Nimue Brown's Blog, page 82

Making your own traditions

Many of the things we think of as traditional at this time of year aren’t actually that old. The first Christmas tree in the UK happened around 1800 and they didn’t really take off until Queen Victoria got into them. The trees are a German tradition. 

The whole red and white Santa image is modern, green Santas are older and before that we had a diverse bunch of Gods, saints, Goddesses and spirits associated with midwinter and gifts. Or punishment, if you happen to be a krampus.

There’s no one right way of doing any of this. Real traditions are living things that evolve over time. Harking back to older traditions in the hopes of finding something purer or more authentic is also a really traditional thing to do. At some point, every tradition we have is just something someone made up.

Living tradition should be about passing along the fun stuff, not dolefully re-enacting whatever has been handed down to us. It should always be ok to reject traditions that don’t work.

The capitalist side of Christmas is a terrible tradition, causing financial misery for many and putting extra pressure on our already struggling planet. These would be traditions to reject. It’s all modern nonsense anyway, and there’s no need to keep it going.

I hope that however you relate to this particularly odd day, that it treats you kindly and that you are able to find peace and good things.

Crimson Craft – a review

This is a really lovely book. If you’re approaching it as someone new to sex magic, and you have feelings of confidence and delight, then this is a great place to start and get in there!

For a lot of people, sex is a difficult and uncomfortable topic. It doesn’t help that there’s so much negative cultural framing – especially for anyone female, queer or otherwise complicated. There’s far more shame than celebration, far more stigma than joy. And yet, our sexual identities can be huge, defining aspects of who we are, and are all too often parts of ourselves that we can’t safely express.

If you grew up with Christianity in your environment – even if it wasn’t your family religion – you’ve probably been exposed to the idea that sex is sinful, not sacred. It can be hard pushing past all of this to even consider the idea that sex could be sacred and magical.

In writing this book, Halo has created a safe space for anyone who wants to explore their own nature as a sexual being. This is an invitation to be open to healing, sacredness, wonder, spirituality and magic. It’s a deeply affirming and inclusive book full of things to explore and the affirmation that exploring is something you are entitled to do.

As this is written for the solitary practitioner, there are no assumptions about your orientation, partnership status, whether you fall in the ace spectrum, or how you want to go about having erotic experiences. This is wonderful of itself and entirely liberating. The person who wants to try these ideas with other people can explore that should they so wish, but this book is primarily about your relationship with your own body and with your sexual self.

If this is an area of challenge for you, I can recommend this book as a comforting, supportive and uplifting sort of read. I admit that I didn’t get in to read and endorse this book earlier in the process – much as I love Halo’s work – because I was in a really bad way and did not feel at all equal to it. With hindsight, while I’m certain I’d have cried a lot going through it at that earlier point, I also think it would have done me a lot of good if I’d felt able to try. So if this is an area of life and self that you’re struggling with, there’s a decent chance this book will be helpful, especially if you’re trying to change things and need ideas to work with.

Get it right, and sex can be magic, and mystery, wonder and sacredness. We have in ourselves, and between us, a capacity to make beauty and joy. That should be honoured and celebrated.

More on the publisher’s website – https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/crimson-craft-sexual-magic-solo-witch

The Wheel Turns

The turning of the year is especially self announcing around the solstices as the shape of the day changes. The passing of a calendar year also makes us more alert to the progress of time, and the existence of so many winter festivals adds to all of that.

Festivals are often the focus for awareness of the wheel of the year. It’s often when we pause to celebrate a key point that the journey through the year becomes most apparent to us. I’ve seen this a lot in ritual spaces, where checking in with community and spiritual practice for festivals also brings people into relationship with the seasons. Back when I was regularly leading rituals, it was evident that for a lot of people, these key check in points formed the majority of their relationship with the seasons.

The wheel turns every day. We’re in a constant state of movement and as we pass through any season, the next one is also being made. A lamb born at Imbolc will be growing in the womb at this time of year.

Taken as a day by day process, the changes are hard to see – it’s the moments of drama that make it most apparent where we are in a season. First frosts. First flowers. And while the solar process of the year is entirely predictable, how any given season plays out is far less so. I’ve seen heavy snow in April when it should have been spring and I’ve been outside in just a t-shirt some years in December. Sometimes our festivals align well with what’s happening in the natural world, but not always.

When I started out on this path I spent quite a few years celebrating the seasons through the eight festivals. That was in no small part because at that time I had a community to celebrate with. I spent some years exploring alternatives to the regular wheel of the year story. There are many things in nature that do not fit neatly into the kinds of stories Pagans like to tell about the wheel of the year. I found spending time on that helped me deal with the ways in which I’m not reliably able to fit myself into those regular wheel of the year stories either.

