Wife, lover, partner

I’ve been married to Tom for over a year now. We’ve faced a lot of challenges together in that time and been through some hard stuff. I can’t imagine being without him, or wanting to be without him. It makes for an informative contrast with my first marriage, and I’ve been reflecting on the nature of relationship, what it takes to make a good marriage, a good partnership.

I was a lot younger, of course, when I married the first time. I felt strongly about wanting to be a good wife, to make a good home, give love and support and all of that. It was never a conventional relationship. There weren’t excessive external challenges – a normal smattering – but it did not work, and I spent most of my time lonely, unhappy, frustrated and burdened with guilt for things that were not of my making.
Although those years changed me, I am in many ways the same person, with the same feelings, impulses, desires, needs and so forth. So, what makes one marriage a miserable failure, and the other a rewarding, joyful partnership? I’m mostly drawing on personal experience here, although I know of other relationships where some of these things have happened too, the good and the ill.

Where a relationship is underpinned by love and respect, neither party wants to do something that would not please the other. That’s especially true in a sexual context, but important other times too. Where there is love, there is a shared goal of mutual happiness. Sometimes it takes work and negotiation to find out how best to achieve that, but again, where there is love, that does not seem like hardship.

If the two people take joy in each other’s company, it doesn’t really matter what you’re doing, or how much money you have, or how long you’ve been apart, or if you’ve got to spend the day on boring practical things, you can still be pretty happy. The ongoing affirmation of mutual love, care and appreciation makes an epic difference. Again, all manner of hard things are easier to take if you know you are sharing life with someone who values, respects and delights in you. The partner who forever finds fault, who says ‘you would be attractive if…’ and finds other ways to undermine, is no kind of joy to be with.

Competition between partners can be a form of slow relationship death. Where it matters who earns the most money, or who works the longest hours, or has the better car, or is further on in their career or making more headway with OBOD, or seeming to be more spiritual… you are in trouble. Where there is good relationship, seeing the other one progress and develop is a happy thing. If one partner is afraid of being left behind, not being needed, not being important, that can stifle the other. You can find your partner only seems happy when you are crushed, demoralised or miserable. If success is unbearable to the other, you can find you are forever being knocked back when things go well. That is not a recipe for a successful marriage.

There has to be a balance of responsibility and power. If one person has the power – especially control of resources and money, that of itself creates problems. If the other person carries the responsibility for fixing, arranging and figuring out, but without the means to carry through, that’s a nightmare. If one person has the emotional responsibility, that’s impossible. Equally, if one person is forever being blamed and there is no scope for sharing responsibility, the relationship is not in a good way. True partnership shares, in all ways and in all things. It matters less who was right, or wrong, what matters is how you go forwards, how you improve things, do better in the future, learn, know each other more thoroughly, build understanding and all that.

All relationships have sticky moments, conflicts, times when needs do not neatly balance or external pressures threaten to overwhelm you. The measure of a good relationship is not the presence or absence of these things, it’s what you do with them. If you’re coming out of the hurricane with arms around each other, the rest is just detail. If crisis makes you pull together, that’s very different from a relationship where it’s used as an excuse to lash out and injure. And equally, if one party is always looking for opportunities to justify anger or selfish behaviour, it’s never going to be good. Good relationship can include conflict, strenuous disagreements, even fallings out, if that overall intention to care, support and be with, is there. It’s always better to air a problem than to hide it. Where there is genuine love and good intention, the hardest things can be worked through and dealt with. Where there is only an intention to use, the smallest problems turn into nightmares.

This is a very superficial sketch, I could probably write a whole book. I feel grateful in knowing what the differences are, in being able to fully appreciate what I have, and in having a husband who is most worthy of being loved and admired, and who loves me as an equal, in return.

Personal and political

I’m following on from yesterday’s blog, and Jayne’s comment about it. “So many people out there who obviously have grievances and feel the need to bore other people with them. What has happened with sharing your problems with those closest to you?”

I’d like to begin with a counter quote from George Eliot, “There is no private life that has not been determined by a wider public life.” (From Felix Holt the Radical 1866).

We all exist in a social and political context. That which afflicts one person, often afflicts others too. Aside from the pettiest of our personal gripes, many of the things we experience have their causes at least in part in wider systems and social structures. The most personal things are often the most political.

When my grandmother was a girl, no one talked about child abuse. It was kept private, spoken only to those closest to you. The same was true of rape, and domestic violence. We chuckle about the silliness of modern health and safety laws, but death in factories used to be common place. And I know there were plenty of people who felt it inappropriate to talk about rape, and child abuse, and poor people dying thanks to unsafe working conditions. Silence upholds the abuser. It supports a system that enables violence and misery to continue.

