A Bigger Picture

(David)

One night last week, I spent the long quiet hours agonising about unfulfilled desires and intentions. My writing is a big part of this, works-in-progress unfinished now and potentially incomplete always. Also, my studies of ancient Irish lore, focused mainly on the Morrigan. In the Irish Pagan School there are several classes and courses awaiting my attention. If only I could beat this long relapse and get back in the saddle.

But intentions and determination won’t break through the brain fog of my chronic illness and pain. The thought is always present that maybe this is it. Maybe this is how it will remain. Relapses have lasted months or years in the past, and also, viewed over the three decades of my illness, a new low plateau can sometimes become the norm. So there’s the fear: that I might leave my time in this skin without fulfilling some promises.

On my altar to the Morrigan, in a corner of the windowsill in my study, I have three cards from the Urban Crow oracle deck: Soar, Preparation, and Sacred Space. Twice last week, the Soar card fell face down. I’d cracked the window open on both of those mornings to enjoy the fresh warmer air. Any breeze coming in was slight, but obviously strong enough to knock over that first card in its path. I’m interpreting this as her message of confirmation that my struggle to fly is on the cards so I should go with the flow and not fret.

I also remind myself that the Morrigan is a goddess of prophecy, planning, and strategy, as much as of battle. That she works on timescales beyond my ken, and her big pictures, her long-term plans, might involve me in ways that I won’t yet see or understand. I accept it. I show up every day to check in, to make myself available to hear her. I do the work, whatever she requires of me. And right now, in my current condition, she isn’t asking anything more of me than I can do.

Storywalker

(David)

This review and the novel itself has particular significance for me during May, it being ME Awareness Month.

Part-time librarian Molly Matthews lives with the painful and exhausting chronic illness ME. The condition has broken every part of her life, except that she has plenty of time to escape into books. Especially her favourite fantasy series, Tamass the Fearless.
 
And when Molly escapes, she really escapes, because she possesses a rare talent that allows her to enter a book and meet its characters and share their adventures. Molly is a Storywalker.
 
Novelist Paul Best doesn’t walk in stories, but he’s always been good at making them up. At least, that’s what he believes, until he learns that he’s spent years unconsciously channelling the life of his unknown twin brother Tamass as the hero of his successful series.
 
When Tamass turns up at Paul’s door one dark and stormy night with murderous demons on his tail, it’s the start of a frantic multiverse-hopping adventure.
 
And then there’s Molly, one of Paul’s loyal readers, a woman who is so quietly ill in one world that she’s nearly invisible, but who in other worlds is seen riding a warrior dragon.

You can buy Storywalker as a paperback or ebook directly from the publisher – https://payhip.com/b/dcs2z

It’s also available from the usual array of online shops.

Integrity and Druidry

(Nimue)

If you’re looking for sacrifices to offer up to your godds, or with which to honour your path, then acting with integrity is a good candidate. Acting with integrity is expensive.

All too often it’s the people who push and shove, shout and demand who get ahead. If you are prepared to act fairly, not exploit others or blame them for your errors, that comes at a cost. If you aren’t willing to use your power to undermine others, or compromise on the truth for your own benefit, this will impact on your life.

If you are kind and co-operative that won’t always go in your favour. You’ll be the safer person to let down, or mess about. You’ll be more likely to have to pay for other people’s mistakes. You are likely to be expected to pick up the slack, and suffer the consequences when things go wrong. Less co-operative people often get a better deal.

We don’t reliably treat with most kindness and respect the people who are kindest and most helpful. We appease the people who have power, we go along with what’s going to cause us least trouble. Failure to do this has consequences. Refuse to support injustice, refuse to play nicely when situations aren’t nice at all, and it can cost you.

Apathy is often the easier choice. Life is simpler when you aren’t inclined to care about anything very much. Shrugging and going with the flow takes very little effort. Refusing to cooperate when things are unethical is hard.

What do we have without integrity? Look around you, and the injustice in the world, and the destruction of life itself, and that’s the answer. When greed, disinterest, selfishness and cruelty lead, this is what we have. There are many battles I can’t wade into, but the one thing I can do is act with integrity at every turn. I can do that when it hurts, and when it leaves me exposed, when it comes at a high price, when it massively inconveniences me. I can try.

We live in systems that often make it hard to take honourable action. To be online is to be ethically compromised, there are no innocent platforms. To be offline is to be silenced, and to reject many of the tools that allow those of us who have little influence to try and make a difference. So many things are like this that it can make the idea of acting with integrity seem impossible.