In recent years I’ve become more interested in approaching the seasons on a more day to day basis, focused on what’s going on around my home. This is in part because I’ve not been able to walk so far, which has focused my attention on what’s closest to me. Exploring the day to day changes makes more sense when you’re looking at the same area of land most days.

Our relationships with the wheel of the year are, to a significant degree, shaped by our relationships with the landscape. How often we go out, where we go, how far we go and how often we go to any specific place will shape how we experience the year.

Healing and progress

Often, healing isn’t a linear process, and this is perhaps especially true around mental health. It can be unsettling, to hit something that feels like a relapse. It can be hard to tell, when you’re in the middle of a process, whether you’re still overall heading the right way, or have taken a turn for the worse.

It helps a lot having professional insight for this sort of thing. That’s not available to many of us struggling with long term mental health challenges. Figuring out what anything means can therefore be an uncomfortably solitary activity.

It’s certainly true that with bodily healing, things can feel a lot worse before they start to feel better. Building strength, surfacing from sickness and healing wounds can all involve periods of time when things feel worse than they did at the beginning. I know to watch for this with flu – the point at which I usually feel most awful is the point at which I’m starting to get better. 

I find it helps on the mental health front not to assume that any given setback is a sign of disaster. Although of course anxiety makes that a challenging thing to hang on to! However, I’ve been around the various stunts my brain can pull a number of times now, and that helps. Sometimes breakdowns and breakthroughs are impossible to tell apart when I’m in the middle of them. And nose-dives aren’t forever. Even the really awful ones, and the ones that have been slow declines over extended periods of time. I’m still here, and some kind of getting up again has thus far always been possible.

Not everything can be recovered from. This is as true of long term physical illness as it is of mental health problems. Not everyone gets better, many things cannot be fixed. Our very able-oriented society can be rather too focused on the idea of healing as a journey to full recovery and this isn’t always helpful. It can be more useful to think of healing as being about as much wellness as you can achieve. You can be working on healing while in practice simply managing not to get any worse. You can heal, and relapse, and heal and relapse over and over.

It’s always good to seek the best outcomes you can – but what that even means is really individual. A person doesn’t have to expect to be completely fixed for it to be worth them seeking healing. Whatever recovery can be managed is worth having, even if it’s only temporary.

It’s also good to consider our expectations around other people’s health, and to make sure that the assumption of total recovery as end goal isn’t informing what we do. A person can waste a lot of time and energy chasing total recovery when that effort would have been better invested in management and making the best of things. 

Singing to the space

How your voice functions in a space is a big consideration for anyone on the bard path. While microphones can be a bit intimidating when you aren’t used to them, they do have a lot of advantages. Not having to use your voice at full volume is the obvious one – and over a longer set, projecting is hard work. If you have a decent sound person, someone else is sorting out your relationship with the space and making it work. You don’t have to do anything especially odd.

However, not everyone has their own kit, not all spaces require it, and sometimes you can end up in places where amplification would have been a good idea, but there isn’t any. At this point, being able to make best use of the room acoustics becomes really important.

It’s always worth getting into a space ahead of performing and looking at how the sound works. This is even true outside – where you stand in relation to the wind direction can make a lot of odds. Sometimes the shape of the land or features in it will give you small advantages if you work with them. The two main considerations are where to stand, and where to direct your voice.

This is something to learn by trial and error. However, if you get into a space and explore how sound works, you can figure a lot out. Wander around talking or singing to the space and notice any changes in what you can hear. Some places will amplify your voice for you. Some places will give you so much echo that it gets in the way.

Below is a video of The Ominous Folk at Shrewsbury earlier this year. You can see that we’re all singing to about the same spot. We’re also stood a lot closer to the audience than the performance space suggested. This, we rapidly discovered, was the bit of floor that gave us the best volume, and we’re singing to the big of the wall that was most helpful.

When you can engage with a space so that the place itself is supporting your performance, it often feels quite magical. It’s a way of interacting with a space and connecting it that brings you into immediate relationship with spirits of place. So, even if you aren’t performing for others, bringing your voice into a place and exploring how to connect with a place through sound can be deeply rewarding.

Leaves on snow

In a normal winter in the UK, the leaves come down before any significant snow falls – assuming any snow falls at all. This year there were still green leaves when the snow came in December. I’ve not seen snow sitting on autumnal leaves before, and I’ve not seen leaves coming down on snow like this, but there’s been a lot of it. The effect is pretty, the reasons less so.

This of course is climate chaos in action. It looks charming enough, but it represents problematic changes. 

In theory, deciduous trees shed their leaves to be more efficient in the dark part of the year and to avoid the stressors of having snow fall on large leaves. I don’t know what happens to trees when they have to deal with this – I see a lot of leaves falling now, but even after the snow has melted in the last day or so, there are still plenty of trees outside my window who still have leaves.

