Deconstructing fairy tales

This is Judith O’Grady’s second blog post, pondering what lies beneath the surface of certain well known fairy stories… (the first one is here)

Goldilocks construed as Cruel Lady of the Manor versus the Irish Peasant Bears got me thinking. How does this work with other classic children’s stories?

In Ancient Ireland the legal system was Brehon Law, different from the Norman Law that replaced it. Simply put Brehon Law is a top-down system– rulers are responsible for the well-being of the people under them and can be deposed by those people if they are dissatisfied. In Norman Law rulers inherit by birth and birth order and the people under them owe them fealty– responsibilities and goods.

A mark of wealth was having a horse (requiring a special diet and housing) and the indication of status was cows (land was measured as ‘grass for __ cows’). Poor people had donkeys (satisfied with whatever grew on the road verge) and pigs (living on leftovers and what they could root up in the woods). So the common man could be typified as a pig, living in a round wattle-and-daub house made of basket-weave sticks plastered with a mud-and-straw mixture and topped with thatch.

Back then wolves were not endangered and were not anthropomorphized as caring parents, skilled team players, and brave warriors but as dangerous predators of precious domestic animals and killers of flocks. Sort of a Bogey-Wolf; the epitomization of hard times.

The Bogey-Wolf might come to the door of your house of straw as sickness, loss of crop or animals, or trouble in your extended family. You would try to defy him, but if he huffed and puffed your house (none too strong to start) would disintegrate. You would go to your neighbour and he would let your family into his house of sticks. But if the Bogey- Wolf was plague, famine, or reavers he would be in the same case as yourself and his house would be huffed apart as well. In the classic story the pig with foresight has taken the trouble to build a house of stone and (chastising you both for shortsightedness) he grudgingly allows you into his sturdy house as poor relations.

Using the Irish Brehon Law template, however, the chief (who lives in the stone house) has a responsibility towards the rest of the tribe. He brings all his people in, puts your flocks in the courtyard, and shares the stored crops around. In the terms of the story, his roof (made of slate) cannot be jumped through like thatch, his walls are secure, and he lights a big fire to make up a pot of surplus-food soup and burns up the Bogey-Wolf when he tries to creep down the chimney. Suddenly the story is about sharing rather than planning for the future.

Judith Grady is the author of God Speaking, which you can find here… http://www.amazon.com/Pagan-Portals-God-Speaking-Judith-OGrady/dp/1780992815/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369479738&sr=8-1&keywords=God+Speaking+Judith+O%27Grady

Reincarnation stories

I’m currently reading David Lacey’s ‘The Karma of Everyday Life’ and I suspect I’ll be back to ponder karma another day. Usually karma turns up in belief systems that also include reincarnation, although it could be applied as a one lifetime process. I don’t have any strong opinions about what happens after we die, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m entirely at ease with my own uncertainty. There are things that make me wonder though.

I have some very early memories from this lifetime. One of the things that strikes me about those recollections from the time when I was really small, is just how big my vocabulary was. I have a better memory for words than images at the best of times so am reasonably confident I’ve not added this later on. Being small enough to play under the coffee table and hearing the word ‘obsessed’ is one such example. I was talking early.

My family were not, I think, any weirder, more funny about nudity or more keen on covering up than any other typically repressed English household in the second half of the twentieth century. Me, on the other hand… I couldn’t bear nudity. I remember having a rash that might have been measles, and arguing with my parents that I did not want to have to show the Doctor my bottom. Ok the rash was worse there, but I had rash other places. I was made to do it though, and the burning shame and humiliation made for a powerful memory. My experience of other small children is that you tend to have more trouble getting them to not show you their bums, their underwear, etc.

I couldn’t stand it if adult males were topless around me. That filled me with feelings of fear and loathing (now, thankfully overcome!) It went further though. I loved cuddly toys, but they had to have pants too. Really. So obsessed was I with this issue, that I figured out a knitting pattern all by myself and I knitted pants for bears. Many bears. If someone had told me that you could cover up the scandalous, exposed legs of tables, I’d have been right there.

I arrived in this world with middle class Victorian sensibilities about nudity and clothing. I have no rational explanation for this. I didn’t like wearing trousers at all as a little girl, that felt almost immoral. I’ve since got over that one, too.

