I want to draw your attention to this powerful piece of writing from James Nichol. It brings together issues of justice, mental health and community healing. The post looks at way in which we are responsible for each other, and the futility of approaching mental health as an individual problem in a situation of ongoing collective trauma. These are issues I’ve been poking about in for a while, but James has brought them together here with clarity, wisdom and insight. It is well worth taking the time to read his thoughts.
Actually, rather like being a human being on a daily basis.
But it depends on the type of human being. Druids are a diverse and ragged edged group, self defined and accepting all comers, up to a point. If you are too far from common Druid thought and practice, probably nobody will try to kick you out, but you may find, and others may point out, that not much is gained, for you or anyone else, from you doing Druid things. And if you become disruptive, you will be encouraged to step aside.
The most fundamental idea in Druidry, for me, is the integration of mankind within nature, both collectively and individually. We are part of the universe, and, through our numbers and our technology, have a critical role to play in the web of life on our planet. We have a fundamental obligation not to mess it up as we are doing at the moment. Similarly, as individuals, we have an obligation to nurture and respect the natural world around us, including the other human beings we may affect by our choices or actions.
For most Druids a significant part of this is a belief in some form of collective consciousness, or spirituality. The spiritual universe is integrated with the physical universe, and may or may not be home to spiritual beings – deities, elementals, spirits of place, souls of the living and/or the dead – maybe all of these, and a selection of others! I try to respect all beliefs in this area so long as they reflect the ideas of integration and mutual respect. A lot of us believe in the use of spiritual connections (prayers, rituals, magic, offerings, …) to gain a wider insight into our universe, and/or to influence the outcome of events in the physical by interacting with the spiritual. Others will see it as mainly or wholely affecting the participants, providing synchronisation, inspiration, motivation, and ideas to the individuals involved. Or both – whatever works for you is fine by me.
Another basic idea, at least for me, is the individual within the group. Every one of us has a personal life path which we make for ourselves, within the universe as we see it and as it affects us in a multitude of ways. Our most important responsibility is to ourselves – our physical, spiritual and material welfare, our growth and development, and our contribution to the groups to which we belong. These form a heirarchy, sometimes overlapping – family, spiritual, friends, community, locality, …., planet, universe. All of these have different interactions, and some are more important than others, depending in part on the politics and administration of the place where you live. This has to be approached in a pragmatic but principled way – if something is wrong, but you have no effective way to influence it, record the fact, sign the petition, and get on with something else. But at the same time, the groups have responsibilities towards you – again depending a lot on where they are in the heirarchy. Do not be afraid to give to or to accept help from a group, and do not adopt an accounting mentality. But at the same time, look after yourself. Emergencies apart, you do no good by giving all you have and then calling for help in the morning!
A personal devewlopment path I find useful is through knowledge, understanding, wisdom, and empathy. First find out the facts as far as possible, analyse them together and in the immediate context, review the facts and conclusions, then look at the wider environment to seek underlying causes, unexpected effects, wider implications. Look for balance and harmony wherever possible, and consider the lives and circumstances of those affected now and likely to be affected in the future. This can obviously be an iterative process at any level, and often is. Doing this can often reveal the complexities of a situation, or illustrate a way forward that was not obvious at the start. At least it can avoid robbing Peter to pay Paul, or jumping on a bandwaggon.
We are unique human beings, and we have a unique basket of talents and abilities. These need to be developed to the point where we can run day to day life, but beyond that I am always looking for things that I can do better than those in my groups. That way my personal improvement provides a growing resource for the group, rather than simply satisfaction for myself.
Recently we’ve had some wonderful comments on the blog from Miami Magus, who has shared considerable insights into traditions I know little or nothing about. So, I got in touch, and the result is this blog post and me pointing at things! Jose is a Cuban Magician living in Miami, Florida and writes about a broad array of topics. This is just a small selection.
It’s always a joy to have people sharing their own work and insights in the comments – please do jump in if you see something that relates to something you’re working on. I’m always open to sharing other people’s work where that’s relevant and likely to appeal to regular readers here. If you want to talk to me about possibilities, drop me a line – brynnethnimue @ gmail dot com
Keith Errington is no doubt best known in steampunk circles for his comedic work. He’s performed with the Hopeless, Maine crew on a number of occasions, the first of which was right at the beginning of our figuring out how to get Hopeless onto a stage. He’s previously written a novella in the Hopeless setting – The Oddatsea and has been working with me on another Hopeless novella we hope to get out into the world next year.
