Nimue Brown's Blog, page 93

Drops of Inspiration

Recently I had the opportunity in Gloucester to do something I greatly enjoy – getting people singing. The venue was a church – no longer in use as a church. I had support from Tom and James.

There’s only so much planning I can do for this sort of event because there’s no knowing how it will play out, how much input people will need or how fast they will move as a group. This was an amazing, responsive group who dug in enthusiastically, so we got to do a lot of different things. Including a really full and rich rendition of my Three Drops of Inspiration. Hearing a lot of people all singing something I’ve written is an emotionally intense sort of experience, heart lifting and rewarding.

We also did some playing with vowels and sounds. This is something I learned to do in a workshop many years ago and it is my understanding that it comes from a Tibetan chanting tradition. It’s very simple, you move between notes and vowels, and you just let it happen. The sounds that emerge are always striking. It tends to have a spiritual feeling to it regardless of context, but to do it in a church turned out to be especially effective.

There’s a video clip on facebook – https://fb.watch/flw9Kqh5xq/

It felt like a meaningful offering to the building itself. This wordless, soulful sound coming from a group of people and being sung to the church itself – it was mostly participants, not audience. The church has no doubt heard many hymns in its time, although not recently. It felt like a good thing to have done.

Numbness, burnout and pain

Over the last two years I’ve had a particularly hard time of it with the depression and anxiety, often slipping into protective states of numbness. When I’ve not been numb, I’ve surfaced into pain, grief and fear and struggled to feel anything good. These are not ideal states from which to try and work out how to fix anything.

I’ve had a lot of pain to deal with, certainly. The last few years have brought some significantly wounding experiences, and I was hardly a cheery, untroubled person before all of that. Mostly I’ve been focused on the distress aspect of this in my efforts to find a way out. The numbness is about the only place I can go to escape, and that’s not a solution that lifts me. It’s just a coping mechanism.

It’s only recently that it struck me that pain was never really the problem. I’ve endured plenty of emotional and physical pain along the way. I know how to weather that. I can make good assessments about what sort of price tag anything has on it. If you care about something, then sooner or later it will hurt you and there’s no point expecting otherwise. I’d never been afraid of that in the past. 

What I can’t bear is paying a high price for something that gives me very little. I guess it’s the difference between being a moth lured to a candle flame and a moth getting stuck on fly paper. I’m not afraid to burn. I used to push my body hard and pay with pain to dance at an event, or do something extraordinary like the Five Valleys Walk. There were no such opportunities in lockdown and I forgot how to even try.

I’m most myself when I’m prepared to do things that are glorious and outrageous, with no great anxiety about the trade-off. I used to be the sort of person who could love fiercely – people, places, creatures, ideas… and not care whether those things hurt me. It didn’t matter whether I might break my heart over a lover, or an elderly cat, or a home I couldn’t keep. What mattered to me was throwing myself in wholeheartedly in the first place. It means that I’ve mostly depended on my own ability to be enthusiastic and to make things happen.

I’ve come to the conclusion that burnout is my biggest issue, not the things that have grieved me. What I most need is to be more resourced, and to have opportunities to be enthused and uplifted by other people. Lockdown certainly didn’t help with that as it cost me most of my access to live performance.

I’ve been looking after myself by reading more fiction. I’ve been moving towards people who cheer and uplift me and who bring me enthusiasm. We’re looking at this as a household – how to be better resourced and how better to support each other. It’s a work in progress. I eyed up something recently that is probably going to hurt me, but should also be wild and wonderful, and I remembered how I used to be someone who wasn’t afraid of what it might cost me to truly feel alive.

Negativity and inspiration

Inspiration isn’t always a lovely, fluffy thing. Sometimes inspiration is born of rage, frustration, annoyance and other ostensibly ‘negative’ emotions. I’ve written some really good blog posts off the back of being bloody annoyed with people. It’s important to acknowledge how these emotions can drive creativity and that they are just as important as feeling all magical and wanting to do something beautiful as a consequence.

When it comes to social justice, rage can be a really important source of inspiration. The trick is not to let the rage run unchallenged. Being cross doesn’t of itself get much done. Getting cross and thrashing about in an unconsidered rage somewhere on the internet can do far more harm than good. It’s important to take the time for the rage. Sit with it. Hold it close. Work out what needs changing. Take the energy of the rage and turn it into a push for change. Fighting against things is seldom that effective. Fighting for things is much more productive. Let your rage show you what it is that you need to fight for.

