Sacred Body part 3 : Offering

by Theo Wildcroft

As pagans and druids, we worry and debate about the authenticity of our practices, our stories and songs, and our gods. We define ourselves by drawing boundaries around Northern Europe, or Celtic versus Saxon influence, or marker points in time. Forgive my bluntness, but I think we’re missing the point. We become overly influenced by concepts such as intellectual purity and social corruption, trying to fix our uniqueness, our difference, and our place in a world of indigenous faiths whilst another part of us reaches out instinctively to reclaim what we really need.

I think this pattern repeats itself all over, as physical practices bubble up out of the ground, taking on the names of other traditions as a way back into our lives. Mark Graham (http://www.druidcamp.org.uk/a-potted-history-of-druid-camp/) talks convincingly of how sweat lodges are just not the same in Britain as they are in the US – and I know he believes that this is a reclaiming, a bubbling up of an older British tradition.

When the much mourned Gabrielle Roth (http://www.gabrielleroth.com/) wrote passionately about her practice of ecstatic dance, she urged all of us to ‘sweat your prayers’. All across the world, the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic diaspora is expressing its love of life through theoretically foreign or brand new physical practices – practices of the body. I know that some of you use dances, songs and drum chants from other cultures; whilst others practice Nordic or East Asian martial arts. And I know why, because I’ve tried most of them too.

Some things that the body has to show and teach us may be universal, but I think that others are more specific to our environment or ancestry. In our own lifetimes, we are endlessly evolving and adapting. Due to the evolutionary accident that combines a narrow female pelvis and an oversized brain, we are each born months, if not years, immature. The human frame, brain and body is formed in response to experience. From the ages of both 0-3 and 10-13, your central nervous system blossoms, creating millions more synapses than you need, and then ruthlessly culling the ones you don’t use. But this process doesn’t end in mid adolescence. Instead, it continues at a slower rate throughout your life. What you repeatedly do, think and feel – what you practice – is who you become. You remake yourself every day.

And after all what we have inherited most clearly from our ancestors is our hearts, our hands and our voices. The legs we stand on were shaped by generation after generation walking this land. My hands just had to remember how to spin and knit and sew; how to wield a hammer or a saw; or how to pick up a child, because they were shaped by these acts a thousand times over, and that shape was written in my genetic code.
For many pagans, thousands of years of a natural, temperate, northern environment has done the most to shape your body – your nervous system, your digestion, your skin, and every other aspect of your physical existence, is still responding as if it lived in a shelter in the woods, feeling safe among the fires of your tribe. All this has changed in a historical heartbeat – in just a few generations. Are you aware that even the presence of artificial light in your evening environment can disrupt your sleep patterns so badly, it correlates to a statistically significant increase in rates of cancer?

Look at your hands right now, really look. Go ahead. Can you see just the tiniest fraction of all that they are asking to do; all that they are capable of – and all that has been handed down to you?

“Three drops of inspiration touch the tongue…
if the soul does not sing its song, the third is slow poison…” Emma Restall Orr

I want you to do something more for me. I want you to take off your shoes, if you’re wearing them. And your socks too, and place your feet in contact with the floor.

Some of you will be resisting the invitation. Just try, and stay with why it’s uncomfortable for you. Some of us will be worrying about whether the floor is safe, or warm enough, and whether the world is going to hurt us. Some of us will be worrying about whether our feet are ugly or smelly, or in other ways shameful and beastly; and unfit to be shared with others.

I spend a lot of time in alternative communities. Last summer I helped build the most beautiful hexagonal compost loo out of green larch wood at Monkton Wyld near Bridport (http://www.monktonwyldcourt.co.uk/). I’m finding that a good indicator of a person’s character is their attitude to waste – especially human waste.

And isn’t that interesting? How often do we cling on to a barrier between our physical self and the world; with all the other human and other than human people in it? There is a shame there that I share:
in my head, I criticise myself endlessly for my few extra pounds, my grey hairs and wrinkles, my scars and marks: for all the times my mind feels that my body has not been the perfect machine I somehow expect it to be. Part of me can’t stop doing it, even as I feel guilty about being so ungrateful. And yet…

I was taught, and I believe that the best offerings I can make to my gods, and to my world, are of my physical self. That this is a true sacrifice – not a grand offering crafted by another and bought with my money; no matter how finely wrought. This is an offering made out of my own hair and sweat and spit in the wind. First, foremost, this is who I am; this is Awen in its rawest form, incomplete, flawed, and therefore perfectly real.