We may have moved on from then, but we’re a long way from being the open, compassionate society I dream of. We still stigmatise mental health problems. There is no shortage of anti pagan intolerance out there, along with plenty of other faith, race, gender and class based hatred. We do not fix that in silence either. When there is fear of rebuke, isolation and stigmatisation, it’s very hard for people to talk even to those closest to them, about their problems. The more socially acceptable it is to admit to difficulty, the easier it is for those private conversations to take place.

Not everyone has someone close they can trust. There are people who kill themselves as a direct consequence of this. I would rather listen to any amount of someone’s personal woes, and support them, than risk pushing away someone who, for all I know, could be wondering if there is any point in them continuing to live. Not everyone has people around them with answers. The ‘only gay in the village’ scenario. The ‘only pagan in the family’. Or perhaps ‘the only person on our estate who is going to uni next year.’ There can be all kinds of dramatic upheavals and changes in a person’s life that alienates them from their usual support network. Sometimes it can be very hard to burden those closest to you with secrets, or with pain. One of the best things about the internet, I think, is the way it’s enabled people to find fellow travellers, whatever they are facing. Bereaved parents. Transgender folk. People suffering chronic and obscure illnesses. And too many others to list.

When someone stands up in public and says ‘I do not like this thing that has happened in my life, it is not ok,’ the world changes. It used to be totally socially acceptable for men to beat their wives. If no one had ever spoken up, or spoken out, if every female victim had kept that private and dutifully avoided washing her dirty laundry in public, it would probably still be totally socially acceptable and there would be a lot more of it going on.

I remember when I was a child, very few people would publically admit to being pagan, because they were afraid of the consequences. We could have sat silently on that one, too. Fortunately for me, and those other pagans of younger generations, we can be ‘out’ with a fair degree of safety, because of those brave souls who spoke up first.
New ideas, evolutions and revolutions do not spring into life, fully formed and with a glorious leader ready to enact them. They grow slowly, out of sharing. People dare to imagine that what is currently normal may not be best. They dare to dream of a better world. And then, only then, can there be scope for making it happen. In the UK, Mind and others have a campaign to encourage people to be more open about mental health issues. One in ten of us can expect to be hit by something in our lives. We need to be able to talk to each other.

We don’t get social change by suffering stoically, in silence. We don’t build a better world by telling people off for ‘whinging’ about things that are not yet right. Sure, there are people who devote a lot of time and energy to grumbling over pointless things, but perhaps if it was easier and more normal to talk about bigger issues, fewer people would feel the need to focus on the small problems that can more readily be aired. It’s easy to complain about other people. It’s hard to make change. But when people are talking to each other, all manner of things become possible. Sorry Jayne, if my sharing personal things offends you. But you don’t have to come here and you don’t have to read. I would say to anyone, if you don’t like something and it isn’t harming anyone, you have the freedom to go somewhere else. I’m not obligatory.

Private life in public

All writing is inherently personal. Even when we’re not writing autobiography or offering insights of heart and opinion, a lot of who a person is can come through in how they write. The choice of language, the absence or presence of logic, compassion and other such qualities. Even in supposedly factual report writing, the prejudices, assumptions and lack of effort put in can speak very clearly about the author. And yes, I have seen one of those recently.

There are many reasons for putting aspects of the private self into public spaces. Some more noble and productive than others. Kiss and tell celebrity stories, the angst of famous people, the fad diets, infidelities and other reasons for shame are frequently fodder for magazines. I look at the covers every now and then to make sure my own prejudices are up to date, but I wouldn’t read one unless someone pointed a gun at my head first. Selling the sordid and intimate details of your life can be a way of getting public attention and courting fame. I wonder what some of the people who go in for it imagine they are going to get. There are also magazines devoted to the hideous real-life stories of the ‘ordinary’ where the more grotesque the tale is, the better. Freak shows are alive and well, and living in paper form.
When a person is famous, or infamous, the appetite for insight stories goes up. When you are trying to become famous for work, or a cause, it can be tempting to use anything that will bring the cameras round. If you think the ends justify the means, that might make it even more tempting. However, the media is seldom kind, and loves the opportunity to make people look stupid. Many are the well meaning pagans who have agreed to don ritual attire for a camera, only to be presented as an object for ridicule. Any time we put part of the private self into a public space, there is considerable scope for humiliation. And not just for the individual. It can impact on families too, on neighbours, communities, the orders and organisations you belong too. Anyone might be tarred with the same brush, and these things can so easily get out of control.

Talking about spirituality, or druidry, or any other aspect of being alive and human, calls for honesty. It is easy to use that authoritarian third person voice and keep the content impersonal, but that kind of work doesn’t resonate. I have tried it, long ago, it did not achieve much. If I wrote this blog from a place of calm authority, with a tone of ‘you should be doing this’ or worse still ‘this is what all druid do’ then I rather hope that most of my readers would have buggered off in search of something more useful. Spiritual experience is personal. We also learn more from the mistakes, the falling shorts, the flailings and the personal trials than we do from ease and success. If I want to share in a meaningful way, I get more mileage talking about the things that I get wrong, or struggle with than ever I do by speaking impersonally.

