Nimue Brown's Blog, page 99

Visualising Yourself

One of the many things that I learned from traditional witchcraft author Lee Morgan is how good it is to explore yourself through visualisation. When we’re working meditatively in a deliberate way, how we picture ourselves is very much part of what happens. We can choose who, or what to be without making any kind of commitment. Visualising yourself as other than you are can be a great way to develop empathy. It can also be incredibly liberating.

I’ve never been especially comfortable with the body I have. I’ve experimented with all kinds of ideas about shape, gender and species. On the whole I think I’d like me better with pointed furry ears. I think I’d like the kinds of legs that fauns and satyrs have. There are days when I’m fairly certain I would make a very good dragon.

One of the things I can do with all of this is put it into stories. There are plenty of us who, for all kinds of reasons, need the escapism of imagining ourselves as something else entirely. My most formative encounter in this regard was reading Clive Barker’s Imajica as a teen. In that novel there is a character whose gender expression changes in response to who they are with. How they seem is exactly how you want them to seem – which really would be the ultimate in people pleasing and I have issues on that score. Only one character sees this person as their whole self, and that for me was a defining moment in forming my ideas about love and romance.

I write nonbinary characters because it is one way of having that space for myself. What I’m most drawn to are the kinds of fantastical nonbinary characters who can be all genders or no gender at all, and whose physical realities transcend what regular human bodies do. I’m working on one at the moment but it might be a bit of a spoiler to say which book that’s in!

Listening is a bardic art

With bardcraft, there’s an obvious inclination to focus on output. Here I am, writing a blogpost… But, to have the output be good, we need to spend as much time as we can listening to and reading other people. Our own perspectives are inevitably limited, and the more time we spend finding out how things look from other perspectives, the better. 

Listening and reading protects us from using cliches and stereotypes. It is easier to get away from tired pop-culture habits if we know more about a greater array of people. By listening and reading we can hopefully spot our own prejudices and assumptions and learn to do better.

Social media is brilliant for this. You can follow people with first hand experience of pretty much anything, and learn from them without creating any kind of burden. Learning when not to comment, when to stay silent and read/listen is a powerful skill, too. Finding the limits of what we know, and the points at which we aren’t qualified to say anything is valuable self knowledge.

All too often, creators write fantasies about other people’s lived realities. This is enabled by hiding behind the idea that imagination is everything. All too often, the people who get the high profile creative jobs are white, male, cis, straight, affluent, able bodied and comfortable. Popular culture has far more representation of what this demographic thinks other people are like than it does authentic representation of people. Most of the world is not middle class cis straight white men.

I’m entirely in favour of imagination and making stuff up. However, the more we know, the better a job we can do of that. Imaginations are not harmed or limited by exposure to facts and other perspectives. Feeding your brain information will stimulate your imagination, not hurt it. To imagine from a place of insight and understanding is far better than to just recycle whatever dubious ideas you have unconsciously absorbed from whatever is around you. The person who does not undertake research in a deliberate way is more likely to unconsciously repeat cliches and prejudices.

There is honour in being well informed and creating good representation of everyone who isn’t you.

Sending you darkness

I’ve been working on my book Druidry and the Darkness this week, getting the ebook version ready for Patreon supporters. It will be more widely available later in the year.

One of the things I raise in it is how odd it sounds to say things like ‘I will hold you in the darkness’ or ‘I will send darkness to you’. We talk about light this way, as a healing, protecting and comforting force. Darkness is just as good at helping and healing people as light is. Darkness can also be protective. Arguably, that which is held by darkness is better protected for being hidden than anything you’ve put in a circle of light.

I admit I’ve never been very good at sending people light. I’m not especially good at visualising light, either. Sometimes light is wonderful – soft daylight especially so. I love gentle light but I often struggle with anything bright and glaring. It doesn’t agree with me, physically or emotionally.

At the moment I’m working on what I can do with darkness when it comes to healing. I know it helps me bodily and emotionally just to be in darkness and I’m exploring what working more deliberately with that can do for me right now. 

I will hold you in darkness.

I offer you darkness.

Blessings of darkness upon you.

May the darkness hold you and keep you safe.

I am putting darkness around you.

I rather like how this works.

Stripy friends

The cinnabar moth caterpillars have appeared on the ragwort, which has been flowering for a few days now. 