In so many traditions, including our own is a linguistic link between breath and spirit. Each breath, tirelessly received and offered back is a tangible experience of exchange with the world. In each breath, we exchange gases, and warmth, and scent and moisture, and a thousand other subconscious intimacies. Your life depends upon each inhalation. Many other lives depend in return on the gift that you exhale.

How were we ever seduced as a culture into believing that humanity stands apart from a world Created for our dominion? In each breath we whisper the truth: that in this jewel of a world, there may be pain and violence and cruelty, but nothing is lost or wasted or irredeemably corrupted unless our thinking makes it so. And because this intimate relationship with the world our mother can never be truly broken, renewed as it is with each breath, and meal, and piss, with each life and death, this bond calls to us still to be healed.

Find Theo here… http://www.wildyoga.co.uk

All the creatures

It’s been a creature-laden weekend. A long train ride to do a book signing in Northampton (Waterstones!) led to several deer sightings and some wonderful fox moments. The fox on the way out was curled at the foot of a tree, catching the sun. The second, on the way back, was stood in a field staring at the train.

Then on Sunday, we went up to the Birmingham Sa Life centre. Lots of interesting creatures there, including rays. I’m very fond of them, I love the way they move, the grace and how curious they are. The centre also has a giant sea turtle, a beautiful, slow moving creature, totally inspiring to be near too. The sense of peace in watching such a being, is inspiring. The creatures at this centre are either bred in captivity, or, like the sea turtle had to be rescued after injury or similar problem, and then could not be returned to the wild again.

Today there were tame deer, peacocks and other birds. Including some comedy chickens with feathers in improbable places. Last week I was feeding rooks. We had moored under a rookery, and they were coming down for bread, and getting right outside the windows.

It’s not the exotica particularly that inspires me, but the closeness, and the sense of connection – however fleeting. Really fires my imagination. The point where a creature makes eye contact, or accepts your presence, or just stays for a few seconds. Those are amazing, even when the creature is semi-tame, and predisposed to put up with you. I had a moment at the Wild Fowl Trust where a robin came down and took grain from my hand. It was a wild bird, in a bird friendly place, but even so…

The people comparisons are interesting. I’ve seen a lot of people this weekend. Most of them did not make eye contact with me. Most were so focused on whatever they were doing, that they weren’t going to notice anyone else. Didn’t want to. There were a handful of really good human interactions with people we didn’t know. But overall, meaningful moments with creatures this weekend were more numerous than meaningful interactions with people we didn’t know. It seems to me that the creatures are less wary or me, less fearful than the majority of humans, and that’s pretty scary.

Contemplating relationship

Some of the most important emotional relationships in my life, looking back, were with people who were not lovers. Some of the lovers, in retrospect, had little impact on me at all, and several were quite damaging. I was pondering this late last night, because I have a fondness for looking for patterns. I’m also on a quest for self-knowledge. So much of who I am and have been has been shaped by the people I was in most intimate emotional contact with.

Those soul deep resonances with others had the effect of tapping in to things that are intrinsic to who and how I am. Through music, literature, creative thinking, sharing ideas and beliefs… looking back those connections were as much about meetings of minds as anything else. I’m very much a thinky person, although also deeply emotional, but intellectual connections are really important to me.

The relationships that went awry involved pressure to be things that did not resonate with me. That included dressing in ways I felt uncomfortable with, acting in ways that were unnatural to me, and basically supressing my own nature for the benefit of others. It’s really that legacy which has created the need to do this whole ‘quest for self’. Picking apart what is me, and what was put on me from the outside, I’ve come to a fairly simple conclusion. There’s a thought form in comics art that goes ‘if it looks right, it is right.’ I think that may have wider life applications. If it feels right, it probably is right – at least in terms of being a reflection of your own nature. If your nature is sick, twisted, depraved and cruel, that’s going to raise a whole other heap of issues, but I don’t find that in myself.