It gives me great delight to be able to share some of his more serious work here. I’m looking forward to seeing more of this sort of thing.
Drained
When the tide is low, and the lake’s water has returned to the air
When the river can flow no more, and the spring bubbles its last
There is no more.
When the sea is calm, and the wind has all blown out
When the clouds have turned to grey, and the sun rises no more
What is left?
When the child has cried every tear, and the artist can no longer express grief
When the Nurse is out of care, and the mother can tend no more
Where is the love?
When the trees have withered, and the grass is returned to soil
When the flowers are weeds, and the fields are sand
What will grow there?
When the deer is slain, and the last rhino dead
When the birds are grounded and fly no more
Where can you go?
When the heron is dying, and the snake is withering to skin
When the horned god has not the strength to carry on
Just because something must be done, it does not follow that the thing you can think of to do is the right answer. I’m in a state of rage and distress as I write this because the something being done is that trees are being cut down. This won’t solve the problem even slightly.
Some weeks ago, a woman was attacked, in broad daylight not far from where I live. This is an awful thing to have happened. She was in a public space, in the middle of the day – she’s one of those women who even the most enthusiastic victim blamer would struggle to find fault with, but like too many other women, she’s been attacked. Trees played no part in what happened, and their absence would not have kept her safe. But the response has been to cut down all the nearby trees.
What are we going to do if someone else is attacked fifty yards further down the path? Keep cutting down trees? It makes no sense. It’s a move that lets people feel like they are doing something, but as the something in question helps no one and prevents nothing, this is an expensive kind of injustice. It’s a loss of life, of habitat, and no one is made safer by it.
The tunnel where the attack happened was left without lights for months thanks to vandalism and inaction. That was a real hazard. The one laurel tree that had grown substantially under the one street lamp was an issue that legitimately needed tackling, but that was all.
Safety from attack is not about cutting down trees. We need to treat victims a lot better and prosecute more effectively. We need to challenge rape culture. Trees are not the reason people feel able or inclined to attack other people. Cutting down the trees does not cut down the crime – quite possibly the opposite given what we know about the impact of trees on reducing all kinds of criminality.
For reasons too complicated to go into here, when I lived in Wem I didn’t have a washing machine. So I checked out the local laundry, and then, seeing its worth and not wanting to burden the Earth with unnecessary white goods, began using it regularly. The man who ran it was a charming Turkish chap, with whom I became friends. One of the things which was made apparent to me during our various conversations was the difference in attitude to children between the Turks and the British.
In Turkey, children are cherished. In my opinion, in Britain – speaking in general of course – cherished is not the right word to use. What is, then? Tolerated? Managed? Directed? Ignored? I’m aware that this is controversial territory, so I’m going to repeat: I’m talking generalities here. But when I considered the Victorian attitude to children, my case was clearer. In my new Conjuror Girl trilogy therefore I wanted to work with this historical attitude to children.
My first child creation for the novels was the League Of Ignored Children. In Victorian times children without families could be looked after by orphanages, or by ragged schools, institutions for destitute children which were charitable organisations. Such schools were usually in working class districts. Another alternative was the workhouse: children of poor families lived there. In all cases, life was harsh. Conditions were sometimes appalling. In my novels however I wanted to create an institution run by children for their own benefit. The League Of Ignored Children exists in a part-demolished building next to a foundry, which keeps them warm in the cold months (they refer to it as their “Winter Palace”). However, children being children, and in particular boys being boys, there is a hierarchical structure with leaders, just as in the adult world. This allowed me to explore my chosen theme of selfishness and its relation to male culture and society in general.
The League Of Ignored Children for me epitomises the exigencies of Victorian societies. Alas, I think some of those exigencies still exist. You only have to watch the news to see that in Britain, and in other nations too. We fail children so often.