But, there are always opportunities, and those opportunities are always worth taking. If you want to make meaningful sacrifices for your Druidry, then sacrifice ease and comfort. Sacrifice what would cause you least hassle in favour of upholding what is true, and fair and necessary. Even though you probably can’t do that all of the time, doing it at all is a powerful choice, and one the living world urgently needs us to make.

Dealing with double standards

(Nimue)

I’ve come to the conclusion this year that I need to challenge myself round the issue of double standards. It’s something I’m seeing as increasingly problematic, and that I need to change. I’ve a long history of being prone to having double standards, and that needs to stop.

If there’s one rule for one person, and a different rule for someone else, there’s not a lot of scope for fairness and justice.

What I’ve been working with are thought forms like ‘everyone is doing their best’ and ‘if I can fix things then it’s on me to fix things’. What I ask of myself is not what I ask of other people. I think I need to put a lot less pressure on myself, and to hold other people to higher standards.

I want to believe the best of everyone. I get very uncomfortable when that thought is hard to hold. I want to believe that everyone is doing their best – limited by resources, personal struggles etc etc. We’re all doing our best – that seems like a kind and helpful position to hold. Where it falls down is when there’s every reason to think a person could do better and just can’t be bothered or doesn’t see the point. I’m exploring the implications of being a bit less accepting and a bit more willing to hold people to account.

Acceptance is a path that in the short term reduces conflict. It tends to reduce other people’s discomfort at my own expense. It can be a way of supporting and enabling problematic behaviour, and it’s that last element that has me looking hard at my own choices right now. If I let things go, if I make all the problems my problems, and I don’t hold people to the same standards as I hold myself, what am I allowing?

I’ve been thing a lot about my own experiences of other people’s double standards over the years, and how that’s impacted on me. If something matters when it affects someone else, but it doesn’t matter when it’s me being affected, that’s felt really dehumanising. When other people’s mistakes have been forgivable, but mine have not, that’s been painful. I’ve internalised too much of that. The double standards have informed my sense of self worth. It’s a lot to square up to.

I can do better than this. I’m not going to demand supernatural levels of perfection of myself. I’m giving myself permission to be more human, and more whole and from here I’m going to stop saying ‘everyone is doing their best’ to myself when someone hurts me.

Witches of Fawsetwood

(Nimue, review)

I read this book quite a while ago because I know Dorothy through Moon Books and she approached me to see if I’d be willing to write an endorsement for her witchcraft novel. I absolutely was, and this is the text I gave her:

“This is a rich, deep, slow read of a novel that really draws you into the lives of the characters. It achieves something truly unusual in that it sets a practice much like modern witchcraft in a historical setting and makes that feel plausible and authentic.”

I want to expand on that here. Dorothy has pulled off something I find genuinely impressive. I’ve read a fair few novels (or at least the first few chapters of them) that position modern witchcraft sensibilities and practices in historical contexts. I have otherwise usually hated this kind of book, I’ve often declined to finish them, and generally found them to be horrible and annoying.

This book was an absolute exception. I found it persuasive and I very much enjoyed reading it.

Usually the problem with this kind of novel is that the author only knows about modern witchcraft and just assumes that was what people did in the past. Dorothy has a depth of understanding around both the history and the folk traditions to be able to do something entirely different. She’s also not got people able to use magic to solve their every problem, and she’s realistic about the kinds of problems people used to try and fix with magic. I very much liked that.

Here we have witchcraft as the survival of pre-Christian Pagan practice, presented as though these are the roots of modern witchcraft. While I was reading I found it easy to suspend my disbelief and go along with the story. Let me tell you that given how much disbelief I had to suspend in the first place, this is no small achievement. She makes the witchcraft work in a way I have never seen before.

If you’re into witchcraft novels then you’re going to enjoy this, simply. It doesn’t really fit with my understanding of historical witchcraft at all, and I was entirely fine with that, because the story was interesting, I was intrigued by it, and the writing was good.

Living an inspired life

(Nimue)

Setting out to be creative will change your relationship with the world. In order to create, we need inspiration and ideas to work with. I’m going to write this post in relation to poetry, but I know similar things apply to other ways of creating, too.

In order to write a poem, you need something to write about. If you passively wait for inspiration to strike, you might go a long time without having any ideas. However, if you are being deliberate about writing poetry and trying to do that regularly, it will impact on how you relate to the world.