I responded to playfulness and creativity, to deep thinking, inspiration, and people who were passionate about the things they were into. Part of me wanted simply to be on the receiving of that kind of intensity, I was attracted by emotional capacity, in part. To be what fires someone’s imagination, to be the focus of intense desire and to inspire fierce passion, has considerable attractions. I wanted to be there. I wanted to be muse and playmate, and all that. Being in that place now, I can look back and see more clearly what it was that I hankered after in those previous connections. The people who loved fiercely, even if they didn’t bestow that on me, were wonderful and inspiring. The people who just wanted to make me small enough to be unthreatening and easily managed, I could have done without.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course. It’s easy to look back and see patterns and relevance that was wholly invisible to me at the time. I’m also aware of how much that went wrong for me had to do with my not understanding my own nature or paying enough attention to my own needs. I let people tell me who and how to be, because I thought being loveable was the most important thing, and it looked for a time like being loved was conditional on modifying myself. Turns out it isn’t. To be accepted as I am, found good enough, adored not in spite of my nature but because of it, has been a revelation. It makes me realise, looking back, who the really important people in my life have been, and they were not in all cases the most obvious suspects.

And they all lived happily ever after

I wonder how many people’s lives have been significantly impaired by that unfortunate fairy tale belief? It implies that once the lovers kiss and the wedding date is set, all will be well. It’s the end of the story, folks, adventures over, happiness guaranteed. And they all lived happily ever after, as though that would be the natural, magical consequence of true love. I’ve met too many people along the way who imagined that finding the right person would fix all their problems like waving a wand. They would be happier, fulfilled, inspired. They would write the best song, the novel, become able, and so forth. What a burden to put on a potential partner! Not only do you want their love, they have to set your world to rights and fix all those thing you couldn’t, or wouldn’t fix for yourself. Not so long back, someone commented here that if I’d found the love of my life, that should cure me of depression. This is the kind of madness I’m talking about.

Relationship is supposed to be a core concept for Druidry. Relationship can be magical, it can bring to us a sense of awen, of divinity, and all manner of other wondrous things. But it is not wise to assume that relationship will sustain itself as if by magic. Love alone is not enough. You need to be paying attention, listening, responding, taking note. People change, and over years people change a lot. Children, status shifts, jobs and other life experiences alter us. The relationship where it is assumed that the all living happily ever after process is under way, is the one that risks losing everything in face of change.

It’s easy to become careless in relationships if we assume they are in the bag. I know of people who invest vast amounts of time, energy, money and attention in setting up relationships, but once they think the other person is secured, they stop making the same effort, imagining that such attention to detail is only necessary at the start. Did they ask if the courted one felt the same way? I doubt it. Will the courted one come to feel ignored and uncared for a few years down the line? Probably. Too busy living happily ever after to do much living, or happiness.

What’s true of our love lives is equally true in friendships, and familial connections. Taking for granted is highly destructive and eats out the roots of whatever you had.

No matter how longstanding a relationship is, or what shape it has, don’t take it for granted. Nurture it. Give it time and attention. Do all the things you would have done when starting out, and things stay fresh and immediate rather than becoming tired and banal.

Also, don’t imagine that love will fix everything. Be prepared to put in some work yourself. Love will not pay the bills, and love will not cure all ailments. What it will do, if you’re lucky, is give you the support and belief of another human being who is willing to work with you, dream with you, share the triumphs with you and cry over the disasters with you. Love can be healing, but only when we let go of old pain. Love can be reassuring, but only when we’re listening to reassuring words from a loved one, or carrying those words with us. There are a great many ways to sabotage what love can do. Asking too much, and putting nothing in are the most reliable.

I have, along the way, been in some good relationships and some lousy ones. I’ve seen a great deal of other people’s love lives, and their hopes for what romantic involvement will give them. I’ve seen people throw away what they have because they’ve lost sight of the value. There may be true love, but refusal to believe in it or nurture it will eventually kill that love off. I also know that where there is mutual support, care and listening, where time is invested in actually having a relationship with another person (or a place, or an art form or whatever else you invest yourself in) good things come. What we get out depends so very much on what we put in. When both people are putting in their hearts, souls and energy, so much more is possible. I spent a lot of years without that, I have it now, and am conscious of the difference of dedication underpinning things.

