Nimue Brown's Blog, page 74

Meditation and emotional processing

If you’re the sort of person who is willing to rethink things in response to new information, then changing your mind can be a fairly rapid process. Sometimes it’s possible to shift emotional states quickly in response to new and different input, but it isn’t so reliable. Emotions are slow, often. The bigger and more impactful something is, the more time it can take to integrate it and make peace with it.

This is just as true of happy, welcome feelings as it is of gloomier ones. A big, positive change can take a lot of getting to grips with and can also be disorientating. We can be more neglectful when it comes to happy feelings because we tend to just accept them as good without any kind of scrutiny, where pain is more likely to have us paying attention to our own inner lives. Having intense good experiences, or a lot of them can also be something that needs processing.

This is something we can approach in a meditative way, taking the time to reflect on what’s happened and exploring how we feel about it. Deliberately reflecting on experiences and feelings helps us consolidate those experiences and make sense of them. It’s also a good way of being in more control with what’s happening. If our emotional experiences are things that just happen to us, we won’t have the means to seek more of what we like, or be able to deal with what we don’t like.

For me, the idea of the life lived deliberately has become a central tenet in my understanding of what it is to be a Druid. I’m not alone in this – the practice of reflection and being deliberate is there in the OBOD course.

Meditating on your experiences can work in any way that you want it to. I’m particularly focused on needing to understand things. My brain likes to sift information for patterns. I like to reflect on what, exactly made me happy and to revisit those things in a deliberate way. Around uncomfortable experiences, I need to understand exactly what I’m uncomfortable about. Sometimes the process of examining an experience will make me realise things about how I’ve been impacted by previous experiences. Your needs may well be different.

We won’t always consciously know what’s going on. We may not always have the room – emotionally or in our lives – to deal with our feelings. Things can get backed up, previous experiences can distort how we’re seeing the present. Sometimes a recent event can unlock feelings we didn’t make space for when they happened. That can be unsettling. Emotions can just bubble up sometimes, especially unprocessed ones, and that can feel a lot like being ambushed.

Making time for it is a good choice. Holding some quiet, safe, personal space where no one will judge you or make anything of it, is a good idea. Calm and gentle reflection on life – the happy bits and the difficult bits alike – means we at least have some idea what’s going on. Without reflection, we may not understand our own responses or needs. Taking the time to contemplate how we feel about things gives us a lot of information about who we are, what we need and what’s significant. It’s good insight to have, and spending time on yourself in this way has much to recommend it.

Alan Shaw – Grave Purpose

This is the third Alan Shaw book and you do ideally need to read the other two first. I’ve already reviewed book 1 and book 2.

Grave Purpose is the third book in Craig Hallam’s steampunk trilogy. Craig has really grown as an author as the series has progressed, getting ever more thoughtful and impressive as he goes along.

The main character – Alan Shaw – started out as one of those have a go hero types, the kind of dashing, quipping, risk taking young man who dominates the action genre. From the beginning, Craig has brought other elements into his work – class especially in the first book, and colonialism in the second as he slowly unpicks the trope he’s working with.

In book three, we take a hard look at the implications of the action hero lifestyle. Alan is getting older. His various injuries have taken a toll and he isn’t magically free from the consequences of his actions. This is very much a novel about consequences and pain. If you like being hurt by authors (you know who you are) then get in there, this book is for you. I found it a very powerful read, although I did call Craig a whole selection of less than perfectly polite things while I was reading it. I know Craig well enough to be able to picture the evil smile this comment will elicit.

There’s a big issue here around disability representation. In real life, most disabled people don’t start out that way. Many people who suffer do so as a consequence of accidents or illnesses. It’s not something we see anything like enough of in stories. Mostly what we get in the action genre are impossible people doing outrageous things with no real consequences. Or we get unrealistic fantasies about recovery. I really appreciated getting to see the consequences. As a person who lives with pain, it was meaningful to me to see a fictional character living with pain. I felt Craig handled this aspect of the book superbly, and I think this is a depiction people who struggle will find resonant. 