On the plus side, it gives me something to tap into for the period literature. I don’t have to imagine what it would feel like for it to be shocking if a man saw your ankles. I know that feeling. That sense of other people’s bodies as somehow alarming and wrong… I recall my father pointing out to me that, underneath the clothes, everyone is naked, and how sick that made me feel. A Victorian gentlewoman does not like to have such things pointed out to her, and there was one such creature living inside my childhood head. I remember the horror that came with understanding how reproduction works in the natural world, and realising that we humans might not be wholly different. That wasn’t a happy discovery for me. (Again, I got over it). I don’t struggle to imagine what an uninformed Victorian virgin might have gone through in face of the realities of marriage…

Paganism has been a great antidote to this, learning to be ok in my skin and with nature as it manifests in the human form. I started life in a very odd place, a hundred years out of date and desperately confused by everything around me. Reincarnation? I don’t know. And that’s without getting started on the fear of fire, and the meltdown I went into watching The Name of the Rose for the first time. I’m not squeamish, but show me a stake and I cease to function.

Pagan Titles

As regular readers will know, I’m not that keen on authority or power structures. Titles that are all about seeming important make me edgy. However, not all titles are simply self-given manifestations of self-importance. They also function, at least in theory, as meaningful labels that allow people to better understand what we do. “Celebrant” announces a willingness to take bookings for rites of passage. If you’re calling yourself a wise elder, you’d better have a grey hair or two to back that up with, and so forth.

A label can be a statement of intent. There’s a fab blog post on this very subject here – http://www.roundtheherne.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/the-name.html

Quite often what happens though is not that we wake up one morning and glue a shiny title to ourselves, but that it comes in from outside. You get labelled as a teacher the moment someone asks that you teach them and you don’t run away. You become a ritual leader the first time you step into a circle to run it, and a grove mother, or father, at the point of there being a grove. Sometimes that’s chosen, sometimes it happens.

There’s an interesting thing about naming. On the landscape history side, the names given by outsiders are considered more useful than those given by locals, in the past. If you live round here (wherever here is) there’s The pub, The church, The fields. If you live somewhere else, and look at it from the outside, there’s that really good pub, the particularly badly built church, the very muddy field. Old names, given by outsiders, often say more about a place than what the inhabitants called it. Let’s not ask what happened to Chipping Sodbury. (Although Chipping means market and bury implies Saxon fortification, so I’ve just foiled my own gag. Never mind, we move on…)

The names people give us may be better indicators of us, than the titles we would choose for ourselves. I find it hugely reassuring that other people are willing to call me ‘Druid’ and ‘author’. Mind you, I’ve also recently been called a filthy urchin, which is not wholly lacking in appropriateness. The titles we give people can be reflections of respect, or derision. One only has to look at politics to see the difference between the titles they give themselves, and the titles others bestow upon them. Can I mention swivel eyed loons now?

The legacy of fear

I’ve got to the stage with the anxiety that I don’t live there all the time. In terms of quality of life, that’s huge. It’s mostly due to knowing that my bloke can stay in the country, and knowing that I can keep my child – having both of those in doubt for a number of years was making me very ill. It means that on a calm, unstressy day I am now a passably function human being. I forget, all too easily, how many panic buttons there are and how easily they are pressed, so if I do ok for a couple of weeks I’m badly thrown by the panic when it comes. Of course life is not stress free.

There are some kinds of stress that I can handle, and I’m building a picture of what it is that tears my body up and makes me not just emotionally messy, but physically ill. That which I have no control over is a significant issue. If I have scope to act in a way that can fix, offset or avoid, then even really stress things are bearable. Things where it’s out of my hands – as it felt like with Tom’s application to stay, are really hard.

But why? In part because I assume the world is hostile towards me. I assume that the more I want something, the higher the risk that I am going to be punished simply for daring to want. I get very anxious around things I need that are awkward and inconvenient. I am afraid of answers roughly shaped ’you cannot get there from here.’ My logical mind knows that mostly, there are ways, and that ‘you can’t get there from here’ does not exist in many sane and functional systems. It probably doesn’t help that not all systems are as sane and functional as I would like them to be. What underpins it is too long in contact with people who were not reasonable, or fair, or I sometimes think, terribly sane. It’s been an odd sort of life…