And they all lived happily ever after is not the end of the story, it’s where a whole new thing has to begin.

Contemplation in Druidry

Contemplation is one of my favourite methods of approaching Druidry. It’s a big, umbrella sort of a term covering a number of ways of working, and one that I’ve found fellow Druids increasingly interested in. Contemplation needs very little, if any training. Pointers can be nice, but its available to anyone at any level, including children. It does not require special gifts, magical whatevers, you can be as muggle as you like and the path remains open. As we don’t all hear the voice of spirit, or walk in otherworlds, this is an important consideration. Contemplation does not lend itself to hierarchy, dogma, or forming powerbases. I like this aspect. It can be solitary, or shared, or both.

Contemplating can be a purely intellectual process, all about asking questions. We can ask questions of anything we encounter in life. Politics, science and culture are full of potential material to contemplate. We can ponder all manner of things with a view to deepening our understanding, seeking our own place, figuring out how we want to live. It’s not unlike philosophy, only without claiming (necessarily) the language, history and habits of philosophical thought. As a topic, ‘philosophy’ can seem daunting to the ‘unqualified’ where contemplation does not imply the need for a knowledge base.

We can contemplate our own emotions, spend time sitting with our feelings, being present in our bodies and deepening self awareness.

We can set ourselves specific exercises, contemplating an object, image, concept, experience and so forth. This approach takes us more into the realms of meditation.

Finally, we can approach any action with a contemplative mindset that allows us to think deeply about what we are doing, while we are doing it.

Thus contemplation can be a part of all aspects of our lives. It enables us to deepen relationships and further our own understandings. Coming back from long, inner journeys, we then have the option of sharing what we’ve found. This, I think, is always a good thing. While I’m much in favour of solitary working, the person who never touches base with anyone else can become separated from consensus reality all too easily. Sophilism, that perspective where we become the only thing of value in our own universe, is not conducive to good Druidry. Of course we may disagree over the outcomes of our ponderings, but this is good and healthy, it helps to keep us questioning. The person who dedicates to contemplation should not be dedicating to always thinking they are right, or getting too comfortable and smug. This is a path of questioning, and above all else, we have to keep questioning ourselves as well.

The power of expectation

One of the memes that crops up in many New Age lines of thinking is that we get what we look for, and like attracts like. Certainly, you are going to have a hard time seeing something you don’t believe is there. Yesterday I was exploring the way in which negative people are often acting in ways intending to reinforce their own world view. I want to follow on from that today. Not thinking so much about the implications of believing, or not believing in fairies and angels here. More about what we believe of ourselves and the world.

It’s so easy to manufacture the experiences that confirm expectations, without necessarily being conscious off the process. Back in my teens there was a boyfriend who had been through some awful stuff and didn’t really think anyone cared about him, as a logical consequence of this. If anyone got too close, he’d become increasingly demanding, difficult and challenging until he forced them (and in my turn, me) to give up and walk away. Thus he kept confirming his belief about his relationship with the whole of reality. Eventually, I gather he got his head straight enough to give someone a chance. There’s nothing like believing you are unlovable to make it hard for those around you to manifest care.

How many such beliefs are we all lugging around? I’m conscious that I may be viewing the world as more hostile than it inherently is. I don’t see the New Age reality of benevolence and love, I see something that is at best, neutral. As a consequence the odds of me recognising an experience of benevolent angels, for example, are pretty slim. I probably wouldn’t notice them until they bit me on the bottom, by which point they wouldn’t seem quite so benevolent anyway… What else have I got? I don’t know, but I’m looking.  I don’t want to be at the mercy of my own unconscious misapprehensions if I can help it.

How much conflict in life comes from the clashing together of stories and beliefs on this personal level? The person who assumes they won’t be believed, and who consequently stays silent. The person who believes they are inherently unacceptable and so has to keep acting out until they find what you can’t tolerate. The person who cannot believe anything good, kind, altruistic or generous really exists so will keep imagining terrible, hidden motives to explain the compassion their reality has no space for. How many people are lugging round a unique reality and bludgeoning other people with it as a consequence?