I’ve had very little scope for privacy in the last few years, required to recount painful, personal things to police, doctors, social workers, solicitors, and more. I’ve endured invasive physical examinations. People have read and photocopied my diaries,, which was such an unwanted invasion of privacy that I still smart over it. For the purposes of getting my bloke into the UK I’ve had to write to faceless officials about the details of a love affair. As court business proceeds, all aspects of my life remain open to scrutiny, and I have no right at present to any kind of privacy at all. I also have publishers who want me talking in public in ways that will encourage the sale of books. This has not been an easy process, and has forced me to look hard at what I want to keep private and how it might be possible to hold a sense of self that does not belong to anyone else. Do I have any entitlement to privacy?

Holding the boundaries of self in face of adversity and scrutiny, is not easy. We’ve not quite got to the stage of my being publically stripped naked and displayed, but from an emotional perspective it has felt a lot like that at times. And yet, I have this growing impression. All the exposure, all the poking and questioning, is only superficial. The answers are truths about my life, exposures of pain and history. But I am more than this. My own knowledge of self is bigger than what is taken from me continually by processes I cannot control.

Part of why I write here, is because I choose what to share and how to say it. I have no problem, I realise, with high levels of openness and honesty. But I would much rather choose to give than have it prised from me.

Your superior druid, shrink wrapped

Yesterday there were debates on facebook, a question that perhaps it was not wise to ask in a public place, and a backlash. The details don’t really matter for the purposes of this post. It got me thinking, however, about those oft-recurring issues around authority in druidry. Every time our community, or some bit of it hits a crisis, someone will comment that it would be nice if there was a proper governing body to sort it all out.

This can mean one of two things. Firstly it can mean wanting someone else to shoulder the responsibility and come up with a magic fix. That’s a very simple, human response to difficulty. Sometimes we all want to be children again and to find a parent who will make it all better for us. The more troubling motivation is based on the desire to control the beliefs and behaviour of others.

I’ll freely admit I had a moment yesterday of wanting to be the one who could lay down the law and tell everyone what they ought to think, and do, and believe. I get these bouts of hypothetical megalomania, and if facebook is indicative, so does everyone else. We all know we’ve got it all figured out, we have the right way, the perfect solution, if only everyone else would listen. Except they don’t, and most of the time we’re wrong, and the ’perfect’ solution would not work for everyone.
One of the dangers on any kind of spiritual path is that you start feeling important. You know more than those around you, and this makes you a better sort of person. Being better, wiser and whatnot, you are then, in your own eyes entitled to lead. It’s not a big leap from leading to dictating. I will also admit that when I first came to druidry, many years ago, that desire to be important, special, ahead of the pack, was part of what motivated me. I wanted to matter. Again, I suspect I was pretty normal in those feelings and aspirations. I sought responsibility because I wanted opportunities to shine and impress.

The idea of being, or becoming ‘better’ is inherent in a lot of spiritual traditions. The idea of the chosen few, the special ones, the ones god will save and give the cushy afterlife to. The whole point of some forms of spirituality seems to be betterness. In being better than we were, we are surely becoming better than some of those around us. We can look at their actions for evidence of our own superior wisdom. We have the moral high ground now. It’s not a long walk from there to words like ‘master race’. Spirituality that feeds arrogance and self importance, is not really that spiritual at all, when you stop to think about it.

So I get angry and self important, like everyone else. I am thankful today that I did not say anything yesterday that I have cause to regret. The more I think about it, now that the initial frustration has passed, the clearer I am that I don’t want the responsibility of telling other people how to live their lives. I have no desire to be the person who says who can, and cannot call themselves a druid, or what druidry means, or how to teach it. I’d quite like to be part of the process that is a living and evolving tradition, but nothing more than that.

Does that make me a better sort of person than I was when I came to druidry? Can I now hold this up as proof of my improved state? Ah ha! Betterness is not about getting out front with self important titles. Betterness is all false modesty and sitting back, not getting my hands dirty and being smug at a distance. There are other daft ideas to run around, other ways to feel bigger whilst doing nothing of any great significance. Other ways of deluding the self.

Who measures the betterness? Me? A deity who might or might not exist? The druid community or its leaders, should we appoint them? And what does that betterness achieve? What happens when we make qualitative judgements about the worth of one life compared to another?
If everything has spirit, how can one manifestation of that be better or worse than any other? How can any existence be more or less valuable than another?