And there it is, the thing I want, and the challenge to overcome before getting it (yet another evil and terrifying form, of course, and bureaucracy always makes me a tad queasy.) I want this enough to be terrified. Then the racing pulse, the stomach cramps, the sleeplessness. The speed at which I move from emotional response to bodily distress still surprises me. It shouldn’t, I’ve lived with it for years.
I’ve found it helps to pick apart the fear, and name it. Nameless dreads are always worse than the ones you can pin down. Where possible I give mine names like Bob and Geoff, Nigel, and Justin, because that makes them a tad more manageable. I’ve learned not to try and shut down my mind in escapist ways, but to walk into whatever the heart of the fear is, trying to face it and name it. I can’t say this helps with the getting to sleep, but it gives me tools. In the short term, emotion and body fail are far more potent and immediate than logic. However, every time I throw my rational mind at the fear, I make some small bit of headway.

“You are not a nameless dread, you’re a snorting application form.”
“Snort,” said the application form.

A lot of people live with fear. Being open about it has brought me a lot of heart breaking stories from fellow travellers (feel free to keep them coming, because it helps to acknowledge this stuff). Fear is easy to hide. It doesn’t show up in bright purple blotches across your face. No one else can hear that your heart is racing, or feel your gut tying itself into dysfunctional knots. It’s hard to explain. People who are not afraid look at the apparently small thing that is crushing you to death and see how small it looks to them and think you are being melodramatic. It’s just because they do not realise that to you this thing has manifested as an elephant, or a landslide of mud and that it really is squashing the life out of you.

To those of you who do not understand, be grateful. It is a precious gift in life to live without terror.

The Auroch Grove

I wasn’t particularly contemplating names, when this one popped out at me. It seems to fit. I admit to having a thing about that which is absent – my previous group was Bards of the Lost Forest, a reference to the departed Forest of Arden mentioned in Shakespeare. Aurochs have long appealed to me – giant hairy cows that became extinct in the 1600s when the last one died in Poland. I feel their absence keenly. Aurochs would have made groves, their feeding and trampling clearing areas inside forests. This is important work, it’s the margins of woodland that support the most diversity of life, so the physical groves made by aurochs would have been ecologically important. When you lose a creature, you lose what it does as well. There’s a species of tree that depended on the dodo for germination. Eventually the last of those trees will disappear too.

Thus far I’ve not done much towards starting the Grove. However, with the name in place I’ve set up a google group which hopefully you can find here https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!forum/auroch-grove this is just for ease of communication. The only requirement for joining the Grove is that you join the egroup so that I don’t have to run round doing different things to contact different people and getting confused. Not in anyone’s interests, that. I’m very happy to have people along who have kids, and anyone else who is comfortable with there being children about – I have one too, and he’s very good at this sort of thing. People studying courses are entirely welcome, so are people not studying courses. If you’re an old hand at this and just want a group to belong to, do come along, and equally if you know very little but are interested, that’s fine.

I am not asking for commitment to turn up. I’m going to aim for monthly gatherings, maybe more if I feel like it, or someone else does… come as often or as infrequently as you are able/inclined. If you ask me to come out and don’t show up, then I’ll be grumpy.

I know it’s going to be a creative and experimental sort of group. I know that where possible, we’ll be outside, but I’m lining up places to retreat to in cases of weather. I’m interested in connecting with the land, environmental action, bardic arts, and picnics. Also cake in pretty much any and all circumstances. I also won’t be running rituals around the 8 usual points in the wheel of the year – other groups are doing that already, so I’d rather not tread on toes, and prefer to explore different narrative ideas about the seasons. The rest we can probably make up as we go along.

I don’t know when exactly we’ll be starting in terms of real world meet ups – hopefully this summer, but that kind of information will be on the egroup.

Sacred Body Part 6: Choice and Connection

by Theo Wildcroft

“I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world…” Mary Oliver

The making of a life consists of being broken open, of being stretched beyond your capacities again, and again, and again. Every time you stretch a muscle, you are tearing the muscle filaments apart. We break, and breathe, and adapt and heal. My students and clients come to me saying that there’s something wrong, because they have lower back pain that won’t be soothed, or they can’t go a week without their nervous system experiencing a panic attack, or just that they can’t put their socks on as easily as they used to.

They connect with me one on one in dedicated therapy sessions, or snatched conversations after class. They’re often confused about what they’ve done ‘wrong’ to their body sometimes they’re angry or ashamed at being ‘broken’. Especially when what’s broken can’t be fixed by a pill or a treatment or an operation. I had a client once tell me: “You know, it’s just I wake up every morning and say – ‘I’ve still got Parkinson’s then.’”