When you’re actively looking for inspiration, you are much more likely to find it. That might mean jotting down turns of phrase that appeal to you – maybe things you read or hear, maybe fragments that occur to you. You might spend more time reflecting on what you see. How exactly does this landscape make you feel? Which words would best convey the atmosphere? How could you express this tree, this emotion, this experience to someone else?

The intention to write can be a good prompt for reflection. There’s a journey from the raw experience to something shareable. Writing can also be a good tool for processing experiences, and making sense of life. There’s nothing like trying to communicate to help you focus on getting your own understanding of it clear.

In order to write, I have to live. I have to experience and encounter. A lot of what happens to me does not find its way into blogs, or poems, or books because there’s also a sifting process. I’m looking for the bright flashes amongst the ordinary things, and for the perspectives that might turn ordinary things into bright flashes. The more material I have, the better my odds of finding things I can work with.

It’s not as if ideas and potential experiences are in short supply. In theory, every moment of your day could be written into a poem. However, poems of binge watching television, scrolling endlessly through social media, commuter boredom and buying stuff don’t really offer much. To write poetry in a sustained way, you need a life that is of itself poetic. To create effectively, you need to live creatively first.

This is something it absolutely worth considering in its own right. What does it mean to live the kind of life that enables you to write poems about it? What would you need? Because those things are entirely worth doing whether you write the poem, or do the painting, or compose the music or not. Living an inspired life is the heart of the bard path, and being creative is a consequence of that. It’s not the case that you end up with a creative life because you write poetry. The life bit comes first, but you might find the signposts towards it within that desire to create.

Hills to climb

(Nimue)

I was about half way up Cam Peak at this point. It’s a hill in the landscape of my childhood, and I had not been up it in many years. I only got half way, my blood pressure being too low for the steeper climb behind me.

When I was a child, this hill was covered in bracken. That’s been cleared, and now this stunning array of bluebells shows up each spring. It’s the first time I’d seen it in person, even though I’ve been back in this area for about fourteen years. It shows how long plants can wait in the soil for the conditions that will let them flourish – these must have waited decades.

I wasn’t sure how far up the hill I’d be able to get, but to be able to get any distance up a hill is a tremendous victory for me. Years of low blood pressure have sorely limited my options. It turns out that getting enough good quality sleep is key to me having good blood pressure, although it’s also affected by heavy periods and hormonally charged night sweats, and anything else that costs me a lot of electrolytes. I’m managing it all a lot better than I used to.

Bluebells always make me think of my grandmother – who loved them dearly. I think about how she grieved in later life when she wasn’t strong enough to climb the hills and see them. I think about that every year when the bluebells appear, and what the loss of landscape does to a person. I thought I’d started down that path as well, and it’s been extraordinary finding a way back.

I’ve done a lot of physical healing in the last year. I’m stronger, I can play the violin again, I can walk a few miles on a good day and I can get up hills a bit. I am hopeful that further progress is possible, and maybe next year I’ll be able to get to the top of Cam Peak. I’ve got a number of goals about local places I want to be able to walk to more reliably, and it feels realistic to imagine that I’ll be able to do that.

I feel like I’ve been given a second chance at life. I’m not on a downward spiral into lost mobility, lost stamina, lost functionality. Healing is possible. Deep, peaceful, restful sleep is allowing me to recover. Not being stressed out of my mind all of the time is making good sleep possible. I’ve got muscles to build, and I have to work on my stamina, but that’s possible. I need to be careful around the things that mess me up, but I’m daring to imagine a future where those are occasional setbacks, not the defining features of my life.

Experiencing different realities

(Nimue)

We each experience the world in our own precise way. This is informed by our experiences and beliefs, our expectations, choices and behaviour. We get some say in that, and it is possible to radically change how you experience life, although it isn’t easy, and the more dramatically you want to change your perspective, the more work it takes.

This is especially relevant around spirituality. Two people in the same ritual will not experience that ritual in the same way. Shared experiences can mean radically different things to people. It’s important to have space for that and not to try and dictate how people ‘should’ feel or what their experiences are ‘supposed’ to mean.

It can be disorientating when someone else’s take on an experience is radically different from your own. It can leave you feeling that either you must be wrong, or they must be wrong. Life is often much more plural and complex than that. Much of the time it’s not too hard to manage having a different take on things, but sometimes it can become really problematic.

