you fly from my hands. I’m going to have to chase you. I know this routine. I shall be a bird of prey then, as is traditional, and I will hunt you for as long as it takes and catch you as gently as I can, trying not to ruffle those little feathers.

I feel like we’ve been doing this for a long time. Lifetimes, perhaps. You tell me that you aren’t magical, and then you transform into some new being and run away from me. Some days I think perhaps this means I should not chase you. But you never run further than I can see you, and I think there is a part of you that wants to be found. Needs to be found. Needs me to see you despite your different forms and disguises. You aren’t hard to recognise.

You become a car park, and I become a tree to shelter you. You turn into a litter bin, and I become a yarn bombing. It’s always a bit of a go-to but I’m too tired to be especially original today. You’re back to trying to persuade me that you’re nothing extraordinary. You become a burned out car on the side of the road. I climb into your back seat, amidst twigs and litter, and I lie down and weep because I am exhausted and I don’t know what to do. At least if I lie here it will be hard for you to keep running away.

Of course if I just lie here, you can’t turn back into yourself, either. Assuming I have ever seen your true form. I think I have. Although I also think there are other forms that would be equally true, equally real. What I want most is a version of you I can put my arms around. It’s a selfish wish, perhaps. 

Once upon a time you asked me not to give up on you, to follow you when this madness began, and to remember your true form. It’s been a hard promise to keep, and sometimes I feel lost and tired and I wonder at the sense of it and whether I have made a terrible mistake. But then I think about you with your eyes bright, your face illuminated with joy and I remember why I said yes to this.

I get out of the broken car version of you. I wait to see if you will turn back into yourself this time.

Butterfly Magic

CW suicidal ideation

By the summer of 2022 I was actively planning how I was going to kill myself. It wasn’t something I talked about much at the time but a couple of people had some idea. Most of the people in my life were not aware that I’d got to a state of feeling it was inevitable. I appreciate that just dumping this on a blog post might be disquietening, but part of the thing that was breaking me was that I couldn’t see any way out of the stuff that was causing the damage, and if I didn’t ask you for help it was because there really wasn’t anything you could have done. It didn’t help that I’d also stopped believing there could be anyone out there able to help me.

Then, in the late summer, one of the people in my life managed to change some things for me, which opened the way to being able to talk about what was going on. Usually when I talk about mental health issues I get rounds of being told to do this, or that, or the other (counseling, meds, go to the doctor…) as though I haven’t tried those things. As though answers are easy to find and the problem is that I don’t try hard enough. As though a person who has given this a few minutes thought will better understand what I need than I do… But that wasn’t how things went, not this time. What happened instead was a serious and sustained effort to identify the underlying issues and enable me to tackle them with support. It’s been a process, and through it I’ve had to take some long, hard visits to the things that have hurt me most. 

Early in 2023 there was a ritual, designed to help me cope with the things that torment me. My suicidal ideation tends to focus on hanging, and rope. The ritual focused on creating protective imagery for my neck, and things to ward off the rope. One of those things, was butterflies. When the next round of ideation kicked in, the butterflies appeared, and they turned out to be yellow.

I have always struggled with not knowing what I’m for. Even as a child, I had a lot of anxiety about existing and taking up space. I’ve been through some things that have made this worse and there are things that live in my head that haven’t done me any good at all. On top of that, I’m a complicated person with some really high levels of need around a whole host of things. I’m profoundly people oriented, these are not needs I can simply meet on my own, and I’ve had too many experiences of being too much and making people uncomfortable when I’ve tried to fix any of this. I’m difficult, I know. The process of trying to squeeze my difficult self into shapes other people can tolerate has been expensive to say the least, and constantly muting, squashing down, cutting bits off has taken a toll. There’s only so long a person can do that for, and in the summer of 2022 I hit the limit.

The photo was taken on the day I had my yellow butterfly tattooed into my skin. It’s there so that I can see it – because the rope has not entirely gone away. I’m better than I was, but at my worst the urge to die was a constant thing and some mornings I’d wake up with the bodily sensation of the rope around my neck. The butterfly tattoo is a rite of passage of sorts. Out of the old, unbearable life and into something better. It’s an expression of belief that things can be better and a physical reminder of hope and possibility. Perhaps I can be someone I don’t have to hate. Perhaps there is a place in the world for the various things that make me difficult and hard to deal with, where I’m not intrinsically a problem. 

Sometimes now I feel like I want to live. It’s a new feeling. Delicate and fluttery, and startling.

Speaking with a silver tongue

Language can have a huge impact on people’s feelings. As a bard or as a ritualist it can be tempting to go for the most emotionally affecting language you can use in order to light fires under people. However, if the language you use doesn’t reflect who you are or what you do, then that disconnection can undermine your efforts and even push people the wrong way.