My students know that I can’t fix them and I don’t pretend that I can. I just help them manage their human condition, and reassure them that they’re not alone. This is my service, my druidry if I can call it that. Their bodies are communicating, and I do what I can to find a space, physical and psychological, in which these unheard fragments of the body, heart and mind can start to hear each other again – in which they can start to feel whole, and strong and rested.

But the pain of the process isn’t wrong, it’s inevitable. Only by choosing to deal with it can suffering can be negotiated with. It takes a lot of courage to face that and not to run from the world. And yet human beings are quietly doing the same all around you.

I know their journey because I’m only two steps ahead of them. Two decades ago now, I decided that I would live, rather than just survive until a better option came along. It seemed to me a hypocrisy to profess a reverence for nature whilst rejecting my own. In each day since, I have found a new way to break the shell of my thinking, feeling self open to the world. Every day I have to make that choice again;
every day a different ‘yes’ to life, to nature and to my body.

It’s not for everyone. Every so often I get a friend or relation asking me for a quick fix. They want me to give them something simple and easy to repair back pain resulting from 15 years or more of misaligned shoulders and atrophied hip flexors. I’ve learnt to read the signs as their eyes glaze over. And whilst I’m trying to explain the evolutionary fallout from walking on two legs they’re wondering if the consultant they’ve just seen has a new, clever operation in mind.

They just know that 30 minutes of practice a day whilst really listening to their body isn’t going to make as much difference as a scalpel. In a way they’re right – I can’t and won’t compete on those terms. But they can’t understand why I won’t just give them a few quick poses to do for a couple of weeks whilst they watch the TV at the same time. They don’t want all the yoga stuff. They just want to get fixed. That’s their choice too.

But there are always surprises. Last year at the Rainbow Futures Druid Camp, where I have led morning yoga sessions for the past 7 summers, after a few years of mutual teasing, and against all his better judgements I’m sure, an old friend came to a yoga session with me, and then another, and then another. I managed not to break him too badly, which was encouraging to us both. He’s a trustee for the Druid Network, and so when he asked for submissions for a talk at their conference, I chose to return that courage, that small act of faith.

CONNECTION

“Here are my hands
that are also my heart, my mind,
my life -
all that remains…” Thich Nhat Hanh

For some of you, I know I have been preaching to the converted. For others, I come to a confession: my aim is to seduce you: back into your bodies, and back into the natural world we all hope to honour as pagans. I do so with words and pictures and video links, over this narrow bandwidth that is our online world, but I’m appealing not just to your reading mind but to your whole being. What I really want is for you to feel, not understand.

To reach you I spent hours and days in typing, editing and refining. Knowing that what I really want with you is time, and practice and a wide open sky. With each word written I became more and more aware of the sunlight or rain on the windows the ache in my right shoulder and the twitch in my calves to put the laptop down and go for a run instead. I did it once, for the conference talk, and again, for these blog posts.
But I was told that to teach you must go to where the student is at. Then, if they take one step towards you you take another two towards them. So here I am, if you can imagine me, in heart, hands and voice – one physical being to another, to call you home. As they say – come on in the water’s lovely.

I hope your shoes are still off because right now I want you to feel both the earth moving beneath you and the movement of your own body against it, in a way that recognises that simple, sacred connection, not just from the skin out, but all the way through.

I want you to take this step every day if you can. I want you to do it in a thousand different ways: stretching and holding and balancing and twisting and folding and opening. I don’t care if you call it yoga or Stav or Five Rhythms or just a really long walk.

So I’m not going to ask you to stand again, but I am going to invite you to root your feet as well as you are able to upon the earth here today. Consider your hands, and remember the intimate connection that they have to your heart, to your ancestry and your history. Take a few moments to do this, if you would. Close your eyes, or just turn your gaze inwards for a few seconds.

And as soon as it’s next possible, I invite you to gently reach out and find another hand to connect with. If you’re feeling a little shy and reserved, just do this once. If you’re feeling more expansive, feel free to hold hands with as many people as you can today.

At the heart of so many of our rituals, is this simple act. We stand together, heart to heart and hand to hand. It’s so simple, so powerful. And if you can really feel it, from the skin in as well as the skin out, it can be enough for us to begin to heal that connection between our soul and the soul of the world.