Cinnabar moths are lovely black and red, day flying entities, and ragwort provides food for a number of insects. Unfortunately, ragwort is poisonous to horses and cattle. It’s not usually a problem because horses and cows alike generally have more sense than to eat it, but, when cut and dried in hay they can’t tell it’s there.

If you have ragwort on your land you can, in theory, be served with a notice to remove it, and not to do so at that point is an offence. You can also, in theory, have government people turn up and remove it, although they are supposed to give notice. It’s a rather heavy handed approach to the issue, but there we go.

Wild orchids

My experience of the wheel of the year is not about celebrating festivals. What I most like to engage with are the seasonal events in my local landscape – the timing of which varies somewhat from year to year. Over time, I’ve built up an understanding of how the seasons occur in the local landscape, and there are certain things that are particularly important to me.

One of those things is getting to see the wild orchids. The hill nearest my home usually has a lot of orchids on it at this time of year. I can’t claim any confidence around telling the pinky purple ones apart. I love the bee orchids especially, and I’ve seen half a dozen this year, which is amazing.

The photo doesn’t really do justice to the profusion out there at the moment.

Presenting as a Druid

I’m always interested in how we define or experience authenticity, versus when we see things as fake, in ourselves and when looking at other people. For me, authenticity is very much part of what it means to live as a Druid. To act authentically, to show up as a person not just a performance and to connect with people and others from a place of honesty. 

However, as soon as you put clothes on and use words you’re engaged in a process of deliberate choices. Part of being human is how we express ourselves to others, how we want to be seen and understood. There’s a hazy area between aspiration and performance. If I want to become a kinder and more patient person my best bet is to try and act like a kinder and more patient person until the process of doing that becomes ingrained in me and part of who I am. There’s not much difference between that and the person who simply wishes to seem kind and patient acts and either person can mess up and let something else show.

When you look at another person, it is hard to tell if they’re undertaking to fake it until they make it. Maybe they are showing you their most authentic self. Maybe they are a people pleaser trying to perform the role they think you most want them to play. Maybe they are an abuser with a persona that protects them and enables them to groom new victims. From the outside it can be impossible to tell what anything really means. Inherently charismatic people are good at persuading others of their innate worth. Socially awkward people can come across badly but still be full of wisdom and compassion.

Druids who are wise, knowledgeable, experienced and compassionate will often discourage others from seeing them as leaders and authorities. Druids who want to be important may go to a lot of effort to present as plausible leaders and authorities. Some Druids step forward to lead and offer authority because they have valuable skills to offer and want to help people. Some Druids pretend to be humble because they’ve figured out that it’s a good look.

I can’t know what’s going on in someone else’s head. I do know that it is very human to feel judgemental of other people. We get social reinforcement by looking around and identifying people to feel we are superior to, and people to look up to as role models and leaders. How we judge each other may have a lot more to do with our own desires to know where we fit than with anyone’s innate qualities. 

It’s good to think about what we’re attracted to, what we find convincing and engaging and what seems laughable or insubstantial. Are we drawn to beauty, charisma and glamour in our potential leaders? Are we deeper people if we mistrust those things, or is that just a different set of values, prejudices and performance styles at work? Any time you feel moved to say ‘that Druid is superficial and insubstantial’ it’s worth looking at exactly what we’re rejecting and why. Humbleness and self effacement can be just as much a performance as fancy robes, and can be a highly successful one. It depends on what buttons you have to push.

How deliberate is your presentation style? What are you putting into the world as a Druid? How deliberate a performance is your Druidry? Does the idea of Druidry as public performance make you feel uneasy and inauthentic, or might that be an entirely valid aspect of what it means to be a priest, a bard, a celebrant? How does anyone else benefit from our Druidry if we don’t perform it in a deliberate way? Is it enough to live your truth, or is it necessary to make that more visible?

Polytheism: A Platonic Approach – review

This book came to me as a review book. I found it a really interesting read, if hard going. There’s an assumption here that the reader is someone who reads philosophy texts and knows the kind of language philosophers use. If you aren’t one of those people – and I’m certainly not – then you might find this a hard read requiring a high level of concentration.

Overall I enjoyed the challenge and found the exploration of a Platonic approach to polytheism fascinating. I can’t say this book has changed how I think about anything, but it’s not written to persuade, simply to demonstrate a perspective. If you are the sort of person who enjoys exploring ideas, then this may well appeal to you. If you read philosophy as part of your Druid path I would say it is well worth a look. If you like the idea of contemplating the nature of Gods and reality, this is well worth considering. Polytheists may well find it affirming, or may disagree wholeheartedly with this take on the way in which deities might relate to each other.