And yet, weigh against that the notion of excellence in all things. It is impossible to seek excellence without having some awareness of how what you do compares with what everyone else is doing. We find our goals by looking at each other. We measure ourselves by contrast. So much depends on what we want that excellence for. Do we seek it for the good of our community and the enhancement of the world, or to raise ourselves up above everyone else? That, I think, is the critical difference.

Cat Treadwell interview

I first met Cat Treadwell through The Druid Network, when she stepped up to run the reviews section. Being one of the people she sends review books to, I’ve had a fair amount of contact with her over quite a few years now. In that time, I’ve watched Cat journey from being someone who just wanted to help out, to being the most actively involved of Druids, her work taking her in all kinds of exciting directions. She’s fast becoming one of the leading lights in UK druidry, and is undoubtedly one to watch!

Nimue: What first brought you to druidry?

Cat: As with most modern pagans, I think there’s always been something inside, whether it be an affinity for the wild lands, the seasons or just the magic in/of story. I’ve always been a voracious reader, and can remember making up my own characters and adventures from a very young age. I’d also be the strange little girl playing in the hedgerows during breaktime at school, getting to know the trees and birds! So I think it’s always been there in that regard.

Official ‘Druidry’ came about when I discovered ‘Spirits of the Sacred Grove’ while working through the huge amount of pagan books out there. Bobcat’s words struck a chord with me (as they have with many others), I sought out the BDO Yahoo group, found out that the webmaster was planning a local Grove… and here I am!

Nimue: What prompted you to take a more active role in the druid community? Was that a gradual thing, or did you make a conscious decision?

Cat: I was prompted in large part by a good friend asking me and my partner to officiate at his handfasting ceremony. I’d never overseen public ritual before, let alone an event of such importance. I still cringe when I remember the rehearsal beforehand in my back garden – it was truly awful, and I learned quickly how NOT to approach such things! But a wise man on The Druid Network forum advised me to be brave and find my ‘druid bollocks’ – and so I did! Strength in laughter, after all… *grin*

Since then, it feels that as I’ve grown, so have the challenges I’m faced with. From my first funeral rite, to a Beltane handfasting at Stonehenge, to my forthcoming book, and the latest request: to travel overseas for workshops and talks. Not to mention essentially working as a ‘professional Druid’ in order to pay the bills (due to redundancy last year). Life is busy!

Nimue: What do you do when you need inspiration

Cat: As I came to the end of my ‘training’ on Anglesey, I was going to make my promises and state my intention to the wider Universe as to what I would be doing with this. That really was a life-changing (and affirming) step, in many ways. Why had I undertaken it all? What for? How could it be best used?

Looking back, everything seemed to evolve in stages. I spent time as a beginner for a good few years, solitary and studying whatever came along and appealed to me. Eventually I joined a Grove (as part of the British Druid Order, now The Druid Network) and opened up to more ‘formal’ teaching/learning. Now came the time to step up – it wasn’t just about expanding my own knowledge, it was putting it to good use.

Nimue: How easy did you find the writing process when you stepped up to creating your first book?

Cat: My favourite image of ‘inspiration’ is one I saw years ago on a documentary. The wonderful Terry Jones sits at his desk, preparing to write. He chews his pen. He stares out the window. He fiddles with his tea mug. THAT is what searching for inspiration is like, quite often!

I tend to be mostly inspired when outside, whether walking the dog or just wandering (or even staring out of the window!). The simplest of natural events can be a reminder of something important, reconnecting you to that crucial spark that allows the creativity to flow. Ultimately, it can’t be forced… but it can be encouraged. Often by just putting yourself in the right frame of mind, with the right tools, and getting on with it!

Nimue: So, go on then, tell us about the book!

Cat: I actually felt as if I was cheating for a good while, because a lot of it had been done already on my blog! But then I realized the difference between writing ‘casually’ for an internet audience, and writing ‘professionally’ for a readership, who are physically expending energy (money) and effort to read my words. More responsibility, but determination to really speak my truth and be aware of what I was sending out into the world between those covers!

One thing that did help was that if I could ever honestly express my ‘life’s ambition’, it was (and still is) to be a writer. I still can’t believe it’s really happening, but I’ve always written, usually fiction. But I love the process, the joy of inspiration (when it flows!), ideas coming together… and then the utterly wonderful feeling of others talking to me about something that I have written. To know that somebody appreciated my work is the greatest gift, and I will always be thankful for it. So while yes, I do write on what interests me, what keeps me going is that others enjoy it as well. And hopefully find it inspiring in turn.

Nimue: What’s the book called, and how/when can people get their hands on it?

Cat: Well, as most folk know now, a few years ago I was yanked into giving a public talk at a Pagan Federation Conference with five minutes’ notice, and a deep-seated fear of speaking in public… but I did it. And was asked back!

So I figured that it might be a good idea to structure the next talk *grin* and started a blog, to ask the wider Web what exactly they wanted me to talk about.