The story itself is full of action, mysteries to solve and consequences. I did mention the consequences?

You can find out more and buy the book from the publisher’s website, and all the other places that sell books. https://www.inspired-quill.com/product/grave-purpose/

A cold spring

Back during my boat dwelling period, there was an April with heavy snow. I can’t remember exactly when the last wintery-spring happened in Stroud, but there was one not so long back. Cold springs are hard, and this one comes on the back of a bitterly cold winter in the UK coupled with hiked energy prices. The direct human suffering this causes is huge, and it’s also impacting on our polytunnel farming and thus on our supplies of fresh food.

Early spring has always been hard and unpredictable. It’s no accident that Lent falls at this time of year. In the past, people would be facing the end of their winter stores while fresh crops had yet to appear. Depending on how good the previous harvest was, and how long the winter turned out to be, this could be a very hungry time of year. There’s something to be said for making a religious virtue out of the problem of being obliged to fast.

However, this is not about needing faith in a world of uncertainty. These are problems of our making. Humans have caused a climate crisis that greatly increases this kind of unpredictable weather. Greed is why we have an energy crisis in the UK, it’s all about deliberate choices, not inexplicable acts of God. We should be able to keep people warm and fed, and yet we can’t – and at the moment that’s mostly something that we, as a country have done to ourselves. Splitting from the EU was a serious mistake and has enabled politicians who don’t seem to understand how anything works.

We aren’t set up to live like our ancestors. We don’t grow our own food, or have the means to store it. Like many people, I don’t have a garden or a cellar. Most of us rely now on complicated systems of distribution for our food. We rely on companies for our heat and light – which should be cleaner and more sustainable than burning things at home, but that’s only true if the energy companies play fair. Being in a flat, I can’t have my own wind turbine or solar panels. 

I’m very much a fan of shared solutions to problems. However, that only really works when there’s kindness and benevolence in the mix. When the food growers can’t afford to heat their polytunnels, and when we’ve broken the system that brought us supplies of food from other countries, what do we do? 

This spring is cold in the UK, and unkind, and we were not ready for it.

Sometimes you just have to jump

In the last few years, I’ve not attempted to write a novel on my own. I’ve co-written a novel with David Bridger, and we’re working on the second in the series. I’ve written two novellas in the Hopeless, Maine setting. Before that, during lockdown, I accidentally wrote three novels worth of material. However, the Wherefore books were written one short story at a time with a structure more like a soap opera, and collaborative partners, so that was a very different sort of thinking.

I’ve been asked to write a sequel to Fast Food at the Centre of the World – that one’s being published as a book this year having only previously been out in the world as audio files. It would be fair to say that while I’ve been thinking about themes, I’ve also been procrastinating a lot. It’s been a year since I last sat down to deliberately write a novel, and I have no idea if I can do it. I wrote that one to a tight remit in about a month for a project that didn’t work out – I was working with other people’s plots and characters, it wasn’t purely mine. This was not a good experience.

This isn’t an unusual issue for writers, or for anyone working creatively. Any time you aren’t doing the thing it is all too easy to feel like you aren’t someone who does the thing. Gaps between creations can loom large. Even if your creativity is central to your identity, there’s only so long you can go without doing it before all kinds of uneasy feelings creep in. It’s not like I haven’t been writing – I write every day. Novels loom large for me. They are large creatures, unruly, and requiring a lot of care and attention. And sometimes, as with last year, things can go badly wrong. It’s a lot of time and energy to invest in the hopes of making things work.

I started Fast Food at the Centre of the World on a plane to America, visiting Tom for the second time. The central characters were his, although I have developed them a long way from his original ideas. I started writing with a keen sense of the world, and very little idea where I might be going. I’m in the same position now, knowing the setup but not knowing the story. I prefer working this way, but it is a bit exposed. 

What’s focusing my mind is the support from the people who are into what I do. Mark Hayes was out on Twitter this week telling me that he wants to read it – without even needing to know what I’m working on. It’s a powerful gesture of support. Others of my closest people are being tremendously supportive and encouraging. 

