Nimue Brown's Blog, page 9

A Druid at Christmas

(Nimue)

There are no wrong ways of handling today. If your family or community celebrates Christmas and you want to join in, that’s a fine Druidic choice. Supporting those around you makes sense as a Druid, honouring your ancestors can be part of that.

Christmas gifts can be a good opportunity to introduce environmentally responsible thinking. I make fabric gifts bags each year and now have my family re-using them, thus cutting waste. Homemade gifts, upcycling, ethically sourced, and the gift of experience rather than stuff can all help make Christmas that bit greener – which is also good Druidry.

If you aren’t celebrating or participating, that’s entirely fine too. This can be an ideal day for quiet reflection, and if the weather permits it can be a really good day for getting outside as many places are quieter. For many years my Christmas day featured a long walk from my home to my mother’s house. These days my body can’t take the ten-odd miles over the hills, but there’s a lot to be said for getting outside if you can.

Feasting is very much a Pagan tradition. You can do that as a standalone activity with no requirement for specific beliefs. Toast your gods, your ancestors, your spirits of place etc, and carry on. Celebrating is good, if you like that sort of thing.

I hope that whatever today brings you is joyful and peaceful, and that you are able to make this day work on your terms.

Festive time off

(Nimue)

Some years I manage to take off the week between Christmas and New Year. Not reliably though. Part of the issue has always been covering what I would otherwise have done in the gap. Self employed and freelance people do not get paid holidays. In years when I’ve been doing a lot of paid social media work, the effort of setting up posts in advance for multiple clients often didn’t feel worth it. Social media sites will punish you for not posting often enough and when you’ve worked to build a presence, that’s not something to abandon.

This year I’m only looking at covering blog content and the things I’ve committed to over on Patreon. I don’t take Patreon holidays – having promised people content, I prioritise honouring that. The challenge for December will be getting the January Murder Village chapter sorted, and the January instalment of Everyday Druidry.

It helps that I’m not travelling for any gigs this month – the only two in the diary were local. January is also a quiet month for gigs usually, and there’s only one in the diary at time of writing. I’ve opted not to try and do and Christmas markets this year – that’s always a gamble what with the cost of stalls and insurance, the investment of time and energy and all the things I can’t do while standing behind a stall being very cold.

There’s something very powerful about having a whole week off. Over the years I’ve explored working seven day weeks (just don’t) having one day off, or two or more and the effect is very different. Taking time off in a chunk makes it possible to really rest and unwind, and even to do fun things from a place of feeling well resourced. In my ongoing mission to improve my health and take better care of myself, I’m intent on giving myself that this year. It’s honestly the best Christmas present I could have.

For perspective, I’ve written this post right at the end of November. Partly because I needed to set the intention and partly because keeping the content flowing takes some setup work. There’s no point trying to do it all at the last minute and then hitting the time off feeling so exhausted that the only thing I can do is sleep.

I hope that you are able to take good quality time off during these shortest of days. I hope there will be blessings at your hearth, and comforts aplenty and that you will find abundance and joy in the days to come. There will be something to read here every day – I’m conscious that this can be a very hard season for anyone feeling lonely or isolated. I will be checking in regularly for comments.

The limits of meditation

(Nimue)

Despite my longstanding enthusiasm for meditating, I’ve never considered it the magic bullet other people seem convinced it should be. I have considerable rage around the way a rather glib take on ‘mindfulness’ is now offered as a medical solution. I’m sick of seeing it offered as a cure personal suffering at the hands of inhumane systems.

One of the issues is the focus on ‘being in the now’. If the present moment is good, or even merely neutral, then that’s fine. If you are being bombed, are overwhelmed with physical pain, worked to the point of exhaustion, miserable with cold because you can’t afford both heating and eating… being really focused on the present just means doubling down on the misery. I’ve been trying (with varying degrees of success) to talk about this for years.

Now there’s some science, and if you have the time and the inclination, this is a really good read – https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hope-can-be-more-powerful-than-mindfulness/

Many years ago, I had an argument with someone who was preaching their version of Zen and being in the moment. They argued with me because I’d written about the importance of hope. They told me that the future isn’t real, hope is an illusion and that I should focus on the present.  I still stand by my belief that hope is incredibly important for survival and for flourishing. Apparently there’s some evidence now to back that up.