I don’t really know what any of this means, for the seasons or for the trees, but it seemed worth remarking on.

Druidry check-in

I find it helpful to pause and take stock every now and then, considering where I’m focused in my Druid journey, what’s important for me and what’s changing. It’s good to review things, to consider the journey deliberately and to think about where I might want to go and whether I need to make any deliberate changes.

Service: This used to be a much bigger part of my path, but I’ve been less involved with activism and with running things in recent years. I’m doing a teensy bit of mentoring. I do my best to help amplify other people, and I continue speaking up about mental health and domestic abuse. Otherwise, my main area of concern is looking at how we tackle things collectively. So many problems – and most especially the climate crisis – are being treated as things to deal with individually when that doesn’t work at all.

Meditation: Meditation, and contemplation have been major parts of my Druidry. I find at the moment I’m tending more towards contemplation and gestating ideas. I need to think about things, to build ideas, to channel raw inspiration into action.

Ritual: Including celebrant work, and having a steady prayer practice, ritual has really fallen by the wayside for me. It’s not what’s calling to me at the moment and I’m fine with that. I don’t have the right spaces or the inspiration at present.

Healing: This is becoming a major focus for me as I work on strengthening my body and doing the things that enable my mind to recover. This is a key underpinning – my ability to connect with the natural world has been sorely limited by how bodily ill I’ve been in the last couple of years. My ability to perform, to do rituals, to travel for events even, has all been compromised. Improving my health will give me a lot more scope to explore the path again, and that’s looking feasible to at least some degree. Honouring nature as it manifests in my own body is going to be more of a thing.

Deity: I have had an ambivalent relationship with deity, to say the least. Those of you who have been following me for longer will have seen the mix of longing and disconnection that has mostly been underpinning how I approach deity. That seems to be changing for me at the moment, and is likely to be a major focus going forwards.

Bard Path: This has always been the centre, for me. The idea of inspiration as inherently sacred, is the heart of my life and no doubt always will be. I’ve had a profoundly fruitful time of it lately in terms of being inspired, having projects I’m invested in and fabulous co-creators to work with. I’m doing more to take my creativity out into the world in all kinds of ways, and I feel really good about all of that. This is what I am for, and this is how I best handle all the many aspects of my Druidry, exploring, expressing and offering to others.

Magic: The idea of magic has always been with me, but depression can be made of disenchantment. Things have changed for me on this score, as part of the same process that has me exploring deity and feeling much more inspired. It’s become possible to have room for wonder, enchantment and a sense of possibility – partly because I’ve been surfacing from the depths of depression, and partly as a thing that has helped me pull out of the depression. I suspect this is something I’ll be talking about a lot more once I’m further into the process and have a better understanding of the mechanics.

Practices change over time. Druidry is a very large forest with a great many ways through it and a great deal to explore. Staying in one part of that is just as valid as wandering about.

Lore of the Saelvatici

This is a tricky book to review because it’s not like anything else I’ve ever read – and I have read a lot of books, and I read broadly. After some reflection I think you’re most likely to go for this as a reader if you’re into folk horror as a genre. It isn’t exactly folk horror, it’s more like the backstory that a contemporary folk horror narrative would allude to before leaving a contemporary character to die trapped inside a hollow oak.

For Pagan readers there may well be some amusement in the set-up – the ancient manuscript transcribed only to disintegrate leaving no real evidence. Steven C Davis clearly knows his stuff, and this is all very knowing. The lost but recreated manuscript tells of old gods, terrifying forests, human violence and horror. The book is an assemblage of fragments, in many ways more like poetry than a novel. I’m fairly convinced it’s a spell designed to enchant the reader and make space in their head for those old forest gods to enter in. I can honestly say I experienced it that way.

Quite some years ago, I read Wake by Paul Kingsnorth – a book set in much the same timeframe and also dealing with Norman conquest, religious upheaval and violence. I found Wake disappointing, and did not try to review it. At the same time, I felt it misleadingly offered things I wanted and failed to deliver on them. That book is on my mind now because Lore of the Saelvatici is in many ways an answer to how Wake left me feeling. This is the imagined history I needed.

That the writing is lyrical makes the violence a lot easier to bear. This is a bloody book, and many of the scenes in it do not go well for those involved. There’s a lot of death, murder, sacrifice… there’s also a lot of sexual violence. I’m generally not good at coping with sexual violence in books, but I managed to deal with the content here, and I think if you’re braced for it you’ve got a reasonable chance. It’s easier, in many ways, when violence is presented as horror and not as something titillating.