Writing can seem like a really solitary thing to be doing. It isn’t – not for me. I depend a lot on my collaborators, on the people who inspire me, and the people I write for. Those are usually the same people. Writing is an expression of relationship for me, not just with people, but with the world as a whole.

I know I’m going to be including themes of fast fashion, AIs, disability, fatigue, parenting and the madness of late stage capitalism in this book. Maybe also looking at eco-fascism, and certainly thinking about regeneration and community. There’s usually a lot of Druidry in my fiction even though it isn’t always overt.

Learning by doing

There are some things you can really only learn by doing them. The process of doing something when you really don’t know how to do it tends to feel exposed. In the beginning, you may be awful, which can be off-putting and might be very uncomfortable. How will people react?

Sometimes very experienced writers of essays, short stories and articles can jump straight into novel writing and make it work. For most people, the first novel is a hot mess you hide and never speak of. Until you’ve tried to write one, it’s hard to grasp what it takes to write a novel, and just how many ideas you need to make it to 60k words – which is short by book standards. It’s not until you try and write a book that you can really get to grips with how pacing works, and character arcs and themes. There’s a lot you can learn from reading, but it’s not the same as doing.

Playing music or singing with people when you aren’t working from a written composition brings similar issues. You can learn to play your instrument, you can learn songs, and there’s a great deal of theory that can be handy for this, if it suits how you think. You can only learn how to play by ear by doing it. You can only learn to sing with other people, or to join in by improvising, by doing it, and you have to do it with other people.

There are things about being on stage and interacting with an audience that you can only learn by experiencing it. This also applies to giving talks, being on panels and being interviewed. There are a lot of things you can learn by observation, but in order to learn how to navigate yourself through this sort of thing, you need practice.

This is why it is so important to have safe spaces where people can have a go. If the only spaces you can find are for professional people who already know how to do these things, there’s no scope for anyone else to advance to that level. Accessible, grass roots spaces where people feel welcome and supported as they learn, are absolutely essential. The only way we get people who are great at these things is if we support them while they aren’t great. No one comes fully fledged into their creative powers, everyone has to spend time learning and making mistakes.

If you’re an organiser, this is something you can factor in by creating opportunities. If you’re an audience member, your willingness to be kind and supportive is hugely important. Mocking people and knocking them down will stop people from becoming all that they could be. Kindness, support and encouragement helps people grow and develop. Often the single biggest issue for people putting their stuff out is confidence – nerves can mangle performances or stop people showing up. Help people build their confidence and you help them become all that they can be. 

It may be tempting to think that surviving setbacks and hard knocks is a good way of weeding out the wimps and only getting the really committed performers. This isn’t how it works. Confidence and determination don’t have any relationship with quality. I’ve seen some really confident people doing terrible things in public places and no amount of negative feedback will slow them down. It’s the more sensitive people, the gentler people, the ones already knocked around who suffer most from being put down. Those qualities are good qualities in a creator, and might be worth more than the ability to disregard all criticism. People learn a lot when you can tell them what you like about what they do.

The reviewing of books

As book reviewing is a sem-regular thing for me, I thought it might make sense if I talk about how that works.

I read far more than I review. When it comes to reviews, I focus on small publishers and self-published authors because these are the books that most need support around getting attention. Usually I already know either the publisher or the author, but not always. Sometimes I jump in for things I’ve seen online.

If I don’t like a book, I don’t review it. I probably won’t read all of it, either. I’m quite fussy about how I spend my time. Also, I don’t think anyone benefits much from me reviewing something I didn’t get on with. I don’t enjoy it, the author won’t enjoy it, better all round not to go there. Also there’s the thing that I’m often reviewing people I know and it’s often the case that I know them *because* I like their work.

On very rare occasions I have done shout outs for music and other things that were not books. I’m most confident when reviewing books. It’s what I’ve done most of.

I’ll cheerfully read most genres, fiction and nonfiction. The single most important consideration for me is how I get on with the author’s voice – which is really subjective. In nonfic I require books to show their workings out to a reasonable degree, especially around anything historical. I’m totally open to nonfic based on personal experience and experiment. With fiction, I like to be surprised without having my ability to suspend disbelief stretched to breaking point. I need engaging characters I can care about so I don’t get on with things that are excessively cynical.