None of us has a perfect view of self or wider reality. We all have blind spots and illusions, and I suspect that’s just one of those things about being human. We also have differences of opinion such that my functional reality may seem like crazy fantasy to other people. It’s just as dangerous to assume you are right as it is to default to the assumption that you are wrong in this.

We find out where the issues may be when two incompatible realities are banged together. How to tell which is real? Am I the ungrateful, demanding, unreasonable one, or is what I want normal, and is the other person a lazy slacker who does not know what decent behaviour looks like? We won’t ever figure that out by looking just at the two people involved. Wider context tells us a lot about how we fit in elsewhere. I’m wary of taking ‘normal’ as a measure for anything because it’s so flawed. In a room full of killers, the mass murderer is pretty normal, after all. But if only one person finds us wildly unreasonable and nobody else does, that’s certainly indicative.

The more diverse a pool of people we can draw on for this, the better. How does my work self compare to my social self, my parent self, my pagan-gathering self? Am I getting the same kinds of responses across the board? How do I feel about the people I clash with? Do I respect them and want to respond to the clash, or do I think they are idiots? Where do I want to fit? These can be useful measures, although if we are the killer in a room full of killers, metaphorically speaking, conforming to peer standards may be letting us stay in a crappy place and resisting opportunities to grow.

Someone too entrenched in their own sense of self importance will never be able to make a good assessment in this regard. Someone who cares more about seeming right than being right, will never be able to explore to see if their relationship with reality is faulty. If you can ask, and seriously consider whether you’re going the wrong way, there’s every reason to think you can also consider the issue well. Doubt and self questioning are vital tools. Self belief is also necessary to sanity. There’s a balance to strike, but if you aren’t looking for it, you won’t find it.

Celebrating the good ones

A few years ago, talking to Damh the Bard, he made the important point that you cannot have strong, empowered femininity without also having strong, empowered masculinity, and that the reverse is equally true.

By contrast, an ex of mine was generally of the opinion that empowering women displaced men, pushing them out of jobs, out of their identity as bread winners, into a no-man’s land of frustration and barely suppressed rage. (I have no idea what said ex thinks these days, I try to avoid his opinions as much as possible.)

There are, I have no doubt, people of both genders who see any power in the hands of the opposite gender, as a threat to them. There are times and places where this is true. But when we disempower one gender, really speaking, we disempower both. That ‘man as bread winner, dominant and running the world’ archetype, beloved of my ex, tends to mean that a man not in full time employment doesn’t have so much sense of self, and that’s no kind of win. Money, authority and identity can easily be blurred by this mindset. The historical gender attitudes that pushed men out of parenting and locked women in the home made us all unbalanced, diminished us all.

Is it possible to have any kind of enforced power imbalance without diminishing everyone? Money is so often the reflection of unbalanced power. The greater the gap between rich and poor, the more fear and possessiveness there is likely to be for the rich. The fear of being taken down, of being stripped of wealth, of the revolting peasants. The need to control others is born out of fear. People who do not feel the need to dominate are, on the whole, going to be a good deal happier.

Author Jean Roberta pointed out in a blog some time ago (sorry, I cannot remember where) that gay and lesbian couples have a big advantage over straight couples. There are no assumptions about how they are supposed to relate to each other, who is supposed to have which role. As a consequence, they have the freedom to build relationships that are much more rooted in the nature of the individuals. Straight people can learn from this.

As a Druid, relationship, and the idea of relationship is central to a lot of what I do. I’m fascinated by how we imagine ourselves in relationship, by historical conventions, social norms, and questions of what is natural, and what is pure construct. So much of gender is imaginary, and yet there are some pronounced physical differences, which are especially relevant in a child-rearing couple. The reality of pregnancy and birth does change what each person can do.