For me, the body, our bodies, are sacred. Faith, community, druidry, and life itself is about relationship and experience. We are at our most sacred where our edges meet the world, and all the human and other than human people in it. We are in the end, what we are able and willing to experience. So I thank you for your willingness to reach out and touch this experience with me.

FInd out more about Theo and her work here: http://www.wildyoga.co.uk

The advantages of being talentless

There are plenty of people out there who assume that to be successful requires talent, which is innate. You either have it, or you don’t, and if you don’t, you may as well give up. This leads to a lot of people who don’t try because they don’t see any point. They aren’t gifted, they cannot succeed.

Observation of naturally gifted and talented people, and regular people, of people who have succeeded and people who have got nowhere leads me to think the opposite is true. I know far too many naturally gifted and talented people who have squandered that innate skill and never taken it forward, and plenty of people who are not innately talented, and have worked to achieve. The trouble with achievers is we tend to only notice them once they’ve got there, creating an illusion of natural talent.
The trouble with being naturally gifted, is that there’s no great pleasure in the things we get easily. Many of us humans respond better to challenges and actually put more effort into the things we don’t do well. Academically speaking I did better with sciences at school than with art and music. Straining to make any headway at all, it was the art and music I really wanted to do. I think the only thing I have an innate talent for, is learning. I know how to study, I absorb things fast and retain them, I can analyse, theorise, and so forth and that’s always been easy. Everything else has always been graft.

The trouble with talent is that you pick a thing up, and do it well and easily. Everyone praises you, especially if you’re a kid. You wing it, making little effort, and you progress, because you’re talented. One day, somewhere down the line, you hit the limits of that talent. You stop being able to progress effortlessly. You find a thing you cannot do. This can be a big issue for medical students, straight A achievers their whole lives, who in their twenties hit the first things they can’t do easily and really struggle emotionally with the experience. Finding it’s no longer easy can be soul destroying. It can wreck self-belief. And because it’s always been easy, the talented person has no idea how to work at improving, and at this point a lot of innately gifted people quit and walk away. The belief that it is inbuilt talent that matters means that when you run out of that, you think you have nowhere to go. Someone totally passionate about, and devoted to their subject will push through, work out how to learn and graft for progress, and get moving again.

The person who has more determination than talent has always worked for it, and just keeps doing that thing. They make progress. They may be tortoises to the talented hares who overtake them, but twenty years down the line, they’re still plodding away, long after a lot of the hares have given up.

In all things, I think determination is more important than raw ability. The person with determination keeps plugging away at it. The person who is naturally gifted all too often quits when the going gets tough. The magical combination of talent and drive does show up sometimes, or can be instilled in a gifted youngster so that they know not to rely on what’s easy. It’s so useful to find something you are naturally crap at, and do that thing, to learn how to progress by dint of sheer effort and nothing else. It is most certainly not the case that the person who starts out with no obvious talent is doomed always to be mediocre. Sheer determination will take you places nothing else can. If you have the passion, trust that, it does far more work than talent ever has.

Deconstructing fairy stories

I encountered Judith through her book God Speaking, which I was hugely taken with. Judith is a Canadian Pagan, writing from personal experience, and with a courage and honesty that I found captivating. God Speaking tackles head on the tensions between insanity and religion.

As Judith isn’t an internet person, and it’s really hard to sell books without an online presence, I offered her some guest blog space. These blogs have nothing at all to do with the book, but I think give a good sense of what an interesting mind she has…

Over to Judith…

As part of my self-training process I spent some years doing professional divination with a set of Ogham cards that I had developed. The design on the cards, that is, not the tree significator nor the traditional kennings although I did a little substitution for North American plants instead of a few British Isles ones that don’t grow here at all. So there I was at a show, doing readings with ‘Ancient Irish Tree Cards’ (in all the hundreds of readings I did only one person actually knew what ‘Ogham’ was) and the activities director of a local retirement home came by and asked me if I would come and do a little talk about Irishness at the home on Saint Patrick’s Day. I’m open to talking, but on the day of the presentation I drove up to the home and thought, ‘Whew!! This is a pretty upscale nursing home– I’m not sure I feel comfortable with this….’ Soldiering on (in solidarity) I was escorted into the library and given an easel (I start with a recitation of an adaption of ‘Saint Patrick’s Breastplate’:

Here in this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the wind with its swiftness along its path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the Earth with its starkness
All these I place
By the Gods’ almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness.