The book came out of that, when last year, Moon Books were looking for new Pagan authors. As far as I know, while there are many ‘published blogs’ on the shelves (?) of Amazon, there hasn’t been one from a Pagan author yet. So I’ve taken time to turn it into a book, add a fair bit… and here it is!

While there’s more ‘Paganism 101′ books out there than I can count, one thing I found seriously lacking when I started out was EXPERIENTIAL stories. How other Pagans live, of whatever path. This has now started to change, thankfully, but that really is my goal with this book. To show how Druidry (and wider Paganism, usually) is lived for me, but also to make the reader question themselves and their own quests. What are you doing? What are you looking for? How far are you prepared for your life to change as your practice actively grows?

I don’t have a problem with those who are ‘trying out’ a path by reading all the books, trying the rituals, but not challenging themselves very much. I believe that this knowledge actually DOES tacitly move them forward, as they discover what they do (and don’t) want to be/do/live. I’m just being more up-front about it!

I love Druidry for being so honest, so challenging, such a daily adventure. Good and bad, dark and light – it’s part of our lives and the wider world. I hope this deep passion comes across in my words and my actions… but as I say in the book, feel free to question me if you don’t agree!

The book is ‘A Druid’s Tale’, and is currently available for pre-order on my website: http://druidcat.wordpress.com/a-druids-tale/

It’s due to be released on 29th June, and I’m told an Amazon page is being organised, with Kindle version available on there.

Cat is also out and about doing talks, workshops, interviews and all manner of other exciting things, so there’s all sorts of scope to encounter her both online and in person, if you haven’t

Living with fear

One-off traumas are awful to experience, but generally, if it seems like a singular event, people get over it fairly well. It’s the experience of living with fear, and having the unthinkable become normal that does the longer term damage. This is what underpins shell shock, as experienced by soldiers. Post traumatic stress disorder is just as likely for civilians after wars. However, being crippled by fear is not an experience unique to this level of hostile experience. People who experience much lower levels of bullying, abuse, persecution or difficulty over a long period can end up just as scarred. It’s not a very well understood problem, nor is it much talked about outside support groups for the afflicted.

People coming out of long term bullying, or abuse can be just as psychologically damaged as people coming out of war zones and can display all the same kinds of symptoms as shell shock. This is not because victims of these apparently lesser problems are somehow being weak or pathetic. This is a biological process that has everything to do with how fear acts on the body. It is a very bodily condition. Once you can get your head in on the process, you’re actually moving towards healing. Prolonged fear causes physical sickness and needs treating more like an ailment of the body and less like some kind of character failing.
There are a number of things that can happen to a person. If you are constantly victimised and nothing you do will protect you, you will come to believe that the whole world is hostile and threatening. You may be unable to respond to even mild setbacks, and feel overwhelming despair in face of even the smallest problems. You may build fear associations such that leaving the house becomes unbearable. For me, it was postmen. I still break into a cold sweat if I see a postman, or post van. I know why, but that doesn’t stop me. When you have lost power and control in your life, the idea of being able to solve problems, or being able to cope barely exists in your head. Each new scenario is there to punish you further, to take you apart, to kick you again. The loss of hope is a consequence of living with fear.

You may develop superstitious beliefs about actions or behaviours that will keep you safe. This can lead to obsessive and compulsive disorders. People only feel safe when they have performed rituals that, from the outside, look crazy and irrelevant. The desire to be safe may also lead to passivity, acquiescence. The abused woman may make no sound when she is beaten if acknowledging pain makes it worse. She may become unable to vocalise any kind of pain at all. The abused child may learn to do anything at all to please adults, in the hopes of avoiding further torment and thus become even more vulnerable.

Once your body has learned fear as normality, things go a bit crazy. The fear responses happen when there’s almost nothing to trigger them. That can mean heart racing, stomach heaving panic attacks that leaving you weeping and fighting for breath, and not even knowing why. The experience of this kind of bodily panic suggests that there must be something terrible going on, you just don’t know what it is yet. When terrible has become normal, that’s not irrational at all.

There was a cure for shell shock. All you had to do was get the soldiers out of the war zone, give them total rest and tranquillity, gentle physical activity and time outdoors. With peace and the right support, many would heal. The only way to break the cycles of physical terror, is to bodily remove the sufferer from the source of their fear, support them to feel safe, keep their environment unthreatening and gradually rebuild their sense of what ‘normal’ ought to look like.

This is one of the reasons why those apparently lesser forms of harm can turn out to be the most damaging. Short of going into a hospital, your chances of getting a few gentle, stress free weeks in order to heal are slim. The longer you are trapped in a fearful situation, the more normal it becomes. A few weeks might enable you to recover from a few months in a war zone, but what if you’ve been a victim for a decade? Making a new ‘normal’ so that you are not afraid all the time, is not going to be so quick. A good doctor can do a lot to help a person, but a careless one may feed paranoia and reinforce feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness. Add in the social stigma of mental illness, the fear of having your children taken away, or losing your job, and the fear itself becomes self perpetuating.