I like the kind of empowered men who use their strength to nurture, shelter and support those weaker than themselves. I like the kind of men who have too much self respect to ever force sex upon a woman. I like the kind of men who delight in powerful, capable, liberated women and would never be so undignified as to whinge ‘I feel like you don’t need me now, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do’ when faced with female success. I like the kind of men who know how to love, admire, and enjoy women, who knowhow to be friends with women. A man who needs to crush a woman in order to feel superior, is not, in my book, any kind of ‘real man’ at all. He’s a waste of space. I wish I’d come to understand that one a bit sooner, I could have spared myself years of having to apologise for success, for happiness, for capability.

I’m writing this today in no small part because I want to celebrate the good men. The ones who support, and do not crush. The ones who make the world a better sort of place. The good guys. And mine in particular, because it’s his birthday, and he is so worth celebrating.

Happy birthday Tom.

And to all you lovely guys out there, you who are man enough not to need to knock anyone else down, power to your paws.

The art of apology

Three parts of an honourable apology – recognition, responsibility, restoration.

We all make mistakes, and it would be unproductive to base any ideas about honour on a requirement to be super-human and perfect in all things. It’s not freedom from error that defines a person’s honour so much as what we do when we cock up. I started dissecting the idea of apology for my son, who is always full of questions about how things work and why. What is the difference between a good apology, and a hollow one? This is what we came up with.

First there must be recognition of what the problem is. It’s easy to say ‘I’m sorry’ without ever grasping what the problem is. Saying it to make the complainant go away may be easy, but it’s not very honourable. Expressing recognition of the cause of the problem shows the person who you are talking to, that you are taking this seriously. You are taking them seriously, and you care. Also, without the clarity that you understand the problem, the other two stages are impossible. Often, when we err it’s not in malice, but in ignorance or obliviousness. When that happens, the recognition stage means taking the time to find out what happened. It may be that the other person was hurt by something we did not intend should hurt them, or that we would not be hurt by. In those circumstances, it can be easy to reject the wounded one, and add to their sense of injustice. Recognising the problem means that doesn’t happen. “I hear you,” is a powerful thing when it is meant.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” is not a true apology. It may count as sympathy. A true apology takes responsibility. If you’re clear about where the problem was, that’s not difficult, which is why stage one is so important. It can become more complex when you don’t feel responsible – if the other person seems to have over reacted, misread your intentions or otherwise got the wrong end of the stick. It can be tempting, in such situations to say “I hear you, but it’s not my fault,” and sometimes that is indeed the best call. Being pressured into apologising for something you had no control over, is not helpful, nor is it good for you. So, the recognition of responsibility stage may require that the other person recognises where their own responses, assumptions, baggage etc have come into play. But if you do the recognition stage, and approach this without accusation or a desire to blame, it can resolve matters. More often than not, there’s some detail that we can improve. Some small way of being kinder, recognising a vulnerability, treading gently, that helps improve things. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you, but I realise I have.” That kind of language can work miracles.

Finally we come to the restoration. If you are truly sorry, then it is important to mend what has been damaged. There isn’t always a physical thing to fix, but a promise to be more careful in the future, to remember what has happened here and not let it happen again, can make a lot of difference. “I had no idea that would upset you. I won’t behave in that way again.” If it’s meant, the promise helps to heal damage.

This is not just a model for apologising, but also for accepting apology. It’s no good taking the moral high ground and then refusing to acknowledge one, or all of these stages. When we feel wounded, it’s important to be clear about why, not assume the other person should know, or automatically think it was done deliberately. We have to give time and space to considering responsibility, and look at our own share. If we are offended, how much of that belongs to us, and how much to the offence? It can vary a lot. And if we can, it is better to let others fix things they have broken, it rebalances the relationship. Then, whatever went wrong can all be let go of, lesson learned. It doesn’t lie around festering unpleasantly.

Hollow apologies that we do not mean and will not act on, are not very far from outright lies, but they sound good. They sound like we care. It’s important not to let the hollow apology through, not to accept them when they come, and not to give second, third, fourth chances based on them.

Breaking your reality

I’ve been through it twice, so far, at intervals of about a decade. On both occasions the breaking of my reality had everything to do with two separate individuals and the complex webs of lies they created. And on both occasions, I fought hard to keep my reality whole, because the alternative always appears so insane, unstable and dangerous. Until you escape. Both times, in the end, I went through the trauma of unpicking all the things I thought I knew, reassessing everything, falling apart, and being able to rebuild. The first time, I rebuilt on a foundation of broken trust, the second time I think I’ve come out with a more nuanced sense of things.