Protest is a good topic for consideration here. There’s nothing like a good, rousing song to unite people and get them all fired up. However, a protest song can turn out to be nothing more than a feel good activity. We loudly sing the chorus about how we’re going to change the world and then we go home feeling victorious while having achieved nothing. It’s not enough to have a protest song be a set of good ideas, if it doesn’t beget change, it hasn’t worked.

Do They Know It’s Christmas is a case in point. The song itself is pretty awful when you read the lyrics (and if you haven’t, you should). It’s condescending, and the narrative of poor unfortunate Africa is laced through it. Justice would involve some recognition of what other countries have done to exploit and harm African countries. Wealthy people encouraging poor people to donate to help other poor people isn’t about the creator walking their talk. Charity just puts band aids on massive systemic problems when what we need to be doing is making radical practical changes.

If you can’t back up your protest song, it isn’t that effective. If, on the other hand, your protest song comes out of years of protesting, it’s going to have a lot more weight. Songs about what you did carry energy into new situations. It’s no good writing songs about justice if, when it comes down to it you’ll look the other way. All too often, when successful people write about struggles, what they do is other their subjects, speak over them, deny them agency, patronise them and encourage pity. Streets of London is a case in point here.

If you are writing songs about issues, then it is important to care more about the issue than you do about how good you’re going to look when talking about the issue. 

When we write, we make things up – it’s true in any non-fiction genre and there’s nothing problematic about that. Making things up is good, and can be a powerful and more direct way of getting ideas across. However, there is a lot of difference between making up a story within a song, or as a book, and making up a story about the kind of person you are. If there’s nothing authentic underpinning your bardic work, then the odds are you’re just trying to elevate yourself. If what you write comes from somewhere real, it doesn’t matter how fantastical the creation is, the truth of it will ring out. I’m thinking of Nils Visser’s Wyrde Woods books here as a fine case in point – lots of fantasy elements, and a lot of powerful social realism underpinned by experience.

If you want to write about issues as a bard, it’s important to develop a real and substantial understanding of those issues, and to be engaged with change making. The world does not need another song about how sad homelessness is, nor does it need any more anthems designed to make people feel good about changes they aren’t actually making.

Druidry Ancient and Modern

It’s an interesting conundrum for modern Druids – how do we relate to the ancient Druids? We know just enough about historical Druidry for it to be a tantalising thing, mostly out of reach. If you want to dig into the history side, I recommend starting with Ronald Hutton and Graeme Talboys. We don’t know much (Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe is a solid look at what we don’t know.) There’s a lot we can infer and take inspiration from (Graeme Talboys, Way of the Druid is great for this.)

So here we are, modern Druids, not directly connected to the historical ones, not doing what they did and unable to know what they thought or felt. It might not seem like an especially credible place to start from. 

We do know broadly what the Druids of old reputedly did – that they were historians, healers, seers, scientists, teachers, advisors, peace makers, philosophers, wisdom keepers. As modern Druids we can take up those notions and run with them in whatever ways make sense to us. It isn’t ancient Druidry, but it holds connections with the past. The ancient Druids would not be doing now what they did then, even assuming we had an unbroken tradition. By working in the areas they worked in we hold some connection to them.

Religions change over time. The Christianity we see today is not indicative of what Christians were doing a few hundred years ago. What happens is that all religions take their inspiration from previous versions of that religion and from other religions and adapt to the times. It is in the nature of religions to change but it’s also in the nature of religious people to see continuity, tradition and coherence in their religions. 

I see core values in what little we have about ancient Druidry. I try to reflect those ideas in my own way of being in the world. At this point, I’m primarily interested in living a conscious and deliberate life based as much as possible on choice. I’m interested in justice, inspiration, community, wildness and wonder. When I started out I was much more interested in the idea of Druid as priest, and being on a path towards priesthood. As I’ve gone along I’ve become more interested in the idea of Druidry as a path that has no particular destination. I’ve put down most of the more priestly roles, and I’m much more of a lay-druid at this point. I figure that the existence of a priesthood implies the existence of a laity, even though we don’t know much at all about how that might have worked historically.

At this point, most of my Druidry is experimental. When blogging I don’t reliably take the time to talk about how what I’m doing relates to how I think about Druidry, much less to make a case for how it relates to historical Druidry. Some of that is about producing blogs that aren’t too repetitive, long or ponderous. Some of it is me trusting that anyone serious about Druidry will put in the time to look at the historical stuff, and will figure out for themselves how they want to handle that. Other lay-druids, casual readers, people from a broader Pagan background etc can just saunter in and take what they like from any of this.