Fear does not always show on the outside. Panic attacks, and expressions of a terror that is rooted in your body like a parasitic plant, are humiliating. Most sufferers go to a lot of effort to hide it.
What would you do if you saw someone succumb to what appeared to be irrational panic? Tell them to pull themselves together? Mock them? Pity them? Avoid them? And if it happened to you, who could you go to for support? Who could you tell? Who would hold your hand and help you rebuild your life?

There but for the grace of… what? Go any of us. The going is easy and there are plenty of people who will happily take you there. The coming back is very, very hard.

Druidry and divination

What historical writing there is about the druids tends to mention divination including reading death throws and entrails, and other less than lovely activities. I for one have never been tempted. There are lots of uncertainties about the insights we get from Roman writers, which doesn’t help. So, having swept all of ancient history aside with an insufficient overview…. How does divination fit into modern druidic practice?

There are plenty of divination tools out there. I started with runes, having purloined my father’s set. There are ogham inspired systems of divination, but, when you consider the academic uncertainties around ogham, this won’t be ancient as a method either. There are modern druid oracle cards too. I think the question of whether a system is old or not, is far less relevant than whether it works. Different people tend to feel comfortable with different tools, and will use them in different ways and for different reasons. What works for one may not, therefore, work for another and it pays to try various mthods.
Divination is not something to do just for fun or as a party trick. You need to know what you want and why you are doing it. Asking yourself not only what you want to know about, but why, is very important and should happen before you start questing after insight. In times of fear and uncertainty, reaching for reassurance can be tempting. What we want then is often a comfort blanket, and a divination tool that gives a truthfully bleak outlook might do more harm than good.

We also need to consider how we think reality works. Is the future a certain thing that can be known in advance? If not, what do we hope to gain? Who are we appealing to when we ask our questions? To the cards or stones themselves? To the gods? To fate? Or something inside ourselves? You can undertake divination without being clear about this, but it should be considered. Sometimes the answers can be informative about what we really want from the process.

I use divination methods to divine the present. This is because I do not believe the future is all laid out before me. I also believe that the present does a lot to shape the future, and if you can spot the influential threads in the now, you can make good guesses at what might be coming. This is not much different from all the other forms of speculative thinking that governments, financial bodies and whatnot do. Their methods are not any more reliable than any others. I use divination to help me clarify my own mind, and be clear about my feelings and intentions. I find this helps me to then pick my own path forwards and to shape the future I want, rather than being buffeted by events.

Finally, I use divination for inspiration. I find the aforementioned Druid oracles very helpful for this. I have The Druid animal oracle, and the plant oracle – both the work of the Carr Gomms and illustrated by Will Worthington. They have beautiful, rich images, and a supporting book full of folklore, natural history and insight. Using them I find insight into my own state of mind, and it helps me create a calm space from which to consider whatever events are unfolding, or anticipated.
In stories of ancient divination acts, the theme seems to be wanting to know that your side will win, or how to get the favour of the gods in order to win, or which day would give you the best chance at winning. Much of divination can be seen to be about harnessing good luck and avoiding ill. This is a world view that just does not fit will my own personal philosophy. We get what we get, as far as I am concerned. Most of my questions therefore tend to be about how to survive, how to nourish my own strength and imagination to help me continue, and how to do the best I can with whatever comes to me.

I have done a lot of work at various times, divining for others. Experience suggests that many people either want to be reassured, or they want someone else to tell them what to do. Armed with a pack of cards, some incense and a bit of background music, a person can have far more authority than they might at other times. A friend who would not listen to the suggestion that she’s chasing the wrong bloke if I just said it, might be far more open to the idea if I ‘divined’ it for her. This raises all kinds of interesting questions about truth, integrity, power, and what power does to people. This is one of the reasons I’ve stopped divining for other people very much.

One of the things I like about the druid oracle cards is that they don’t give answers. It’s nigh on impossible to get simple ‘do it this way’ instructions in answer to problems. Instead, they offer kinds of energy to explore and work with. How to do it rests with the individual, but sometimes it’s nice to have a place to start from.

Soundbite philosophy and other fish

I woke in the early hours with the absolute conviction that today’s blog post would be going in the ‘ritual’ category. The thing I can’t remember, is what it was supposed to be about. This is not unusual, my dreaming mind has a life of its own; I often wake with convictions that can’t then be pinned to anything coherent. When they can, I tend to use them. There may be a flow, something I can tap into, things my unconscious mind knows. And, when there’s an easy option, I’m not ashamed to take it. So, this is not a blog about ritual, but about thinking, and whether or not we go with the flow, and where the flow might take us.

