Nimue Brown's Blog, page 96

Some sort of dryad?

I found this beautiful fungi growing on a tree near my home. I’m not sure what it is! And as I have no intention of eating it, that may not be critically important. It might be a Dryad’s Saddle, but then again…. it might not. Anyone wise in the ways please do comment!

Vilifying Britain

This week, Rishi Sunak has expressed an intention to treat as extremists people who ‘vilify Britain’. It’s an attack on the right to free speech, which is explicitly the right not to be mistreated by your government over airing an opinion. It’s also disturbingly vague, which makes it more dangerous. What does it mean to vilify Britain?

Could it, for example, mean discussing the history of the bloody awful things that British people, British companies and British leaders have done to people around the world? You can’t talk about the British in Ireland, or India for example, without it rapidly becoming obvious that the British were acting villainously. You can’t talk about how British people profited from the slave trade without making us look pretty bad. I could go on at length, because the list is huge.

Do I vilify Britain when I point out that we are living with policies that kill vulnerable people in the UK? What about if I suggest that policies around care homes during the covid pandemic were murderous? What happens if I talk about the Leave campaign and how that was probably interfered with by Russian interests? Or the utter madness of going ahead with leaving the EU and the massive harm we’ve done to ourselves. I’m certainly not making us look good as a country if I talk about things that are happening, and have happened. That’s awkward, isn’t it? Does that make me an extremist?

Then there’s the issue of who isn’t affected by this. It’s the flag shaggers. Right wing nationalistic groups are all passionatley and vocally pro-Britain. We have every reason to think that in terms of safety and risk, right wing extremists are the people we should all be concerned about. They won’t say mean things about British history, though. They won’t pull down statues of slave traders. It looks awfully like being an actual villain is going to be fine, and making a fuss about villainy is going to be suspect, if we’re really going this way.

I’m no fan of imperialism, or colonialism, or fascism, and I’m going to keep saying so. We’re not a great nation. We’re a horrible mess of a nation and we urgently need to get our shit together.

Songs from Hopeless, Maine

One of the things that delights me about the whole Hopeless, Maine project I’m part of, is how much of a community has developed around it. Tom and I have always held space for other people to come and play with us, and this has led to many glorious things at this point.

In this video, are the Ominous Folk of Hopeless, Maine. That’s Tom and I plus James and Susie, and we’ve done a fair amount of gigging together over the last year. It’s been a wonderful expansion of the Hopeless project. We headed this way years ago after being asked to do an evening event at a book festival. It would be fair to say that graphic novels do not work well on stage. 

This song was written for us by Walter Sickert. Tom first ran into Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys more than ten years ago when they were all at the same steampunk event in New York. We used Walter’s recording of it in another video (see below) but without the guitar accompaniment, it was tricky to perform. We borrowed a snippet of another of Walter’s songs, and added that to the mix for the Ominous Folk version.

When Nature isn’t Nice

The difficulty with nature-based spirituality is that nature isn’t always nice. It’s not all beautiful sunsets and pretty flowers. I blogged recently about how the otters have eaten the ducks locally. It’s all too easy to tip into a survival of the fittest, nature red in tooth and claw kind of take and end up feeling that might is right, along with all the horrors that brings.

Nature of course is complicated and nuanced and vastly diverse. Existence is messy. Nature doesn’t reliably condense down into simple messages, but it does encourage us to accept complexity and avoid simplistic takes on things.

Nature can be especially challenging when we’re thinking about our own bodies. To what degree do we want to accept or resist natural processes? It is perfectly natural to want to stay alive, but at some point, the pursuit of life at all costs will result in something hideous, where death would be a blessing.

To what degree do we see overcoming nature in our own bodies as important? Suppressing natural human-ness is often seen as more civilized and professional. But, keep holding those farts in and you can damage your appendix. There’s a story about a gentleman who actually exploded… 

We ignore nature in our own bodies at our peril. We can’t triumph over body-nature forever – there’s only so hard you can push, only so much you can do without. Our minds and bodies break, sooner or later. We’re better off if we’re allowed to live in gentler ways. We’re better off if we are allowed to respect nature as it manifests in our bodies rather than constantly fighting to suppress it and overcome it.

Margins

This sounds like a really lovely project and I look forward to seeing what comes of it as the wheel of the year turns…

The River Crow

Photo by George Becker on Pexels.com

I might try to write a poem for each of the Wheel of the Year festivals, just as a way of keeping in the habit of doing so and connecting to the Awen as part of my Pagan practice. This is my offering for Lughnasadh.

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Adventuers in Stroud

I’m out with The Ominous Folk next weekend, and also involved with the Hobby Horse Dressage!

Tickets for the Stroud event are over here! https://stroudsteampunk.weebly.com/

Dualism and fatigue

I have to push back regularly against my own sense that mental fatigue is a brain issue. Mind-body dualism has a lot to answer for, and I think it (mis)informs a lot of how we humans see ourselves in relation to the natural world.

Our brains are not separate from our bodies. The same blood makes its ways around the whole system. Brains are squidgy lumps of biological material. They need energy, oxygen, and do better if we don’t hit them with stuff. Mental energy, is energy.

Getting mentally tired isn’t some kind of special brain event. It isn’t about not trying hard enough and it cannot be overcome simply by making more effort. Like the other parts of our bodies, brains need rest. They need sleep, and unstressful downtime. Our brains suffer if we are dehydrated, or too hot, or experiencing too much stress in our bodies.