I researched the darker side of childhood with the aid of Sarah Seaton’s Childhood & Death In Victorian England. Monique – the main character of the trilogy – is a keen reader of the local newspaper, and she relates some of the tragedies: Poor Ruth Sampson, killed by her father, who smashed her against the hearthstone. But he was not guilty, because drink sent him insane. Emily Holland, murdered by a mechanic up north. And only five years ago, Florence Albery, killed in a river by her own mother. Well, at least she had a mother, but what good did it do her? When all men can do is accumulate for their own benefit, no wonder the small and the weak are victims. And: This land doesn’t like children. It doesn’t see our value, it doesn’t see our potential. It’s irritated by us. It would rather we didn’t exist so it could get along with more important business. We are ignored. We’re all ignored children… What are we except a nuisance? People are too busy with their own lives to have a thought for ours. And all the time they ruin us, by leaving us on the streets, by exploiting us, by restricting us…
I suppose this is a rather depressing view. Many children have marvellous childhoods, and grow up to be stable, sane adults. But when others do not because of the corruption and blindness of the modern state – ruled by men, not women – it is perhaps no surprise that tragedies continue to happen.
How different the British attitude to children would be if women were in charge, not men.
The Elemenpals is aimed specifically at infants, young children and early readers. It’s written in such a way that children too young to read independently can be read to and so that children who are beginning to read independently can manage with little help but still with adult supervision. I wanted the book to encourage family bonding time through shared reading experiences.
I know you’ve done a lot of studying of child development. How does that relate to your writing?
I’m currently working towards becoming a developmental psychologist and am particularly interested in neuro-developmental psychology and the way that children’s brain development affects, and is affected by, their behaviours, their personalities, their development of their sense of self and autonomy. The books were my way of empowering my own children to form a connection with nature and to explore their own narratives and self expression through finding parallels in nature and the elemental cycle and perception. I also wanted to include some neurominority characters who actually reflected my children’s experiences as most autistic characters in books only reflect the “classically autistic” narrative and none of my children relate with that at all as it’s such a narrow view. So Menme, the Spirit Imp, is non-verbal and, as you can see in the book, speaks with gestures, facial expression, body language and hand movements. This isn’t an obvious thing, it’s not a plot point. Menme just is and fits into the story authentically and organically and it was really important to me to do that well. As an autistic writer, I feel it’s part of my duty to include those narratives ethically.
Is this a Pagan book? the elemental aspect certainly suggests that it is? would it work for non-Pagans, could it get into schools under the radar?
The book is definitely based on Pagan beliefs and folklore but it’s the sort of folklore and belief that society has carried with it, protecting their Pagan heritage whether they knew it or not. The archetypes of Mother Earth, elemental beings and deities of sacred life such as rivers and trees are things that modern and Abrahamic beliefs could never quite quash and they’re the main theme of the book. I’d love for them to get into schools. Every aspect of them has been written with empowering children in their development at the forefront. My biggest dream for them would be to see them in schools. I’ve already written some classes that would work with the UK curriculum that could accompany them but that’s just how my mind works, I’m not sure they’ll ever be used.
Can you talk a bit more about what representation, or the lack of it means for children? How it impacts on them…
One of the most oppressed groups on this planet is children. Most adults believe that children should obey, shouldn’t “talk back” and don’t allow them any voice or autonomy. Our education system is designed to spit out conformists on a conveyer belt and punish any form of individuality from what they wear, to how they speak, even as far as policing their facial expressions which are mostly involuntary. It’s a mental health crisis waiting to happen! Except it is happening already. We are the product of that education system, we adults. The problem is that many of us perpetuate it and take agency away from children from the moment they’re born. Giving children some control over some aspects of their lives is extremely beneficial, teaching and empowering consent, emotion development, conscientiousness and more. How can we teach our young girls that their body is their own and that no one has the right to touch them without their consent on the one hand and then force them to wear what we say on the other? How can we teach our young boys that when a girl says no she means no if we do the same to them? For that matter, how do we teach boys that their own body is theirs and no one can touch them without their permission? Giving children agency and representation on how that agency can work in various settings is the only way to give them this power effectively.
How did you find your illustrator?
I’m not sure how Adam and I connected. Totally by accident, probably. We both have a love of wordplay and respectful debate and discourse so it was likely that we had a mutual friend and ended up chatting that way. But one day he saw that I’d written a children’s book and as he’s a published children’s author himself, we were discussing writing for children, one thing led to another and I had myself an illustrator who really understood my vision of what I wanted to convey in my books. The fun and whimsy of the characters, the fluctuating moods to expose children to as many emotional possibilities as we could, which is extremely beneficial for their emotion development and expression. Adam is incredibly talented, as a writer and performer, as well as an artist, and he understands my mind in a way that I feel is a must for people creating together in this way. The books are as much his hard work as mine but I know he’d argue with that.