What do you do when someone else asserts that their version of reality is right, and yours is wrong? This happens a lot around spirituality. When it happens in the context of massive power imbalances, people can be forced to act as though they accept a reality that is not real for them. That’s a really psychologically damaging thing to experience. That kind of controlling can be done deliberately in the context of cults, and other abusive, manipulative situations.

At the same time it is of course possible to be wrong. We can all misunderstand things or not have a context for making sense of what we’re experiencing. Some of us jump at shadows. Sometimes being told that you’ve got it wrong is a helpful thing, if you can hear it. In safe and sane situations, there’s evidence to back up the right take, or explanations that make sense. In healthy situations, a challenge to your perceptions is likely to improve things for you, not distress you.

Being able to relate to a consensus reality is vital for our mental health and practical functionality. Being able to hold our own understandings of things is also vital. Healthy situations will let you have your own take on things to a fair degree, and unhealthy situations will tend to want to control your understanding and keep it in line with someone else’s view.

These are not easy things to judge. Perhaps the most useful question to ask is how able to function effectively you are. Being able to function effectively indicates having a healthy relationship with reality. Problems in functioning, difficulty making decisions and not being able to get the outcomes you expected can suggest that you might not have a good or useful understanding of what’s going on. If someone else is trying to impose a reality on you to control you, then the ways in which that impacts on your functionality can feel like you’re going mad, not like you’re being manipulated. It’s not easy to recognise this when it’s happening.

Wheel of the year poem

(Nimue)

Turning

Snow drops ice white emerging

The year turns, life comes again

Celandine in hopeful yellow

Growing new and bright again

Lambs in fields, newly delivered

The year turns, life comes again

Final frosts melt into water

Flowing now and free again.

Leafing trees their green unfurling

The year turns, life comes again

Catkins dancing, small birds calling

Nesting now, begin again.

Sweet the ducklings on the river

The year turns, life comes again

Feasts for otters, numbers dwindle

Fleeting life is lost again.

Dark the leaves of summer shading

The year turns, life comes again

Fox cubs wander, road side straying

Some survive to roam again.

Autumn shifts, red toned and freezing

The year turns, life comes again

Fall away to browns and fungi

Rotting down to live again.

Bare the trees, exposed the branches

The year turns, life comes again

Forming buds for next year’s growing

The wheel turns again, again.

This is another poem that’s come out of doing poetry classes with Adam Horovitz. The remit for this one was the use a repeating refrain.

Creating for fun and profit

(Nimue)

I’m a big fan of people doing creative things for fun. I firmly believe that everyone should have time and opportunity to be creative in any way that appeals to them. We should be able to do things for the joy of it and not in the hopes of developing some side hustle. We should have to feel that the only way to justify hobbies is the hope of turning them into paying gigs.

There is a huge difference between creating for fun and doing it professionally. Not least that when you’re doing something for fun, you can be relaxed about how it goes and what the results are. To sustain being professionally creative you do still need time for this, but it gets harder and more pressured. Having bills to pay can make it difficult to invest exploratory time in creating, and having to force your creativity so as to meet deadlines is hard.

Deadlines are inevitable. If they don’t come from other people, they will come from the need to pay bills. You can’t spend a year working on a single piece with no money coming in. You can’t try things to see what works when you’ve got to have something you can sell by the end of the month. That also means you can’t just work when you feel inspired or in the mood, you have to knuckle down and do it at times when you aren’t feeling it. Again, that can actually kill your creativity if you aren’t careful.

How much are you willing to compromise your vision, your values, what you do and how you do it for the sake of a paying gig? This soon becomes a question. Your passion project may not be marketable enough. There may be no one willing to pay you, or support you as you do it. Patreon helps, but to set up something like that you need to be well established, not starting out.

Plenty of people try working creatively only to discover that it’s a grind. There’s all the business side to deal with, and the issue of selling yourself, and selling what you make. Getting started is slow, not earning enough to live on is a common experience. Coming to hate what you once loved is a real risk. Selling your work can steal all of the joy from the process. Trying to be commercially viable can take all of the soul out of it.

I think a lot of people who haven’t tried it imagine that creative work is just swanning about being self indulgent, doing your hobby and having fun. Unless you have someone who is willing to fund you, or are independently wealthy, it doesn’t work like that. Getting creativity to pay takes a huge amount of sustained effort, and is no sort of easy option. I have no doubt that if more people knew what it was like, it would protect people from jumping into it when they aren’t equipped to deal with the harsh realities. It would also perhaps result in non-creative people being a bit more understanding about the ways in which this is also work.