I read somewhere (facebook perhaps) a lovely thought form that went ‘do not go with the flow. Dead things go with the flow.’ Fish tend to swim against the flow, I’ve watched them seeming to hang in the water in much the same way as kestrels fly against the wind in order to hover. If the canal is anything to go by, dead things can be depended on to go with the flow. So does rubbish. Often ‘going with the flow’ results in these floating things getting trapped by the curve at the front or back of the boat, at which point all motion ceases. And the flow varies in most watercourses, from barely shifting to torrential floods, all of which a person who goes with it, can be subject to.

Going with the flow is a surrender to the inevitable. Or at least, to what we assume is inevitable. It is the path of least resistance. The sapling that bends in the storm does not break. I spent a little while studying tai chi and Taoism, and the idea of yielding is very important in that tradition. Overcoming by yielding is a strategy worth considering, especially if you dislike violence or conflict. But can all trials be overcome through yielding? Looking at my own life, I have to say, no. I have yielded, a great deal at times, given way, acquiesced, offered no resistance. In the short term it reduced pain, but longer term it kept me trapped in a harmful, soul destroying situation. There are forms of oppression it’s very hard to tackle by yielding. Sometimes, yielding only serves to reinforce the problem.

There are lots of glib statements out there that seek to sum up a life philosophy in a few short words. The trouble is, that very few simple ideas can be safely applied to all situations for a failsafe ‘how to live well’ solution. If it were that easy, someone would have figured it out long ago. Anything that can be pinned down to a single sentence probably won’t get you very far, or won’t work all the time. Life is much more complicated. Being human is vastly complicated. The things that make sense to one person, in one place and at one time won’t necessarily have anything to give even that same person, in another time or place, much less anyone else.

Most actual philosophies and belief systems cannot be expressed simplistically. It’s tempting to want soundbites and easy catch phrases, but that’s not how a spiritual path works. It’s the commitment to complexity, to exploration and a quest for understanding that underpins all spiritual life. The difficulty is part of the point, part of what makes it meaningful to search for answers. The one liners that can readily be shared on facebook are often charming. They may raise a smile or trigger an idea, but slogan-philosophy only goes so far. The fun part is taking that nugget, be it ‘go with the flow’, or anything else, and working out what that means, right now, in your life. That’s where both the real work, and the real discovery happens.

Where is the flow going today? I don’t know. But I can go with it, or swim against it, get out altogether, and consider all manner of alternatives. The only one liner of philosophy I’m inclined to trust, is that there is never one true way to anything.

The end of medicine

I’d noticed maybe twenty years ago that there was an issue with antibiotics. I’m not a scientist, not working in medicine, and even so, I got the message. Antibiotics were a finite resource. To make them last longer we needed to stop routinely giving them to animals and prescribing them for the slightest ailment. Apparently no one else paid much attention. We have a myth (upheld by the movies) that science will find a magic solution in the nick of time. It hasn’t, and the end of antibiotics is now looming.

Without antibiotics, operations will be far more risky, and things that are currently routine will cease to be so. This may mean a collective shift in how we think about medicine, and for me, it’s flagged up some rather uncomfortable ideas about the current systems. The obvious answer to losing antibiotics is to invest more in preventative medicine. There are plenty of ailments that can be avoided, where small, early interventions reduce the need for bigger ones later on. There are many conditions we know perfectly well can be alleviated or avoided just through lifestyle changes.

But here’s the thing. If someone has a heart attack at fifty, goes on to need a bypass, medicines, later a pacemaker, more drugs, more hospital time, they cost a lot of money. Or to put it another way, a lot of money is made out of them. A fit and healthy person who seldom needs to see a GP, much less anything more involved, does not make money for anyone – or at least, not for drugs companies or medical companies. There are financial benefits, for some, from others being ill. There is a whole industry out there that depends very precisely on other people being ill. Then there are the health insurance companies, and even in countries like the UK where medicine is mostly free at point of access, there is still the option to pay for a faster service, and people turning a profit. The more interested our government gets in introducing market forces into medicine, the more reason there is to have people get sick and need curing, the less reason there is to keep people well in the first place. The logic of the market place simply is not consistent with treating human beings in a compassionate and civilized way.

The flip side of this is that healthy people are more productive, more likely to be employed, more likely to have longer working lives than those who are sick. Someone who dies young won’t draw a pension, of course. And if you have a surfeit of poor people who you can’t keep in gainful employment, and you are only thinking in terms of money, letting them die off might make a lot of sense. It’s all about priority. When money comes first in all judgements, kindness and decency won’t get much of a look in. When the price, the cost, the economic value are the first measures you explore, sick people may generate you more GDP than well ones. I have no idea how the figures stack up, but the results are there to see all too plainly. Far more time and effort goes into cure, than prevention.