However, the idea of the mind as separate from the body is a pervasive one. It can be so easy to absorb ideas about the human mind being separate from nature as a whole that we might not even notice what we’re doing to ourselves.

I have to remind myself that if my concentration is poor, this may be because I’m tired, or need food, or I require a break from things.  How well I can think is a facet of how well my body is doing overall. I don’t think well in unbearably hot weather. Being in a lot of pain really compromises my brain.

The big one for me is remembering that energy is not an abstract idea. Mental energy is not magically different from other energy. My brain requires food just as much as the rest of my body does. I grew up subject to a lot of misinformation about calorie controlled diets. As though intense mental activity required no nourishment. We’re getting better now at recognising that brains need fats in the diet to function well, but too many of us were taught that fats are bad and to be shunned.

One of the ways we can approach nature as Druids is to explore the ways in which we are natural beings, and the ways in which human ideas have distorted our relationship with our own natural selves. Brains aren’t magically separate from bodies. Minds are not abstract things and do not exist in a different dimension to our physical selves. Consciousness may remain a bit of a mystery, but is only viable when we have enough oxygen in the first place.

Defining a woman

This never goes well. For too much of recent history in too many places, defining women has gone hand in hand with excluding anyone defined as a woman. It’s been about keeping women out of public spaces, out of most kinds of work, and often about keeping women in the domestic sphere. It has meant not getting to vote, and not being allowed to own property. Too often, women have been defined as daughters, wives and mothers, existing only in relation to the men who control them.

Defining women always functions to exclude people. If a woman is a person with a womb, where does that leave the many women who have had a hysterectomy? Definitions of femininity too often tend towards smallness, weakness, fragility, and being inferior to men. Tall women exist, so do muscular women, but like a lot of people I grew up absorbing the message that muscles aren’t feminine, and delicacy is. I have never wanted to be delicate.

Then there’s all the psychological stuff – that women are gentle, carers, nurturers, kind and soft and warm and loving… Which all sounds charming I suppose, but does not play out well. It de-persons the women who aren’t intrinsically maternal, and it pushes all women back into the domestic sphere and the caring occupations while reinforcing ideas that these things aren’t appropriate for men.

When women are supposed to be gentle, kindly, delicate little things, the women who don’t fit are treated as monsters. You don’t have to look far back in history to find that having ideas, ambition, a desire to be active in the world, a desire for physical activity, for education and opportunity would get a woman labelled as unnatural and monstrous.

I see far too many conversations – especially around British politics – where ‘defining a woman’ is a thing. I don’t see any conversations about ‘defining a man’ because there’s far less interest in controlling male bodies and limiting male opportunities. I don’t see any of the people engaged in this giving any thought at all to the women who they want to define as not-women. Those of us who are too tall and too muscular, those of us who were never pretty, and have strong bone structures. Those of us who are not docile and domesticated. Are we men now? What are we? 

Defining a woman is not the beginning of a process that empowers women. It’s a process that will cause many people who experience themselves as women to be excluded, and loaded down with body shame and humiliation. It is a process that leads to narrower options for women. 

Demand equal rights for all people. Demand the freedom to live comfortably in your own body. Resist body shaming and pressure to conform to narrow and oppressive gender stereotypes. Also check out the science, because the differences between people of the same gender and the differences between genders are not clear cut. Some cis women naturally have more testosterone in their bodies than some cis men. There’s a lot of diversity in humanity, and there is a lot to be gained from embracing that. Denying that it exists of course makes it easier to attack trans people (which is a gross thing to do) and also harms a lot of cis people too.

After the inspiration

Unhelpfully, creators are often depicted making their art in a rush of intense inspiration. In practice it doesn’t really work like that. The rush of inspiration is a wonderful thing, but the results are usually messy and need working on. After the inspiration comes the tidying up, and the working on whatever you’ve got.

What the rush of inspiration gives you is raw material. An idea, or a cluster of ideas for a thing. It might even give you a first draft, a sketch, a design. Then you have to sit down and develop it. The idea for a book has to be developed into a detailed plan perhaps, and then actually written. The poem written in the heat of the moment is probably going to need refining when your head isn’t on fire. The thing you drew in the heat of the moment might require reference material to develop into a finished piece.

It’s all too easy to become focused on the rush itself – which is an exciting part of the process. However, the idea that we can make a finished piece flat out from raw inspiration is so often a misleading one. Creativity is more than the initial rush of ideas and enthusiasm. The crafting part is just as much a part of the process. So is gathering your tool kit and learning how to use those tools. Learning about the form you are working in, finding your ancestors of tradition and your contemporary, living community is also an important part of the process.

For most people, the sudden rush of inspiration is a rare thing. If you wait for it to turn up then you could be waiting a long time for your art to happen. If you practice your craft skills, study your form, and work in more planned ways, you actually make more room in which inspiration can happen. It’s not just about becoming a wildfire of untamed imagination. Inspiration can be with you at any part of the process.

Time for Ocean Aid

Today is World Nature Conservation Day. I’m sharing content from fellow Moon Books author Steve Andrews, who has written a book called Saving Mother Ocean – more about that over here https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/earth-spirit-saving-mother-ocean He’s currently exploring the idea of Ocean Aid concerts.