Most of the Druid folk I connect with are doing parallel things, walking their own paths and sharing what they experience. As a community we used to be more interested in orders, arch druids, groves, structures… but I’m seeing a lot of people being ever less interested in authority and more curious about exploring things on their own terms.

(With thanks to Mickle Bear for the prompt)

Buy your happiness here

When something is truly learned, it becomes part of who we are and we don’t need to give it much deliberate thought. This is true of any habit we have, of the things we’ve been trained to do and of things we’ve internalised by accident. We are learning from the moment we enter the world, and we absorb a great deal without question – and not just as children.

I’ve worked in marketing, and one of the things I learned from doing that was that people usually need to see something five times before they’ll buy it. Five times isn’t that many times, in the grand scheme of things. Of course we don’t all rush out to buy things we’ve seen five adverts for. At the same time, when you consider how much gets bought on impulse that isn’t needed or even necessarily wanted, it seems likely that a lot of people really do buy things for no other reason that they’ve seen it repeatedly and the idea of it being attractive has got inside them.

There are people who will buy things, read things and watch them for no other reason than that the thing is already popular. Popularity itself is something that people find persuasive. Perhaps that’s about wanting to connect with other people, wanting to be involved in cultural moments and movements. I don’t know because I’ve never really felt it. But then, being a person who takes pride in being at the margins isn’t actually any more meaningful than being a person who takes pride in being up to date and at the cutting edge of things. Wanting things simply because they are new is also an issue for many people, and something that doesn’t grab me. I’m slow and old fashioned in a lot of ways, and I adopt things when I have to. Newness doesn’t reliably excite me.

I probably spend more time thinking about what I want and why, than is normal. I also don’t encounter that many adverts in the course of my day – just what I see online, which is brief and easily ignored. I’m not that persuadable that stuff is going to make me happy, and I think that insulates me a lot from internalising marketing prompts. I think it helps me that I have a very clear understanding of what makes me happy, so even when I’m low, I’m not persuaded that any product will give me that. I also don’t have the kind of body chemistry that can be made to respond to shopping. I don’t find it rewarding, so there’s nothing for an advert to manipulate.

It’s interesting to wonder how much of our desire is open to manipulation. Probably more than any of us likes to think. There are certain kinds of language use that I have no defence against, and I certainly have buttons that are easy to push. Most of us do – around the desire to be accepted and respected. So many adverts promise us those things, and threaten us with not having them if we haven’t kept up with what we’re supposed to be doing and consuming. Your socially appropriate body in your super-clean house wearing the right clothes and surrounded by the right gadgets is supposed to magically bring your heart’s desire. Except none of it works that way.

It might not matter so much if it worked. If we really could buy happiness and delight, then that would be great. However, once our basic needs are met, we don’t get much out of having more. Happiness is not something we find in products. The more time we’re persuaded to spend on earning money to buy things that don’t answer our needs, the more trapped we are in this relentless loop of earning and consuming, and the less room we have in our lives for joy.

Messing up and being honourable

There’s a lot to be said for working out your values and living deliberately in accordance with them. However, life doesn’t reliably put us in clear cut situations where it’s obvious what the right choice is. Sometimes there is no clear choice and every option we consider will have the potential to cause harm. All you can do is weigh up what you know of the risks and try to pick the best path through it all.

Being honourable doesn’t mean getting everything right. It isn’t the quest for a set of values that work as fixed rules in all situations. I’m really wary of the kinds of five minute spirituality tips that suggest there is a single answer to apply to all things. There isn’t. Not least because none of us knows what every potential future could be and we can’t pick a path with any confidence about how that might go.

Being honourable is about trying to make the best choices you can. It also kicks in when things go wrong, and in how we try and set things right once we’ve messed up. It’s often the case that messing up provides a lot of information about how better choices would have looked. There’s always some scope to learn and improve, and the honourable choice is often the one that has us learning, restoring and improving things.

That said, sometimes the honourable choice is to pause, heal, lick your wounds and get your shit together. Running in to fix things when you’re in trouble, burned out or otherwise not coping does not guarantee good results. Sometimes it is better to draw a few breaths first and take a proper look at things. 

I don’t think there’s much scope for acting honourably unless you can also be compassionate. If all we’re doing is acting out a set of arbitrary rules, without nuance or care, then sooner or later that becomes a stick to beat someone with. That might be all about getting to beat yourself up over mistakes made. It might be the means to be judgemental when other people mess up. As none of us are omniscient it is an absolute certainty that everyone will mess up. We can hold each other to high standards while being compassionate about our human shortcomings.

Very few people are out there trying to be evil. Most people think that what they do makes some kind of sense. A lot of people try hard to get things right. It’s important to recognise that someone’s idea of getting things right can be informed by radically different perspectives. Sometimes those people urgently need educating on an issue, and sometimes they need more empathy from others, and we all have to just figure this out as we go along. The choice to protect someone may look like taking power from them. The choice to let someone make their own mistakes may look like needlessly exposing someone to harm. There are no tidy answers most of the time.