Boredom, frustration and apathy tend to get a bad press. If all you do is wallow about in those feelings, they can trap you in inaction and a sense of powerlessness. However, you can also use them as a spur. Breaking out of limitations is often difficult, but the need to escape from those stuck feelings can be a superb motivator for taking the plunge and doing something new.

If you’ve written poetry, you’ve probably at some point done the kind of agonised bleeding on the page that comes from depression and heartbreak. Misery and setbacks are awful to go through, but working out how to meaningfully share your pain can be a good and restorative process. You may be able to comfort others by showing them they are not alone in their struggles. You will undoubtedly become more able to feel compassion and empathy, which in turn points the way towards the kinds of actions you might take.

Oysters make pearls as a way of protecting themselves from the discomfort of grit that gets in their shells. Some people, and experiences can impact in much the same way. Creating can be a way of coping. It can be a way of processing shit into gold. It can also make it possible to deal more gently and kindly with people who were annoying you.

Suffering is not essential for creativity. But at the same time, our creations are richer, more thoughtful and better informed when we’re able to draw more widely on experience and aren’t focused exclusively on nice things and whatever makes us comfortable. 

Queen of Crows

The first appearance of The Queen of Crows was in the Hopeless, Maine tarot set. She arrived simply because crows are a suit, and Tom decided to base the image on me. This led me to wanting to make up some Queen of Crows material, so now there’s a song and she features as a character in this year’s Ominous Folk show.

This is the version of me as The Queen of Crows that we’re using on posters for the show – art by Tom Brown.

And here’s my actual face, with some facepaint. I look far more tired in real life than I do in the illustrations. Tom is kind to me when he draws me. I thought it would be amusing to mess about with some face painting.

When you are broken,

The queen of crows will come to you

The shattered last remains of you

And all the empty places will be feathers.

Bard or Performer?

What you think it means to be a bard probably has everything to do with what you think historical bards were. I’ve seen people say that if you’re interested in your own fame and fortune and if there’s any amount of ego in it then you aren’t a bard. I guess these are people who have not considered the implications of being a court bard (Taliesin) or the kind of bombast and self promotion that figures in Welsh and Irish mythology tend to go in for. Scotland’s Thomas the Rhymer is hardly a self-effacing figure, either.

You can of course serve the gods, spirits and whomsoever else you wish to serve with secret, private bardic activity. But for anything involving people, being a bard really does involve being good at grabbing, and keeping people’s attention. 

Being larger than life, charismatic, and compelling are all good qualities to try and develop in yourself as a bard. There is magic in enchanting people, and there’s a lot to be said for having no qualms about putting yourself centre stage and demanding people pay attention. Of course if that’s all you’re doing, people will soon lose interest. Whether a performer intends to be a bard or not, they need to have something going on beyond a desire for attention.

The idea that wanting to be popular necessitates being crappy comes up a lot around ‘literature’ as well as bardic pursuits. To be serious, worthy, high brow one must also (according to some people) be elitist, obscure and write things that aren’t accessible to people who don’t already know all the things you know. I think this is by far the bigger ego issue than the natural human desire for attention. People need good art. There are a lot of people who want good art. Trying to make things for a larger audience doesn’t invalidate it. There is no conflict between trying to do something a lot of people will like, and trying to do something substantial and anyone who says otherwise is either a snob, or trying to justify why their work isn’t much appreciated.

What makes you a bard is that your work is driven by ideas, the need for beauty, principles, vision, inspiration and a desire to make the world a better place. If people pay you for that, you are no less of a bard. If you see creative work as a quick way to earn a lot of money… this is mostly not how anything works anyway. It’s surprisingly hard to have a creative career as a soulless mercenary who only cares about the bottom line.

How to Make Bone Soup

How To Make Bone Soup is an ebook poetry collection that can be picked up for free from my Ko-fi store. I can’t do much to help people with the greed crisis making life unaffordable in the UK, but I can and will keep giving stuff away. https://ko-fi.com/s/333a79c6be Do check out the other free books in my store, too.

When times are hard, the first thing to go is likely to be the leisure budget. This inevitably makes creative stuff the most precarious line of work to be in. Although honestly nothing looks secure anymore and I can’t begin to imagine how this winter is going to play out.