Living only in the moment may make sense if you are in a monastery and have dedicated your life to that spiritual path. Taking time to be deliberately mindful clearly does bring a lot of people some everyday benefits, and I’m all in favour of that. If something works for you, go for it. Alongside that we need to be clear that failure to magically transform your life with meditation might have far more to do with your circumstances than not being a ‘good Druid’. There are a lot of problems you can’t meditate your way out of.

Hope enables us to try and change things. If your life is perfectly safe and comfortable, you might not need hope and can indeed bask in the lovely present. For those of us not cocooned in privilege,  our quality of life will likely depend on our ability not only to endure, but to work towards something better. If we can’t imagine something better we’ll not build it. The planet urgently needs us to imagine better and kinder futures, and to hold enough hope to take action.

Getting too focused on the present can lead us into apathy, inaction, complicity with oppression, and despair. Too much acceptance has us going along with dreadful things. It’s neither a peaceful choice nor a spiritual choice for Druids to persuade ourselves that we can’t do anything and we should just live in the moment. Resistance, climate chaos, compassion, and justice demand active responses and you can’t do that if you aren’t willing to be future focused to at least some degree.

Being mindful, present and wholly in the moment can be wonderful, and there’s a time and a place for it. Like everything else, it requires discernment, and a willingness to take responsibility for ourselves.

A magic spell for bards

(Nimue)

Repeat this spell whenever you find that you need it. Say it outloud if you can – we are more persuaded by things we hear ourselves saying.

I invite inspiration into my life.

I give myself permission to be a bit crap.

When inspiration comes, it does not magically transform us into people who can instantly do what said inspiration suggests. It can take time to learn skills, even if you already have skills in the relevant area. The inspiration for a poem is not necessarily going to result in you just sitting down and writing it perfectly in one go. Sometimes creativity takes time, re-visits, re-drafts. The first pass is not going to be the best thing you could do.

If fear of being a bit crap stops you from even having a go, you will never get to a point where you can magically create things. Messing up is a creative rite of passage, and to become good at things, you have to be willing to spend time failing at them first. This is how we learn. If you try, and the first go is a bit rubbish and you let that stop you, then you will never get very far. It can take a lot of passes to get to the point of not being rubbish. Being really good often takes years.

Expecting to do things perfectly at the first attempt is really a bit mad. Many of us have this living in our heads thanks to bad experiences in educational systems. For those of us from less privileged backgrounds, it was only if you were stunningly naturally good at something that there was any chance of being allowed to do more of it. It takes time to become good at things, and if you have not been given that time you may have some badly distorted ideas about what you are capable of. The time you spend on creating is far more impactful than the raw talent you start out with.

Repeat the permission spell. Say it to yourself. Give other people permission, too. Throw perfectionism out of the window – it is of no use to you. Aim for the absolute best you can do, and figure out how to be ok when it isn’t as good as you thought it would be.

Because here’s a thing – that never goes away. What you know is always ahead of what you can do. What you can imagine and the possibilities you can see will always be better than the things you can create. You do not get to a point of absolute mastery and perfection, it isn’t available. Committing to the bard path means committing to this part of the path too. You have to learn how to celebrate and enjoy the progress you make even as you identify the flaws in what you’ve just done. Give yourself permission to be a bit crap, and the inspiration will flow through you far more effectively, moving you on in your journey.

Honouring the shortest days

(Nimue)

I don’t tend to think of the solstice as an exact time – although many people do and that’s absolutely fine. Some people like to celebrate sunset at the solstice, but not everyone does. In my part of the world that’s a cold time indeed to be outdoors for a ritual. I did manage it last year, but I’m not planning to attempt it this year.

Rather than thinking about the shortest day, I’m more drawn to the idea of a solstice period, as we go through the shortest days of the year. It will be a while before it feels like the days are lengthening again.

If you can, then this is a good time to pause, reflect and retreat a bit. Of course that isn’t available to everyone. If you’re working more hours at this point, or have a lot of family-orientated work to do, it can be a demanding and hectic sort of time. Be gentle with yourself if you get the chance. If you can, spend a little time with the darkness, with the setting sun or the rising sun. See if you can catch a midwinter dawn chorus – the birds where I live are still singing the sun up, albeit quickly and quietly compared to what happens in summer.