If you’ve got something coming out that you’d like me to review, you’re very welcome to drop me a line – brynnethnimue at gmail dot com.

Dealing with shame

Shame is a really socially informed emotion. Clearly we have it to encourage us to align with our community groups, which for most of history we’ve depended on for survival. Also clearly there are a lot of modern humans who feel no shame for the harm and pain they cause. Alongside this there is the question of who we make ashamed, and what it costs to be part of a group.

If the shame is deserved because harm has been caused, then the answer is to do something restorative. We all make mistakes, that’s just human. We will all mess up and hurt other people, and feeling shame in face of that is a strong prompt to get in there and fix things. If we’re able to respond to our mistakes with restorative action it should be easy enough to draw a line under things and move on, learning from the shame but not feeling burdened by it.

If the shame is underserved because no harm has been done, then it can be hard to live with. I’m thinking about the many ways in which we make people feel ashamed of their bodies, their sexuality, their perfectly harmless lifestyle choices and so forth. Making people feel bad about innocent things will diminish them. It serves a social function, too. This kind of shame is all about who has the right and the power to express themselves and who is powerless and made to fit in.

It is hard to overcome shame on your own. This is fundamentally a social issue so the solutions need to be social as well. Unshaming someone can be a collective project. It’s why we need Pride events, to help counter a long history of encouraging queer people to be ashamed of ourselves. It’s why so many minority groups take up similar approaches – asserting the right to exist and to be as you are without having to feel badly about it is a work in progress for a lot of us.

Any time we affirm each other, we are potentially helping someone feel less ashamed of themselves. It’s really powerful to have spaces where we can treat each other as valid and good, rejecting the kinds of social judgements that wound so many people. Just being nice to each other about appearance gets a lot done – there’s so much body shaming out there, so much cruelty around the accident of how anyone looks, and all too often what we’re being judged against are photoshopped images and bodies that have been surgically modified. 

I don’t really know what’s going on with people who go in for shaming others. No doubt for some it is entertaining to cause pain, but I can only see that as itself coming from places of pain, shame and inadequacy. I think you’ve got to be in a pretty awful place to want to hurt someone, or make them feel ashamed of themselves over entirely harmless things. I wonder to what degree the urge to make others feel shame comes from having a great deal of internalised shame themselves. I think sometimes it comes from a desire to control others and make them smaller, which is something that comes from fear and insecurity. People often hate in others the things they can’t deal with in themselves, as with the cliche of the homophobic politician who turns out to be into gay porn and rent boys.

When you have a community you can trust, then there’s scope for affirmations to counter anything you’ve had treated as shameful. If you’re not hurting anyone else, then what you do is your own business and no one should feel entitled to tear you down over it.

History, astrology and perspective

I’m currently reading a book primarily about prehistory (Church of Birds by Ben Gagnon) and while it’s mostly not about astrology, the author has things to say about the sky. It struck me, as I was reading, that the way in which people understand astrology has everything to do with distance.

Up until relatively recently, humans viewed the stars as being small things that were nearby. There are many places around the world that have understood their rivers as existing in relation to The Milky Way. For people who understand the stars as small and nearby, it’s easy to see why the activities of the stars would be as much part of the ecosystem as the river. The effect of the moon on water is easily observed, so the idea that stars could also impact on the Earth isn’t especially far-fetched in that context.

As a modern person experiencing the stars as remote and indifferent suns, I’m ambivalent about astrology. I find it hard to believe that something so large and distant could impact on me in more than very vague and general ways. However, imagining the stars as forces that seem much closer to hand, immediate and personal, gave me completely different sense of how astrology might have worked for my ancestors.

This is one of the things I love about books on prehistory – this opportunity to imagine life in radically different ways. It’s a good antidote to rigid thinking and a good opportunity to stretch my imagination and try to make sense of things from unfamiliar perspectives.