I imagine that all children know – at least if they have access to the rest of the natural world – that animals and birds, plant and trees all speak to them. It seems both normal and natural, and just the way the world is. How different our lives, and our relationship with the more-than-human, would be if that was a quality, an enchantment, that routinely continued into adulthood.
As a very young child, I used to leave out ‘potions’ of pulverised rosehips, herbs and rainwater in acorn cups for ‘the fairies’, whom I knew lived in plants and trees. Sometimes I would see a glimpse of a woodmouse, or a bird, who’d sipped my brew – and that was OK too; in fact it was magical (considering the delight I feel, even as an adult when birds come to the doorstep without fear, not much has changed there).
I remember when I first learned to speak Cedar. My cousins in Cornwall had a ‘home field’ on their farm where the orphaned lambs would be, needing bottle-feeding several times a day. In between, we would climb onto a long horizontal limb of the Cedar tree in the field. One day, up there on my own aged about five, I heard the tree whispering, and realised that I could understand its language.
Around the same time, I used to climb up into one of the pair of cherry trees either side of our home front gate, and delightedly knew as I faded into the canopy that no one could see me for blossom.
That was probably the beginning of my lifelong relationship with trees. However, there was a more significant event as an adult. I worked part-time for Kindred Spirit magazine back in the 90s, and one of my briefs was to conduct a transatlantic phone interview with shaman Eliot Cowan, who had just written Plant Spirit Medicine. I knew about shamanic practice and plant medicine; had read my Carlos Castaneda; had experimented with psychotropic plants; had even written a book on subjects that included such things from my own practice. But something subtly shifted for me after that interview.
Not long afterwards I booked myself a week’s solo retreat in a tiny cottage near Cornwall’s coast. The cottage was in woodland, and within the shelter of a triple earthwork, complete with its own Iron Age fogou. I’d come specifically to work with trees, and to do a week’s writing. I imagined I would connect with the magical Rowan and the ethereal Silver Birch (sometimes known as the ‘poet’s tree’). I’d dumped my luggage and headed off down through the woodland towards the sea. I knew the area well, and was confident that I would find Birch and Rowan close by – and I did.
I knew that trees love to be met, anthropomorphic as that sounds. We seem to have a natural close relationship with trees; indeed, some first nation peoples believe that humans are descended from trees.
However, I hadn’t bargained for the abductive qualities of the Willow – that slender, gentle and tender-seeming tree under which Ophelia permanently floats in her death-song in a painting by the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais. So I was taken hostage by a particular Willow in a watery grove of them. Benign though the tree was, it was also extremely insistent, in a way that startled me.
I never made it to the other trees; instead, I spent a rather trippy few hours under Willow’s influence instead, and that journey has continued. (It was only later I learned that Willow has a reputation in folk lore for ‘stalking’ people.) Since then, I’ve become ever more aware of the deep synergy between humans and plants, in particular trees, and it led me to marking the wheel of the year with my version of the Celtic Tree Calendar, and then devising courses, ‘Tongues in Trees’, that would enable me to lead participants into a deeper relationship with the tree family. I’ve been leading these for many years, now, and have more recently offered this course as a one-year online intensive.
I spend part of my year in an ancient mythic forest. Quite apart from everything we now know about the gifts from trees, whether to do with climate change, the hydrological cycles, preventing soil erosion, offering habitat, food, medicines, timber for shelters and fires, and new findings about the immense ‘wood wide web’ that underpins a forest, we have a deep psychic resonance with the idea of the Greenwood, the Wildwood.
There are always two forests: one is the physical wood and forest we encounter ‘out there’. The other is the abiding forest of our imagination: an inner pristine wildwood, an Enchanted Forest, the one we encounter in myths, fairy stories and legends. When I walk into a physical forest, I walk into a liminal place, and a deep, receptive and attentive humming silence, a benign presence. There’s something about entering a forest that is both healing and disorienting (in my forthcoming book I speak a lot about this). In the forest we lose horizons, and perspectives, and enter firstly a green underwater-type world, and secondly a kind of mythic consciousness, as our European fairy tales attest.
I know this particular forest quite well. I arrived in it a few years ago after a particularly traumatic time in my life, knowing that it would offer me some kind of healing, and it did – AFTER tripping me up and breaking my arm so that I had to be still – an almost foreign experience for me. But the biggest shift was my fond idea that I’d write about trees here; but in fact I ended up learning from trees – as it’s said our Druidic ancestors did. That changed the way I wrote my book.
Druid Life 