I’m not especially affluent in terms of income, but we’re hugely insulated by owning our small home outright. Without that, it would be challenging to make all of this work, but not being at the mercy of mortgage fluctuations or landlord greed is a massive blessing and a privilege. I owe a lot to my ancestors.

It helps a lot that I have Patreon supporters. Having a monthly income from Patreon makes it easier to spend time on creative projects. Which in turn makes it feasible for me to just give ebooks away. If you would like to be part of that, please wander this way – https://www.patreon.com/NimueB

One-off ko-fi donations are also much appreciated. https://ko-fi.com/O4O3AI4T/

If you are one of the many people struggling to make ends meet right now, please help yourself to the free amusements I have on offer. There’s lots more content over on my youtube channel – https://www.youtube.com/c/NimueBrown as well. 

First signs of autumn

There was a time when I would have taken blackberries as a first sign of autumn, but more normally now they appear around my home in August. I think of apples as very much an autumnal thing and yet here we are at the end of August, and I’ve seen windfall apples. The stress caused by drought has turned some trees early – although not to many where I live.

There is however a crispness in the air first thing in the morning. It’s the uneasy taste of a new school term that reminds my body of stresses from the past. Which is a pity because of itself, that morning crispness is delightful and welcome.

I’m watching grass returning to life now that the days are less hot and we’ve had some rain. So while in theory the end of summer is supposed to be about harvest and things dying off, that’s not what’s happening on my doorstep. Climate chaos is impacting on the wheel of the year. I think it’s really important not to insist on those old stories about what happens when, but to be alert to what’s happening now. And anyway, the wheel of the year was always far more complicated than the stories Pagans like to tell about it.

No matter where you are in the wheel of the year, something is always starting and something is always dying.

Stay warm with a jumper?

As the UK faces electricity price hikes that will push many into fuel poverty, advice for staying warm abounds. Far too much of it is coming from people who clearly have no idea what they’re talking about. The ‘just wear a jumper’ solution is a popular example of this. Without understanding how poverty impacts on people, we aren’t going to prepare well or help each other.

A jumper keeps warmth in, it doesn’t heat you. That works ok in cool temperatures, when you are moving around, or when your body can burn calories for warmth. Food prices are going up. If you can’t afford to heat or eat properly a jumper is of little use. The colder it gets, the less those extra layers can do to help you. In very cold conditions, the body distress over hours of being cold is immense. I’ve been there. People can and do die of hypothermia.

If you can’t afford heat, you are probably also going to struggle with the costs of doing laundry, which of course requires heating water. A jumper is a large item to wash. Even if you are really careful about trying to keep it clean, after a week or so of being worn all the time, a jumper will start to smell a bit cheesy, and then increasingly cheesy. If you think hand washing clothes in cold water is going to solve this, it isn’t. You don’t get clothes as clean in a cold wash, and this is punishing on your hands when your environment is cold. I have done it and I do not recommend it.

Then you have to get the jumper dry. Good luck doing that without using energy in a cold home that is already damp because that’s what happens in cold conditions. If you cannot dry your clothes fast enough they will rot – can you afford to replace them? If it takes 2 days to dry a jumper, it will smell like a wet dog. You might be able to hang it outside, but winter weather is notoriously bad at drying clothes.

The old ‘wear an extra jumper’ trick works much better with an open fire – which is something older people are more likely to have experienced. An open fire may not make your home super-warm, but it does tend to make for a drier home, and you can stick your laundry in front of it. I’ve done this too. It’s not optimal, but it is workable.

If you’re making fires and keeping them going and hand washing laundry then this of course is cheaper in terms of money. It’s expensive in terms of time. Back when this way of living was more normal, it was possible to run a home on one income. It’s not technically possible to fund a contemporary household through work while also doing as much domestic labour as an early twentieth century housewife. 

I’m all for re-skilling and using slower and less energy-intensive ways of doing things. But, you have to be set up for that. You certainly can’t do it alongside a host of other labour intensive things, and you can’t do it if you are ill or in pain. Wringing out a massive wet jumper by hand takes quite a lot of effort.

We need to resist these suggestions that the problem is people not trying hard enough and not being willing to put up with some discomfort. Cold, wet homes are a nightmare. Modern build isn’t designed for you to live how your great granny did. The extra jumper causes as many problems as it solves.