Beyond Sustainability

What does it mean to go beyond sustainability? As the title makes clear, it’s a concept I explore in my next published title from Moon Books. 

Much of the talk around climate chaos focuses on sustainability – which makes some sense. As a species we aren’t acting in a way the planet can sustain, and if we don’t get on top of that quickly, the prospects are grim.

The issue with this perspective is that it encourages us to see humans as only really capable of being a problem. We need to be able to imagine ourselves as being able to go beyond that. Getting things back on a more balanced footing isn’t really enough. If the current culture continues it would likely mean trying to live up to the edges of what’s sustainable, with a lot of non-sustainable things being greenwashed as somehow good. Just look at how we’re using the term ‘sustainable development’ at the moment for a sense of how this works.

Humans are capable of moving beyond the idea of being sustainable. We should be thinking about what it would take for us to be restorative. This applies both to our relationship with the planet, and to how we treat each other. So much of what humans are doing to each other right now is toxic. What would it mean to regenerate? What would happen if we started looking at the things we can do – in any area of life – to make things better than they have been.

Sustainability is mostly shooting for being adequate. What if we went further?

Beyond Sustainability is available from the 28th April from the Moon Books website https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/earth-spirit-beyond-sustainability It’s up for pre-order on most book selling websites now, and can be ordered from bookshops.

Changing your mind

It is incredibly disorientating when something happens to make you realise that your understanding of the world may be desperately wrong. This is often an issue for trauma survivors. People who have faced a traumatic experience may need support in rebooting their reality and going back to feeling safe. It’s also an issue when you’re emerging from abuse – especially gaslighting – and realise that you’ve had your reality damaged. When you’ve been lied to a lot, finding out about it can leave you unsure of what can now be trusted.

Then there are the people emerging from belief systems – that might mean cults, or family stories, religious belief, political affiliations or anything else that dominates a person’s world view. If something happens to make us doubt our world view, that can be a real blow. At the same time, if we’ve been persuaded by something inaccurate, toxic or controlling, then recovering from that is in our best interests.

When the reality you encounter doesn’t fit with the reality you think you know, what do you do? Who can you safely talk to? How do you ascertain which version is real? How do you decide what to trust?

I’ve been here a couple of times, and I can’t say it gets easier with practice. As a very young adult I was drawn into a web of lies, which enabled someone else to commit fraud, and sexually abuse others. I was used as a decoy duck to make the situation look valid, which was a tough thing to have to square up to. Once I started unpicking what was going on, there was a long period where I felt totally lost and bewildered. All I could do was look for the solid, objective evidence. When it’s personal, this is a lot more feasible than when you’ve had your reality broken by something that has more power over you. If your entire culture has told you that you’re evil because of who you are attracted to, finding a space where you can challenge that idea is much harder.

Trust makes us vulnerable. Trust the wrong person, or the wrong news outlet, or the wrong politician and you can leave yourself open to considerable harm. But without trust, we have no points of reference to build our sense of reality on. Deciding who and what to trust is such a huge issue, and yet most of us make the choice unconsciously, assuming that whatever we grow up with is normal. If we find that we’ve misplaced our trust, especially if that’s around things we’ve trusted since childhood, then rebuilding is really hard.

It is possible, though. I’ve done it twice now in a substantial way. If you are short of useful points of reference, focus on whatever is least subjective. A few pieces of evidence about what’s real and what isn’t can help you unpick the rest. (Choose your sources carefully and consider the qualifications of any expert you turn to. Youtube conspiracy theorists will not help you.) 

If you’re obliged to question your reality, or re-build it, one of the most useful questions to ask is what it’s going to allow you to do. There is no single objective truth about existence, or how to live, or what to feel. When you’re building your reality from scratch, you actually get to pick how you want to think about life, the world, people, yourself. You can do that in a deliberate way and it is entirely reasonable to pick based on what you think would most help you. Start by considering how you might be kind to yourself. If you pick kindness, things tend to go better than not from there. It’s a better basis for making mistakes. Better to be too kind, too patient, too good, than to choose a path of anger and wounding.