More on the publisher’s website – https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/pagan-portals-polytheism-platonic-approach

Druidry and Inclusion

It would be nice to be able to say that Druidry should have room for everyone. In practice, if you try and organise that way, not only will you exclude people but you will be most likely to exclude the most vulnerable and most marginalised people.

Dealing with abuse, aggression and actual threats drives people away. If you have the privilege of not being much affected by other people’s differing world views, you can’t assume that’s true for everyone. Dealing with prejudice and abuse – overt or covert – is at best exhausting and threatening, and at worst damaging and unbearable. People aren’t going to stay for that.

If you include the white supremacist, then when they start expressing those views, if you let them continue then you effectively exclude everyone who isn’t white. If you include the person who thinks all queer people are an abomination, there will very quickly be no LGBTQ people in the room. If you allow ableism, all the ramps in the world won’t get disabled people to stay in that space. If you want to be understanding of the gropy man who doesn’t respect boundaries, you will find women don’t stay in the space. If you allow some people to routinely talk over, ignore, undermine and otherwise treat people with disrespect, those mistreated people will leave.

I would rather include the people who wish to grow community, share fairly and treat each other with respect. If I have to exclude bullies, sexist people, classist people, racist people, and so forth then I’ll do it without hesitation. I’ve been the person who had to leave because they didn’t feel safe. If I’m in a place where I can call out the problem and give people a chance to learn and do better, then I’ll try and do that. But, I’m not going to sacrifice the wellbeing of someone who did nothing wrong for the comfort of someone who was acting badly. If someone has a problem with other people even existing, I don’t want those views in my space. They can do that someplace else, or ideally, they can sort themselves out. There’s a world of difference between not wanting people to exist, and not wanting people to bring their hate into your space.

Doing nothing is not a neutral choice. It isn’t the moral highground. There’s nothing actually Druidic about neutrality outside of Dungeons and Dragons games. Justice is part of the Druid path, and we don’t get justice by doing nothing. To have a just community we have to be willing to protect those who have least power from those who are controlling, aggressive, and unreasonable.

Sunlight and shadow

For me, woodland works in many ways as a metaphor for Druidry. I like the image of Druidry not being a single path, but being many possible journeys through the wood. I like the idea of Druidry as a terrain rather than as something more directional and focused on a goal. We’re in the wood, the wood is the destination, there is no extra special place to get to, no finish line to cross, it’s just about being in the wood.

Of course woods change all the time. They change with the seasons. They change one year to the next – trees grow, trees fall, paths become overgrown, new paths open up. Wild residents change in number, and location. The wood is not a fixed place. The metaphorical Druid wood is also not a static thing.

The other feature of woodland that has long struck me as being a good Druid concept, is that interplay of light and shadow. Across a wood, light levels can vary dramatically. You might find open clearings where the light is bright. Woods can be very dark – at night they cut out a lot of light pollution so you can get proper darkness under trees. Most of the time what you find is this constant and ever changing dappling of light and shadow. I don’t find the way that some people equate light with good and darkness with evil to be especially helpful because both are part of nature. I think Druidry belongs to the dappled and shifting light of woodland, where there is also beauty in the shadows and in the contrast. This is not to say I think Druidry is or should be amoral, more a recognition that everything is complicated and few things turn out to be purely good or purely bad.

Human rights are not negotiable

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me.

Pastor Martin Neimoller

The problem is that all too often people don’t act until they can see the chain of implications that leads to them. They won’t act until the threat to them is immediate and obvious. Some of us – because we’ve learned from history, and we’re anxious and we know we are marginal in some way – see how one thing is likely to lead to another. Some of us looked at the attacks on trans rights and knew that this would be the opening move leading to wider and deeper attacks on the LGBTQ community as a whole. Some of us looked at the way in which attacks on trans folk were being framed in terms of biological essentialism, and could see the dangerous implications for all women.

But it shouldn’t be about that. Supporting each other’s human rights should not be dependent on being able to see how our own human rights might be specifically threatened in the future. Human rights have to be universal – question that and the whole thing becomes unstable. If anyone is placed outside the embrace of human rights, then anyone can be dehumanised. Human rights only work as a concept if everyone has them, and they are not considered negotiable. The rights of people to live peacefully on their own terms should not be overruled by the entitlement of people who have a problem with that. Either we all have human rights, or none of us do.