Each cycle of the seasons offers opportunity for growth and renewal. The old year falls away and the new year rises. Change is inevitable. We have no way of knowing what lies ahead. This is often a good time for looking back, reflecting on lessons learned, and whatever this last turn around the sun has brought us. What do we want to take forward? What do we hope to leave behind?

As we move through these short days I will be thinking about where this last year has taken me, and what I want to carry forward. I’m more into setting intentions rather than goals, and have been thinking for some time about the directions I want my life to go in.

I know that whatever else I seek next year, I will be focusing on abundance and joy – how to have more of that for myself and how to bring more of that to other people.

Just One Conscious Breath

(Nimue, review)

I was sent this book to review and I don’t know the author, which is less often the way of it for me. This is not a Druid title but I do think it will be of interest to Druids. The main principle of this book is that when we are deliberate, this enable us to live our values and act consciously, rather than simply reacting. For me, this is a core Druid value as well. The idea here is that al it takes is one conscious breath to shift you from pure reaction to something more deliberate.

The book is written in very small sections with the advice to do no more than one section a day. Of necessity I went a bit faster because otherwise the gap between release and review would have been hefty. However, I slowed down from my normal reading pace and am confident that one section a day would be a good way to handle this book. The chapters are largely philosophical so each one gives you material for contemplation as well as breath-orientated medication practices.

Author Michael Wood draws on Zen and Taoist traditions as well as Breathwork and his own lived experience. There’s more depth around this than we often see in texts about meditation and I very much appreciated that. This is someone with a deeper experience of, and understanding of those paths writing about substantial experiences rather than just repeating what others have said. I came out of the book feeling that my understanding of Zen had been greatly enhanced by reading this.

For me the book raised a lot of questions about the nature of mind and thought, and what it is that people are trying to do with meditation. It made me realise that I might well be a more advanced meditator and that the reasons I often get frustrated by this kind of text is that my mind is pretty calm and I don’t need to declutter my thoughts that much. Reading One Conscious Breath has been an unexpected personal journey, and I think this book has the capacity to offer many people insights into their own lives in various productive ways. You certainly don’t need to entirely agree with the author to find the book stimulating and helpful.

The only significant issue here is that the writing isn’t trauma informed. As is so often the way it assumes that your fears are issues only in your head and that life would be ok if only you could think about it differently. This honestly doesn’t work if you are in, or have been in a highly traumatic situation. While the tools here may be used to help you cope, they aren’t going to solve this level of distress. Some of the sections about dealing with fear need approaching carefully if you have PTSD or CPTSD.

For anyone dealing with first world problems, this is going to be a helpful read. If your malaise is largely internal, while your life is passably comfortable then this book has a lot to offer. The more marginal you are, the less effective it is likely to be. But then, that’s so often the way of it with spiritual writing.

With those caveats in place this is a book I can recommend for anyone interested in meditation. It’s also good for readers who want accessible philosophical material to explore, focused on reasonably common life experiences. I’ve meditated a lot more than usual while reading it, and I think I’m going to continue that into the future.

Why pre-history is so important

(Nimue)

The distant past is not easy to find out about, and may seem largely irrelevant. However, the roots of many of our least helpful cultural stories can be found in how we think about the past, and tackling that can help us tackle some of our modern issues. It’s a big topic, this won’t be an exhaustive list.

We tell stories about how early people were superstitious and believed ridiculous things. This supports the idea that we are cleverer and more sensible now. Human technology goes way back, our ancestors figured out a huge amount, they were clearly rational people. This whole line of thought also contributes to the negative treatment of indigenous people, who are seen as both primitive and superstitious when they are neither.

Gender binaries and gender stereotypes. We use our stories of pre-history to normalise current narrow and unscientific takes on gender. When you infer gender from grave goods there can be no women warriors for a start. Now that DNA evidence is in the mix it is more apparent that our foolish modern gender binaries are not as normal as some people assume. Hunting was not a male activity; gathering was not a female activity, modern ideas about gender roles are not ‘natural’.

We tell each other that humans are naturally competitive and exploit each other. Again this isn’t true, prehistory has evidence of injured and disabled people being supported by their communities. Prehistoric people collaborated in amazing ways and we do not know how the organised themselves to do that. Organisation is not proof of hierarchy.