When to disagree with apparent experts

My default position is to listen to and respect experts. I’m interested in substantiated theories, evidence, lived experience and other variations on a theme of people knowing what they are talking about. I am deeply uneasy at this ongoing thing in British politics and media of treating experts as intrinsically suspect, and treating uninformed opinion as being as valuable as expertise.

People pretending to be experts are amongst us. Check out their qualifications, and if you aren’t sure what those mean, a quick internet search will tell you if that’s even pertinent to the subject matter. Some experts do make the mistake of talking outside of their areas of knowledge and that can be problematic. Being an expert doesn’t make you good or kind, and a person can have a lot of qualifications and still have awful ideas. Jordan Peterson has qualifications.

Challenge experts when they haven’t given you enough information or been clear enough. Being an expert doesn’t automatically make a person a great communicator, so flagging up what needs a better explanation can be a very good idea. They should be able to direct you towards their evidence.

Check out their funding, if you can. You aren’t going to get objective facts on climate science from someone hired by the fossil fuels industry unless they’re turned whistleblower. One of the things to be alert to is speakers who come from Think Tanks – these often have impressive sounding names, but think tanks are often fronts for big business and people with obscene amounts of money. They often don’t represent the people they claim to. When people from think tanks make it into the media you don’t tend to get much information to frame what their think tank is really about, and all you have is the persuasive and impressive title to go on.

Lobby groups and pressure groups can sound like a source of expertise, but these can also be misleading. For example, The Tax Payers Alliance in the UK purports to be a grassroots movement representing the concerns of ordinary people. Its funding isn’t clear, and it campaigns for low taxation – which usually benefits the rich and corporations to the detriment of ordinary people. LGB Alliance claims to represent lesbian, gay and bisexual people but in a recent court case was obliged to admit it has a 7% lesbian membership having previously implied that it was a mostly lesbian organisation.

People can be experts in the theory of things and have no lived experience of it. This is a major issue for neurodivergent folk and for people living long term with illness and disability. It can often be the case that your lived experience is deeper than their ‘did a module at university’ experience. People who have looked at things from the outside should not be talking over people who actually have to live with the thing.

We cannot trust mainstream media to put experts into a context. When 99% of scientists agree on something, and we get to hear from one of them alongside one of the 1% who disagree, we’re being shown a really misleading picture. We can’t trust the people who tell us they are experts to be as good as they say they are, and we also can’t afford to trust the people who undermine the work of genuine experts. This is exhausting and demoralising at the best of times. It isn’t easy to navigate through all of this, although the simplest indicator I’ve found so far is that genuine experts tend to be cautious and tend not to speak in absolutes. Genuine experts point to their evidence rather than asserting that it exists.

The Path to Healing is a Spiral

This is an incredibly grounded book, full of humour, compassion and wisdom. Anna McKerrow explores various approaches to healing while steadfastly resisting ableism and toxic positivity. It’s a powerful read with a great deal to offer anyone who needs to take better care of themself.

I was not having a good week when I read this book back in May. (I had the book well ahead of release for blurbing, and I cunningly stashed a review!) The week in question started with a massive triggering event, and a huge meltdown, then Idabbled in sleep deprivation and then crashed into a period while flirting yet again with anaemia. Health had become a matter of firefighting and trying to keep going. It’s been a tough year on that score with far too many rounds of similar things. I read this book while in a place of urgently needing to heal, and feeling lost and powerless. It was a good book to read in that context.

Anna talks about an array of emotional healing experiences she’s had, and about the kinds of horrible, but not that unusual experiences that meant she needed that. As she points out, most of us will be wounded, repeatedly along the way. Healing is something we need to do. She also writes about the kinds of things a womb can do to your body and more people need to know this stuff, regardless of womb-status.

If you’re curious about alternative healing approaches, there’s a lot to learn here. We get a mix of Anna’s experiences alongside interviews from practitioners, which I found really interesting. This isn’t a how-to book, it won’t tell you how to heal, but it does explore the idea that you could. Some things aren’t fixable, but mitigation, better support and more coping mechanisms are always worth having. It’s a wise and encouraging book in that way.

I think it is people in similar situations to me who will benefit most from this book. It’s for those of us who could do with taking the time to ask what could be made better, rather than just being in a perpetual running battle with the health issues. For those of us with mental illness, it’s a helpful invitation to think about what kind of support we might even need while being offered examples to consider. If your womb has chosen violence, this is definitely for you.

More on the author’s website – https://www.annamckerrow.com/the-path-to-healing-is-a-spiral.html