This is not a book for everyone, but if this is the kind of writing that attracts you, then you are going to love this. Strange, wild, uneasy and powerful material, it may well do things to you. The world would be a more interesting place of more of us had forest gods inside our heads.

You can find it on Amazon – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lore-Saelvatici-Steven-C-Davis/dp/0956514731

Healing and sacredness

My sense of the sacred is something that has shifted a lot over time. It’s not a hard pattern to trace. In my teens and early twenties, I was infused with feelings of possibility, open to a sense of wonder and able to imagine divinity and magic as part of the world. 

Things happened in my twenties that closed me down. It’s a long and unhappy story – which is perhaps all anyone really needs to know about it. I became uncertain, depressed, anxious, and I lost much of my sense of wonder and possibility. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which hope and confidence are necessary for feelings of faith and wonder. At the times when I’ve been least able to believe in myself, I’ve also been less able to believe in much else. With the current political state of the world and the looming realities of the climate crisis, it is not easy to stay open to beauty, to find joy, to be hopeful. Without that openness, the scope for experiencing anything numinous is much reduced.

This autumn has taken me on a transformative journey that is steadfastly changing my life. At this point I’m confident in naming it as a healing process, but I can see it will be more than that. I’ve faced up to many of the things that have locked me down. I’ve made my peace with many things, I’ve gained insights and I’ve changed. I feel more like the person I am supposed to be and considerably less like a ball of scar tissue. Alongside this I’ve seen my creative output increase dramatically and take new shapes I’m excited about.

I’ve been writing a lot of poetry. There are themes through it about connecting with divinity. It’s become a process of re-enchantment, for me, and rediscovering what it means to feel wonder, awe and inspiration. Being able to feel those things is changing how I feel about myself. 

I’m taking this winter to look inwards (a surprisingly conventional response to the wheel of the year, but there we go!). I have a lot of inner work to do, alongside keeping doing the things that are supporting this whole process. I am investing time in following the calls of inspiration, and seeing where these emerging feelings of wonder and hope might take me. At the moment, I need to hold carefully the process itself – at some point I might be able to talk usefully about how all of this has happened, but not while I’m in the middle of it.

What I can say is that all of this growth and change is fundamentally rooted in experiences of peace and safety. I know the theory is that we do our best growing on the edge of the comfort zone. I’ve lived for a long time outside my comfort zone, sometimes not even being sure where the comfort zone would be anymore. Folding into peacefulness, into security and gentleness has been transformative. Sometimes the healing part has been brutal, but it is the feeling of safety that makes it possible to go through that.

Not choosing hate

Our environments have a huge impact on us. We’re affected psychologically by what we encounter, and pathways our brains form develop in response to that. Bits of our DNA switch on and off in response to our environments. How and where we choose to spend our time is therefore an important consideration.

The media we each consume is very much part of the experience that shapes us. It’s also one of the bits we get a real choice in. What works for one person might not work for another and that’s all part of the glorious diversity of being human. However, when it comes to hate watching/reading I think there are questions to ask. 

It’s evident over on Twitter that there are a lot of people watching the Harry and Megan series on Netflix precisely so that they can be angry about it. I’ve only spent a few minutes looking at this because I try to balance having some idea what’s going on against not being overwhelmed by horrible things. I dip into news sources cautiously. It is really easy – especially on a site like Twitter – to end up scrolling through a lot of hatred and bile. It’s important to remember that we don’t have to know every awful detail and sometimes it is a good idea to look away.

Social media and the internet allow limitless opportunity to engage with people we don’t like, content that infuriates us and ideas we hate. While it’s good to encounter diverse opinions, letting things you hate become a significant part of your environment isn’t good. But it clearly is attractive.

Anger is a powerful emotion. Feeling like you have the moral high ground can be intoxicating. Seeking out things you hate can be a way of bolstering self righteousness and there can be a feel-good aspect to that for a while. But not for long, because exposing yourself to stuff you hate in order to feel superior to it takes far more than it gives. I’ve made that mistake a few times and I do not like where it takes me. It’s all too easy to get into without noticing what the impact is.

There are of course many other reasons for seeking out discomforting things. The need to know, and to understand sends people looking at things they loathe in order to make sense of them. I know not to watch any Jordan Peterson videos thanks to people who have done so and talked about it. Some social movements cannot safely be ignored. Sometimes, to protect our people, our communities we have to wade in and deal with the haters. Sometimes, fear of what’s coming will have you staring into the void, hoping to dodge whatever horror it spits out next.

As with most things, I think reflection is key. Noticing patterns of behaviour and what the consequences are. Checking in with yourself over whatever you’re doing with your time. Being alert to what nourishes you, and what doesn’t, what’s necessary and what isn’t. If you have the privilege to be able to pick your fights, then pick carefully.