We give each other the impression that the most important historical technology is for hunting and fighting. It is merely what 19th Century archaeologists liked to focus on. We’ve defined eras of prehistory by these tools, and given them priority in how we think about the past. This is a modern mistake. We depict ‘Stone Age’ people badly wrapped in skins. Spinning is known to be at least 12,000 years old. The ‘Stone Age’ had fabric in it. In terms of human mobility, the baby sling must have been both early and critically important. There is evidence for early fertility management, and early sex toys. Our ancient ancestors were complex people.

We project our modern ideas onto the past and use them to justify this mess we’ve got ourselves into. If we had better stories we might do better. The evidence about prehistoric humans is rich with possibility and has far more to offer us than  the bad takes of the last few hundred years.

All of this serves to underlie the myth of progress. This is a key story that describes human history as a progress arc, with ‘now’ being the pinnacle of human achievement. The truth is not that simple. Given that we’re killing the planet, imagining our trajectory as process is pretty mad. With the progress comes the sense that our trajectory was inevitable and unavoidable. We’ve always had options and we still do. Getting a better handle on prehistory can help us see how many options we’ve always had, that what we now have isn’t progress, and that destroying ourselves with our failing capitalist system is not the only option we have.

Not patriarchy but surrender

(Nimue)

Most of the good things in life require surrender. You have to let go and fall into them – it’s true of laughter, love, pleasure and joy. True spirituality is about surrender too. Meanwhile patriarchy is all about control or submission.

Patriarchal systems encourage men not to surrender to their feelings. Anger is permissible, but there’s a general pressure to be in control both of yourself and those around you. There’s so much around love and relationships, and around sex, that you just can’t experience if you have to be in control. Fear of female sexuality is a big driver in patriarchal systems, and I think that’s very much about fears of male surrender. There’s real joy in that surrender, and when we surrender together it can be a deeply beautiful experience.

Women in patriarchal systems are taught to submit and endure. There’s nothing beautiful about this – in being obliged to put up with the male control, there’s very little room for joy. Submission on these terms of joyless, and female joy is seen as intrinsically suspect anyway.

Proper laughter is a loss of control. It’s a very bodily thing that overtakes you, melting away all resistance. This kind of laughter is the enemy of power and control, it dissolves barriers, pomposity, and rigidity and is deeply good for us. It’s a long way from the brief, cold laughter of cruelty. The man who is willing to be laughed at isn’t playing along with the rules. I think genuine laughter has a lot of power in face of patriarchal society. Comedy often demonstrates who wants to laugh warmly with others and who want to punch down.

Spiritual teachings often focus on surrender. For some people that’s surrender to the will of God. For others, it’s about surrendering to the living moment, or is about radical acceptance and being in the flow of life. Spirituality shows us the release and sweetness of surrender, when we stop fighting life and learn to go easily with what is. This of course is entirely at odds with systems of hierarchy and control. This is why those systems try to co-opt religions and turn them into systems of hierarchy and control, too.  The heart of any religion is surrender, and when what you see is control you know there’s something else entirely going on.

Practicing different forms of surrender is a good way to protect yourself from the malice of hierarchical systems. It is – perhaps ironically – a way of not submitting to those systems. When you know how to let go and how to give yourself wholly in these ways then power structures and control will never hold any real appeal for you. Oppression is what people do when they are too afraid to let go, and in that fear, are unable to experience what is best in life.

Arts and exclusion

(Nimue)

Many people feel that The Arts aren’t for them, without realising what kind of messaging they’ve been subjected to.

Oppressive governments tell us that arts are worthless, strip arts from schools, strip funding from arts and are destroying higher education too. The message is that there are no carers in the arts. Right wing administrations hate the arts because arts encourage imagination, empathy, creativity and community, all of which is at odds with a right wing agenda. Further here in the UK the arts are a big part of the economy, despite how the industries are treated. Unfortunately it’s the artists who are least likely to be paid.

There’s a class aspect – if you don’t come from a moneyed background you’ll get clear messages that art is not for the likes of you, and that you won’t be able to understand it or appreciate it. Some spaces you will be priced out of (opera especially). At the same time, working class art is downgraded to craft. Folk music and popular music are treated as lesser forms than the ‘high’ art that rich people make exclusive. Street dance is seen as less worthy than ballet, and so on and so forth. The art that ordinary people share and enjoy is no less artful or valuable, we’re just encouraged to think that way.