There are few things more frightening than finding that your reality doesn’t work. However, when you think about it, so much of the reality we inhabit depends on trust. It depends on things we have all agreed are true, exist and can be used as points of reference. Language, countries and economies are all part of our belief system. There’s a process at the moment not unlike saying ‘The Emperor has no clothes on’ in which we’re collectively reassessing the value of money markets, wealth made out of fantasy, and considering that the uber-rich might not be all that good for the rest of us. Bloodless revolutions can be dramatic and uncomfortable too.

I wonder what it was like for the devout Christians of the Victorian era, having to deal with Darwin, and the possibility that their book might not represent literal truth. There are still those who just won’t look at the evidence and who hold to the belief, and their relationship with the rest of reality gets ever more strained and problematic. There must have been plenty for whom Darwin brought deep, personal crisis. We’re asked to do a lot of trusting – of governments, scientists, lawyers, big businesses, media and medics these days more often than religious folk, but it is no less a belief position that keeps it all chipping along. We depend on the realities other people help to make, and sometimes those are very faulty indeed.

Most of the UK is in drought, my bit is being battered by torrential rain. We’ve had years of less predictable and more problematic weather already, but we’re still reluctant to think about climate change. For everyone whose notion of reality depends on car, reliable water supplies, all the electricity you can dream of and the freedom to consume more than you can afford, climate change is madness. Going there, recognising it, would require of our culture something not unlike a nervous breakdown. It’s going to hurt like hell.

I have leaned, in my personal life, that no matter how familiar and established a fictional reality is, when you are dealing with lies and illusions, it just doesn’t work. The effort required to bend and re-shape things into other things, so that your dysfunctional reality holds together, is vast. Every piece of evidence that doesn’t fit has to be reinvented. Experiences that contradict, must be forgotten, feelings that go against the reality, must be crushed. It may seem that we can make the reality stick, and that no other reality is possible, but it catches up with us in the end. Either we can’t sustain the work involved in holding a faith position about things that blatantly aren’t true, or we get so far removed from the rest of the world that we can’t function. Collectively, climate change will do one or the other to us, unless we deal with it. I’d like to think it’s possible to change by reasoned, deliberate choice rather than in crisis.

In personal life, the breaking of reality was an awful experience, but the far side of it is a much better place. Things make sense again. Sensory evidence can be trusted, emotions taken into account. A greater sense of inner peace becomes possible.

I’m wondering if ‘Jayne’ will feel tempted to comment on this post. If she does, it could be to ask if I’ve realised that I have been living a lie for the last couple of years. ‘Jayne’ has tried on several occasions to assert this already, but unless I’m very much mistaken, she needs to. ‘Jayne’ slipped up over the Easter weekend and made a comment that took me from suspicion about the familiarity of her phrasing, through to a reasonable degree of confidence that I know who she is.

Assuming I’m right in my guess then ‘Jayne’s ‘ hostility is necessary for her. Based on what I think I know, her situation requires her to hold the belief that I am a cruel, vindictive, heartless sort of person. It has been necessary for some time that she reads the very worst imaginable things into anything I do or say and must, therefore, cherry pick the bits that can be tweaked support her world view. So she comes to the blog of someone she dislikes for something, anything, that reinforces her perspective. I wonder what she has to carefully ignore to make her world work. I wonder what she has to pretend to like or accept, what she has to suppress within herself, in order to get from one day to the next with her reality intact. It’s no way to live. I know, I’ve been there. I try not to be too hard on her. She frustrates me, but I feel very sorry for her, and I also know that merely my saying that will poke the flimsy foundations of her world. If I am nice to her, I will hurt her. You can’t help someone whose reality doesn’t work, without causing them a lot of distress.

Sometimes the best we can hope for anyone, is that the fabulous prison-castle construction made of lies and straw shows its true nature so that it can be kicked to pieces. The walls are mostly just air. You are free to leave. It’s good when that happens.

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.