(with large-sized copies of appropriate cards for each invocation.)

After that I was talking about the imagery in the various pictures and told the story of why the wren is the king of birds.

One old geezer who had clearly spent a long long lifetime of never being opposed in anything nor ever spending a moment of his time in doubt of his essential self-worth decided that now was the ideal instant for him to step up to his favourite pastime of pestering:
“This is just MAKE-BELIEVE!” he said querulously.
“These are legends, yes,” I responded, “But they explicate essential truths in a fantastical format.”
“Faugh!” he said, “Fairy tales!”
Then I lost my Socialist temper (as the sparks fly upward) and countered, “Look at the back-story of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, for example: Goldilocks thinks of herself as a cut above the disadvantaged people living in a little cottage in the forest. ‘They are not like me’ she says, ‘They do not feel things the same way— they are just bears.’ So she feels quite comfortable eating their porridge, breaking their chairs, and using their beds. When the ‘bears’ come home and find her asleep, what is the essential truth, the moral of the story that is the teaching lesson here?”

The Querulous Geezer was thrown off balance by the indirection and not having me straightforwardly complain that he is causing trouble or being impolite and has no answer nor does any other of the audience…

“If you take all that they have from the poor they will rise up against you and eat you.”

And then one of the Nize Little Old Ladies changed the subject.

When I told the story at dinner that night, my son laughed and said, “So you’re not invited back for next year?”

God Speaking is out now, and you can get it here http://www.amazon.com/Pagan-Portals-God-Speaking-Judith-OGrady/dp/1780992815/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368782561&sr=8-1&keywords=God+Speaking+Judith+O%27Grady and other such places.

Fire in the head

I used to improvise and wing things a lot, in rituals, and musically. There was a time when I’d happily go out with a violin and play music I didn’t know, with strangers, and mostly get away with it. It takes a certain amount of nerve. I think you could do that from a place of arrogance or self confidence, but for me what mostly enable the winging of things, was a deep belief in the awen. I’d open my heart, and the words would come, or the notes, or whatever I needed creatively in the moment. It never failed me. Mostly I just experienced the inspiration as happening to me, a force rushing through me, and I never felt much ownership of the things I did.

Life changes and a loss of nerve have meant I’ve not been out winging it as much in the last few years. Hardly at all, in fact. I draw on inspiration to write, but that’s usually a slow and private process. If it doesn’t work, no one else will ever know. Winging it in public is totally exposed and vulnerable, any shortcomings made visible. It’s one thing to go out and feel that you’re balancing on a tightrope the awen holds steady, and quite another to feel like you can’t. Depression and anxiety are not aids to the flow of inspiration. They are serious blocks, and anxiety makes it hard to just go out there and do it and trust that you can.

I had some unexpected jamming in a pub with some guys about a month ago. That helped me feel like I could just leap in and do those improvised things again. Yesterday I really took the plunge. If you read the blog – here – about Intelligent Designing, I proposed to write limericks for anyone who shared either the blog or the link. I had quite a few link shares on facebook yesterday (thank you everyone who joined in) and was rapidly churning out silly limericks that included people’s names. Exposed enough to feel a bit edgy, hidden behind the computer enough to feel a bit safe.

So much of creativity is actually about trust. Trusting yourself that the skills are there and you can do it. Trusting the inspiration to flow. Trusting people not to bring over ripe fruit and throw it at you… It’s always a bit of a leap into the dark. It always feels a bit risky, and I realise that I’d become risk averse in a way that was restricting what I could do. I need to learn how to trust myself again, and how to trust the inspiration. Yesterday went well.

If you fancy having a play, pop the book link http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Designing-Amateurs-Nimue-Brown/dp/1780999526/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1368694639&sr=8-1&keywords=intelligent+designing+for+amateurs on the site of your choice, and let me know – I’m on facebook, @brynneth_nimue, I’m on Google+ and linkedin and if you reblog to another wordpress one I can spot that. If in doubt poke me here or some other place…

Intelligent Designing

Dear everybody, I have a slightly mad fiction thing out at the end of the month. To which end I will be doing a slightly crazy thing tomorrow to help people notice it. If you would like to get involved with the crazy thing, the information is all at the bottom of this post. But, before you rush off there, please do pause for a moment, because what comes next is the opening of said book, Intelligent Designing for Amateurs.