There are people who will come along to knock you down for daring to take your art seriously. If you don’t have money to help you get started, the demand for instant perfection will probably force you out as a child and keep you convinced that you can never be good enough. Capitalism focuses us all on the idea that we should only be doing things we can definitely make a lot of money from. Devaluing of the arts makes it ever harder to make a steady living, or to survive without support from someone else. That makes creative work less available to people who are economically deprived. That doesn’t mean art isn’t for us, it means we have a system that is against us.

Art is for everyone. It always was. Storytelling is a fundamental human impulse. Our ancestors went into caves to make art, and what we find in archaeology is decorated. Art is a pot you have put some designs on. Art is a spear thrower with an animal head on it. Art is an ornate belt buckle. Drumming, singing and dancing are all ancient practices, all widely found in non-industrial societies. Our arts are part of our humanity, and to strip that away is to dehumanise us.

Art is for everyone. Creativity is for everyone. We have to give each other more room, more opportunity, more encouragement and more support. If we let this current joyless, money obsessed culture take over then we have so much to lose. We need space to express ourselves and to share those expressions and we need community support as we do it. So, never shame someone for trying, or for not being instantly brilliant. Encourage people in expressing themselves, and in having the space to learn and grow. Don’t make it all about the money.

Do call out the joy killers though. Let’s not encourage the people who want to make it harder. If you catch someone trying to shame someone else into not singing, or dancing or drawing or whatever they were doing, call that person out and ask them how they think anyone is supposed to improve if they aren’t allowed to even have a go. Challenge the myth of talent – most of us are not instantly brilliant and we need time to learn. Affluent people get opportunity and classes, the rest of us get told that we don’t have enough natural talent to be worth considering. Talent is a myth. Time spent is key to everything.

Inspiration is at the heart of the Druid path, and I think we all know that it should be available to everyone. Supporting each other in this is going to be an important part of how we resist joyless, planet killing capitalism and build something better.

The lies objectivity tells

(Nimue)

Objective writing sounds impartial, unemotional and rational. In theory this is how we write science papers and do good journalism. It’s often quite passive language ‘today three people died when a bomb went off’ – which has a very different swing from writing that three innocent civilians were deliberately murdered, for example.

Adopting an objective writing style conveys to the reader that this text is authoritative and trustworthy. It often normalises whatever it presents. Objective writing draws attention away from the author who hides behind the text a little like the man behind The Wizard of Oz’s curtain.  The objective text offers apparent facts, hides biases and any statement presented in this voice conveys certainty and universality. Druids and bards interested in language as a tool may find this topic relevant to their concerns.

It’s not how I usually write, and that’s no accident. Normally I speak as an individual, talk about personal experience and the subjectivity of my own view. I don’t want to write in a way designed to persuade you of my authority. There’s a lot I don’t know, and my perspective is always personal. But then, that’s also all true for everyone who writes in an objective voice. They’ve adopted a style that disguises their individuality, and with it their feelings and biases. We all have those, and hiding them is misleading – often deliberately so.

The objective reporting of a science paper often isn’t an issue. If the scientist genuinely feels curious but neutral about a topic, then that objectivity is real. It causes problems when we can’t see who funded the study. We may not know what political or religious beliefs a person brings to their science. The gender of the scientist is not always irrelevant.

Where I’ve seen other people posting content from AI generators, it often has that objective authority tone while at the same time spouting empty nonsense. It makes sense that Ai writing would be set up to sound objective because of course there is no single human with an opinion behind the work. At this point we can’t be warned to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, because there’s nothing there. That troubles me.

It’s worth being alert to this when reading – or when encountering anything that is presented as news. Ostensibly objective writing can be highly manipulative stuff, especially in the ways it hides accountability. Too often reporting looks like ‘a thing happened’ and not ‘a person did this.’ Especially when the person in question has a lot of power. Objectivity is used to normalise atrocities.

This is certainly an issue I encourage fellow bards and Druids to consider. How do we express ourselves? Are we using language to validate our beliefs or to expose our own biases and limitations? I’m always uneasy when I find writing that goes ‘Druids do this, and at these times’ and doesn’t make it more personal. We do this. I do this. Some Druids. Not all Druids. I think we need to be talking from inside our own specific experiences instead.