No matter how hard we try, we’re inevitably going to fall short of our own ideals sometimes. That’s not a reason to avoid having high standards. It is however really important to think about how to handle things when we fall short of our own expectations. And for that matter how to approach things when other people fall short. An honour system that doesn’t allow for complexity or for situations where there are no good choices to be made, is inevitably going to be brutal. I can’t see that making honour systems so rigid that we are bound to fail is a course that serves anyone.

Feeling more magical

“How do you feel more magic all the time?”

I’m writing Wednesday blog posts for a particular person, who has jumped in with a question this week. It’s a good question and one that raises a lot of other questions. Most of us don’t feel more magical, we struggle with banality, with things that grind us down and leave us feeling sad and tired. Humans make terrible setups for humans to live in and I genuinely have no idea why we do that.

We need trees. We’d all feel a lot better if we had more trees around us and there’s plenty of science to back that up. We need quieter spaces with more bird song, more running water, and clean air. It’s not difficult to feel wonder and magic when you’re in a forest and the birds are singing. It’s really hard to feel it when you’re surrounded by tarmac, concrete and indifference. If we had more beauty in our human spaces, more art and colour, joy and connection we’d all have an easier time of it feeling magical.

One of the simplest ways to feel more magical is to seek the places that give you more and avoid the places that make you feel small and sad. Of course that’s not always possible. The way in which work happens, the pressures of capitalism and the challenges of stepping outside of that makes it hard to avoid the things that crush us. But, we can try for better balances. It’s important to make time for the things that feel exciting and full of possibilities. Chase the things that make you feel a bit magical. 

It’s the need for magic that inspires many pagans to make rituals and spells. Whatever other reasons there are for doing those things, having some time feeling magical is part of what doing magic is for. Taking some time every day to invite magic into your life helps with the feeling of it being there, and this is something we can do for ourselves, all the time. When times are hard, it can be difficult to remember that there can also be good things. Having more magic depends, in no small part, on being strong enough and courageous enough to keep making and seeking magic even on the bad days.

It’s not easy, hanging onto a sense of wonder if everything around you seems thin and hollow. It’s not easy to keep believing in joy and wonder, sometimes. It’s better when we do this together, when we take it in turns to make magic for each other, lifting and inspiring each other as best we can. If you aren’t feeling especially magical, there’s a lot to be said for asking what you can do to bring magic into someone else’s life.

How we go through life has a lot to do with the choices we make, day by day. Where we focus our attention, what we make, what we think, what we care about. We always get some kind of vote in how that works. Sometimes there aren’t many good choices open to us, but even so, staying open to the world makes a difference. The world around us is alive. If we choose to see the world as a vibrant, magical place then we’ll be open to those experiences. If we let ourselves feel wonder and amazement, if we are open to being surprised and excited, the world can offer a lot more magic. The trick isn’t so much about becoming more magical, it’s about not letting the strange priorities other humans have rob us of our own magic in the first place.

Smutty Writing

I used to write erotica, back in my twenties. It would be fair to say that this caused problems in a number of settings. I had to make the case – even in Pagan contexts – for being sex positive, for not treating this as something to be ashamed of. It’s hard when you have to fight to be accepted for who you are and what you love. For a long time, worn out from having to defend myself and (after my publisher died) not having a space for that side of myself, I didn’t write anything filthy.

I’m very much a sapiosexual sort of person, and stories were actually important to me as part of my sexual identity. It’s taken me a while to figure out who I am and start putting myself back together. I’ve had help. Not least, there have been people admitting to having read my smut back in the day, and being very much up for reading more of it.

During the autumn of 2022, I spent a lot of time exploring the relationship between sexuality and sacredness. I’ve been experimenting with ritual on those terms, with embodiment, inspiration and creativity. It’s taken me into ideas of deity as well, and has been a process of re-enchantment. The issue of deity is going to call for its own blog, probably many blogs. 

I’ve had help with the reclaiming process. I particularly appreciate the Crimson Coven space Halo Quin is holding on Facebook – again something I need to come back and talk about more precisely. I also need to honour the more private spaces that have been held for me in recent months, with the space to grow and to find myself.

How to Adore a Horned God is a poetry collection and it’s available through my ko-fi store – https://ko-fi.com/s/b0e8dde8bd

And this is me reading one of the poems – which is slightly rude.

This year, I’m going back to writing erotica. Shamelessly. Joyfully. I’m going to make more space to celebrate who and how I am, and I’m no doubt going to be talking about aspects of that, in no small part because talking about sex is a happy thing for me.