Chapter One
Anthropological observations of the curious habits of personages native to Barker Street

Hopefully there would be dead people next door. That would liven things up tremendously. Ever since the new tenant was first mentioned, Temperance had been trying to imagine what an archaeologist would look like, and had become stuck somewhere between the beard and the muddy boots. Granny said an archaeologist dug things up, which had formed most of her impression. Temperance had never encountered an actual archaeologist before, and until recently, hadn’t even met the word in person. It was one of those large, pleasing, hard to spell words that she liked to roll around in her mouth. There were others. Obsequious. Crepuscular. Epigrammatic. Meanings did not always excite her young mind, but a word that came with a person had more appeal. Granny told her something about digging up iniquities, or possibly aunties. Antimacassars? Digging up definitely suggested mud, and led Temperance to think from there about the likelihood of dead people. Dead people went into the ground, so it stood to reason they could come out of it again. What else was there to unearth aside from coal and ore?

“Nothing at all like a body snatcher,” Granny had insisted, when the subject came up at breakfast, but Temperance wasn’t sure. What else would anyone want to dig up, really? Treasure might be nice, she supposed, but that seemed more like pirate business.
Still, having a new neighbor would cheer the whole street up. The bigger, separate house next to their little terrace had been empty all winter. Seeing the dark windows at night always inclined her to feel sad.

“How’s that sweeping going, then?” Granny demanded from inside the house.
The sweeping had not, in fact, started, the girl having entirely forgotten about the broom in her hand. Pushing curls of escaping brown hair out of her face, Temperance surveyed the twig strewn path to her grandmother’s door. Sweeping seemed so pointless. The wind would bring it all right back in no time. She sighed heavily, feeling very sorry for herself.

Before she could start on the job, the sound of hooves and wheels drew her attention to the street again. All of the delivery people had already done their rounds for the day. Horse-drawn vehicles were otherwise unusual here. The inhabitants of Barker Street were all very decent people, but not equal to carriages, excepting for weddings and funerals. Temperance loved funerals, but the approaching wagon lacked the plumes and splendid display of misery. Instead she saw a neat little trap, followed by a heavily loaded cart where a great many things were piled up behind the driver and passengers.

With a little squeak, she dropped the broom and ran to the garden gate. Then, because she did not want the archaeologist to think her childish, she slowed down. Walking in what she hoped was a dignified way, she soon reached the next property just as the tired horse came to a halt.
The person inside the trap was carefully helped down, and then approached the front door. There was no beard whatsoever, and no obvious signs of mud. Perhaps there had been a mistake? The trap itself took off at a jaunty speed. Temperance wondered if this was the archaeologist’s wife, come on ahead to make their new home nice. The man himself would probably be in a hole full of bones at this very moment, Temperance reasoned.

One of the men got off the cart. He had wild hair and a big coat. On the whole he seemed a better candidate for the adventurous life, and Temperance watched him expectantly.
“All to be unloaded here?” he asked the woman.
“If you please.” She nodded to the girl who was sitting on the cart. “I assume you can find the kitchen, Mary?”

The girl nodded and hurried inside. The two men set about unloading items of furniture from the cart and taking them into the house. Temperance felt rather puzzled by all of this. There weren’t any bones being unloaded just usual, household things. Unless the bones were in one of the tea chests. She supposed that would make sense, even if it was a disappointment.

“Hello girl,” said the tall woman, with an accent that clearly came from another place.

Temperance had spent hours planning how to make her introductions to the new neighbor. She had already established herself as being absolutely essential to Charlie Rowcroft, Barker Street’s resident inventor. Now, she meant to impress the archaeologist, or for that matter his wife, with her clever, useful nature. Thus, she would gain free access to their home as well. Staring up at the new arrival’s face, she couldn’t remember any of the planned speech and found herself instead saying, “Have you got any dead people?”

Now available for pre-order here -
http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Designing-Amateurs-Nimue-Brown/dp/1780999526/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_pap?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368608170&sr=1-1&keywords=Intelligent+Designing+for+amateurs and no doubt other places as well.

So, here’s the planned silliness. Reblog the post, or post the pre-order link and let me know. I can spot a reblog pretty easily, otherwise tag or message me on facebook, @brynneth_nimue on twitter, or drop an email to brynnethnimue at gmail dot com. I will then write a limerick or silly verse about you, and post it wherever the link went. That could be slow and messy with Twitter, but we’ll do what we can…