Climbing back into my skin

(Nimue)

This last year has been very much about making my Paganism more embodied, and healing my body as I go. I have a history of disassociating. I’m very good at it. I’ve used it to deal with relentless body pain, as an escape from physical cruelty, and to try and deal with what lack of physical stimulation does to my brain. That last issue I think was being made worse by disassociating, but there we go. When all you’ve got is a hammer, as they say, problems tend to look like nails.

Much of the body pain is stiffness caused by the hypermobility, and tension caused by stress. When stress was a constant issue for me, there wasn’t much I could do but ignore it. Keeping a body calm and comfortable takes resources and opportunities I mostly didn’t have. Being able to take the time to relax and do soothing things is important for being well. So is not being stressed out of your mind in the first place.

What I have now feels like a soft animal body that I can inhabit. I am still sore a lot but nothing like the levels of pain I used to deal with. Sleeping better helps my body relax and recover, too. Gentle, physical affection in an ongoing way turns out to have a massively soothing effect, dialling down the stress and helping me to be more relaxed and comfortable in my own skin. This has been quite a surprising process.

It’s not easy being a Pagan when you’re also expending a lot of mental effort trying not to notice that you even have a body. I don’t recommend it at all.  Being able to enjoy and celebrate the experience of being alive has changed my spiritual life, from something ideas-based into something I live in an entirely different way. Having room for nature in my own body makes me feel more connected to the world around me. I feel like I’m part of the world, not separate from it, and this has really helped my mental health, too.

There’s so much pressure on us as people to live in ways that fundamentally deny our animal selves. It’s not good for mental or physical health to try and function like working machinery and to ignore what our bodies need. Rest and peace are such vital things. We all need gentleness and downtime, scope to play and relax. Our mammal selves struggle with overstimulation and relentless work. The more room I make for this body I have, the less I suffer.

What does your creature-self need right now? What parts of your animal self are you obliged to deny? What can you do today to honour nature as it is expressed by your own body? No matter how pressured you feel to be a machine, these are always questions worth asking.

Pagan talks

(Nimue)

I’m going to be at this event at the end of June, talking about creativity and the bard path. I shall get my soap box out because I feel passionately that everyone should have the opportunity and the resources to be creative. I’m also going to be talking about the ways in which AI steals from all of us, and why that matters.

I like talking at events. I’ve done a modest amount along the way – both online and in person. I’m not really a ‘deliver a paper’ sort of speaker. I prefer, as with this talk, to be able to pick a topic that I know deeply and can speak on with confidence without having to script it. I also like being able to go with the flow in terms of mood and audience. I like to be able to respond to what seems to engage the people I’m with rather than having to stick to  planned speech.

My usual approach is to have a running order of sub-topics within the area I’m tackling, and then to take that point by point in an off-the-cuff sort of way. I find I’m more relaxed when I can do this, because I’m working from places of strength and confidence.

There’s no one right way of doing this, of course. It depends on what works for you, and the kinds of audiences you are dealing with. Some spaces very much want the delivery of carefully written papers. Whatever makes you feel most relaxed and confident is the best choice for you if you’re intending to get out on a stage in front of people.

I’m very much up for speaking at events if they are in viable striking distance for me, or if accommodation can be sorted. I can also do workshops, especially around creativity and meditation. I will consider online events, especially if I don’t have to be up late at night to participate! I am no sort of night owl, more a limp pigeon, and my ability to talk coherently at length deteriorates as the night wears on, so that’s a factor.

More about the June event here – https://pagantribalgathering.org.uk/

Blessings of peace

(Nimue)

As I type this, all I can hear is bird song, and the small noises of everyday life. If I moved to the bedroom, I would hear the nearby stream in addition to the birds. These are good sounds that soothe my body and mind alike.

I struggle a lot with human noise, especially when it’s loud. The environments that humans create for human existence aren’t terribly good for us. Some of us struggle more obviously with that. I gather that harm is caused whether you’re conscious of it or not, and noise pollution is stressful and unhealthy for everyone, even if it doesn’t consciously register as a problem.

Seeking peaceful environments is good for us. We can also think about the noise pollution we cause, and how to better handle that. With signs of summer here in the UK a lot of people seem to have the urge to open their windows and play music very loudly. I was at a local beauty spot recently and one car there was blasting out music, obliging everyone else to listen to that, and not to the songbirds and other more natural sounds.

I have no doubt that I’m preaching to the converted here, and that regular readers are unlikely to be the sort of people who would want to inflict a lot of noise on an otherwise peaceful and wild space. But, we all make noise one way or another, and that’s going to impact on the environments we are part of.

Quietness is a gift we can give to each other. It’s a gift we may easily overlook because the blessing is in the absence. It is worth thinking about the quietness that deserves our gratitude, and the quietness that we can participate in, for our own good and everyone else’s.

Birds at the window

(Nimue)

The flat I’m currently in has some metalwork that can take window boxes, and bird feeders. I put what I could into the available space shortly after moving in. Last summer I had herbs, strawberries and insects out there. It took the birds a bit longer to catch on, but this spring I’ve had a steady supply of visitors.

My main visitors are blue tits, great tits, robins and magpies. The tits favour the hanging feeders, while the robins and magpies go after whatever I’ve left in the window boxes for them. Often it’s sunflower seeds. So long as I don’t move, they will all come in when I’m just a few feet away on the other side of the window, which always feels magical.

One of the magpies came by as I was typing this. I don’t have a phone camera, so getting good shots has been tricky – so far we’ve had some magpie-ish blurs. The smaller birds are so cautious that we won’t risk alarming them by moving with a device.

I’ve had a couple of bits of shiny plastic dropped into the window boxes. My guess is that was also the magpies.

(Typing briefly interrupted by a visiting robin!)

It feels like a meaningful way to connect with the local wildlife. I’ve taken a space that was lifeless, and created some habitat and resources. I’m growing a few things that I can eat, and I’m providing food for my bird neighbours, and resources my insect neighbours can use. It’s a very small gesture in the grand scheme of things, but it’s what I can do here.

Seasonal Stories for Summer

(Nimue)

In theory the summer is supposed to be a high energy time when, aligned with the rising power of the sun, you get on and make things happen. It doesn’t work with everyone. I’m writing this piece to give whoever needs it permission to not feel energised by midsummer.

You may find that the shorter nights impact on your sleep, leaving you tired. If you’re sensitive to the light and are waking earlier you might find that the way in which you are bodily aligned with the sun is undermining your energy levels.

Plenty of people struggle with hot weather, and with high humidity. Again, if that’s your natural body response to the conditions, you aren’t getting anything wrong. Some people burn easily and are prone to heat stroke and sunstroke. That’s also nature in action.

Being highly active in hot weather is actually dangerous. People can have heart attacks in such conditions. Be gentle with yourself.

Nature is a complex web of interweaving lives, landscapes, and climates. It cannot be meaningfully reduced to a simple story – and this is a big problem with modern Pagan wheel of the year stories.

Honour however your body responds to the seasons. It’s all valid. Getting to know nature as it manifests inside your body is a good way of engaging with nature as it exists outside of your body.

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.