In a world without antibiotics, preventative medicine has to make more sense. Precautionary measures and lifestyle changes have to predominate, at least if we’re serious about survival. And if money can’t be reliably made the other way, that could well swing it.

The antibiotics problem isn’t news. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone. It was inevitable, we knew it was coming. Just the same way that we know that we will run out of oil, gas and coal eventually. We know climate change is on the cards too, or at least, most of us do. So are we going to follow the antibiotics model here and pretend there isn’t a problem, or hope a magic fix will come in a timely fashion? There are a lot of things we might just have enough time to do something about, but only if we get off our collective posterior sooner rather than later.

So often the argument for not acting comes down to anticipated costs. We can’t be green, it’ll put our industries at a disadvantage. We can’t clean up, it costs too much. No one seems worried about the figures that might be involved in not acting. What is it going to cost us, longer term, if we don’t tackle the pending oil crisis and the melting of the ice caps?

Of course by then, the odds are someone else will be in government, so why worry? They can deal with it. Or science will magic it away, or if we close our eyes and all sing very loudly, we can pretend none of it is happening. It’s not just fantasy, its suicide.

Why write fiction?

I found myself asking this question yesterday. Over the last year, most of my energy has gone into non-fiction work – this and other blogs, Druidry books, promotional work. I wrote a novel last year, but that seems a very long time ago. Non-fiction is comfortable, work-wise. I like the calmer, more intellectual thinking. Once you get started on a topic, the material suggests a logical progression. It speaks directly, makes its points clearly. What can fiction do that non-fiction cannot? I realised yesterday that if I couldn’t answer this to my satisfaction, I would not write any more novels. (I’ve written about eleven novels so far, most of them published).

When I started novel writing, in my late teens, I did it because I had something to say. There weren’t just stories and characters in my head, I had an agenda, a sense of direction. Then I discovered exactly how publishable I wasn’t, and like so many authors before me, started exploring what it takes to be commercially viable. I’ve spent about a decade writing things I thought I could sell, and earning a modest income from ebooks as a consequence. Every year it’s got that bit harder to sustain my enthusiasm. I realised yesterday, that there is no point in writing novels that are supposed to sell, as opposed to the stories I want to write. I’ve spent so long on the former that I have little sense of what the latter would look like any more. Better to write non-fiction.
That might have been it. However, I’m married to a man who fell in love with the novel I wrote in my early twenties, back when I was still writing more from the heart than from the head. So we had a long conversation about my work and the direction I’m heading in, and whether to give up the fiction.

Tom pointed out that fiction has a far greater capacity to be emotive, and to generate empathy. There is also the inherent scope to enchant and inspire – harder work in non-fiction. There is room to come at big ideas from odd angles, exploring what ifs.

I spent last summer under a lot of pressure to make my work even more overtly commercial. Yesterday Disney announced big losses because their latest bound-to-be-a hit movie, that no doubt ticked all the boxes, turns out not to be a profitable, sure fire thing after all. I don’t want to live in a world where books, films, plays and other arts are written based on a commercial assessment of what might sell this year. The further we go trying to make things a definite commercial hit, the less soul there is. Maybe audiences aren’t going to go for the box tickers so much in the future. What I do know, is that I can’t do the commercial thing, it makes me miserable and the quality of my output deteriorates and then dries up. If I’m going to create, I need to be able to be proud of what I’ve made.

I have several books languishing on my hard drive. I’m going to wait until the graphic novel comes out, and then either find them a home, or give them away. A lot of people swung by this blog yesterday for the free poetry book. That was a huge morale boost. Books sitting unread on hard drives are a waste of time.

If I set out to write a novel thinking I’ll just give it away, and not worrying about publishers and marketing and all those distractions, I may write something I like. I may finish it. Hell, I might even start it, and right now that would be something in itself.

Love like you’ve never been hurt, write like you don’t need the money. Ok, I think it was ‘work’ originally, but not to worry. I used to write like it wasn’t a job, but instead a dream. I used to write for the pleasure of telling a story and in the hopes of finding one person who would get it. I’ve had a decade of listening to other people telling me about market research, genres, rules. You have to do this, you can’t do that, you must, you must…. It has sucked the joy out of me. No more. I’m very aware of there being a lot of people in my life who will judge me on sales figures and income. For many people, the only measure of quality is the cash it brings. I didn’t set out down this path because I longed for fame and fortune. I wanted to tell good stories. I still want to tell good stories. The greatest commercial success of my writing life so far was the project I refused to compromise over.

Inspiration matters to me. It is part of the essence of druidry, and the beating heart of the bard tradition. If I don’t honour that in my work, what on earth am I doing? So, I’m going to write a novel. A long one, full of wildness and strangeness, that will not fit tidily into a genre classification, and that will probably be very hard to sell. Having made this decision over night, I feel happier about my working life than I have in years.