Blessings of peace

(Nimue)

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

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

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

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

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

The trouble with books

(Nimue)

I’ve always been an avid reader, and I read widely. At the same time I have spent my whole life struggling to find books I want to read. Going into big bookshops depresses the hell out of me – all those front tables with celebrity ghost written content and TV tie ins are not for me, not at all.

I’m a fussy reader. I’ve just put one novella down because I couldn’t get on with the author’s voice, and a second because I couldn’t engage with the characters. Every so often I find an author I can get really excited about – Sylvia Moreno Garcia and Natasha Pulley in recent years.  Finding a novel I really like is a thing of joy. Reading something that passably works for me is often as good as it gets, which is frustrating.

I read a lot of non-fiction, and around that I have a much easier time telling what I’m going to like. However, I want to read fiction about half the time.

Part of what I’m struggling with is how narrow things can be within speculative fiction and how depressing things set in the ‘real world’ are – and how unreal those things often are too. I don’t have any interest in dystopian fiction. I don’t mind the odd YA novel, but on the whole they aren’t what I’m looking for. I’ve found gems in the witchlit category, and I read classics sometimes. I’ll occasionally read romance, crime and thriller novels but generally I find they aren’t my thing. I like gothic work, and I like the kind of horror that makes me feel at home (Clive Barker).

The authors I like most tend not to fit into neat genre boxes, and tend to be some distance from the straight white socially Christian guy who went to Oxbridge model.

I want to be surprised, and enchanted. I am open to being comforted and challenged. I like queer, Pagan and non-binary rep, and authors who know what they’re talking about and who will take me somewhere I haven’t been before. I like diversity, I want to see the world from unfamiliar angles, with characters who make sense and have depth. I want character driven stories. Who should I be reading?

And if you’re thinking ‘me!’ then please, please get in the comments.

Perspectives

(David)

There have been times in my life when I wished I could be where I am today:

As an abused schoolboy, wishing for a place of safety;

As a young family man serving abroad, wishing to be home with my wife and our children;

As a wounded serviceman in hospital, just hoping to survive;

As a war veteran in a nursing home, desperate to be free of paralysis and home again with my loving family.

Sometimes people misunderstand my acceptance of this situation, housebound by crippling pain and illness in my family home. If they’d been in some of the places I’ve been, perhaps they would understand how I can live in love and peace despite my limiting condition.

Dance Away

(David)

It’s early summer 1979. One o’clock of a weekday morning, with work tomorrow, but we don’t care. We’re down in the Harbour Lights, and the nightclub’s bar shutters have just rattled closed while the DJ chooses his record for the last slow dance.

It’s been quite a year. Life has changed almost out of recognition, and one result of all the changes is that you’ve become one of the carefree cool crowd. Temporarily, because everyone’s lifestyle is mobile and that’s a significant part of what makes this bunch so electric and exciting.

The first measured notes sound, instantly recognisable, Dance Away, which is your favourite current song. You lived your tumultuous teenage years to Roxy Music, and now in your early twenties when life has blossomed into something very different it feels kind of fitting that this might be the group’s swan song, because they too look like they’re moving on. That isn’t important though. What’s important is you and she catching each other’s eye across the dance floor and smiling as you meet to dance in each other’s arms.

She’s cooler than you are. Others might not know it, but you do. You’ve been together for a few months now and have shared secrets about your childhood traumas. Those secrets, you think, are what generates a reserve in her that is part of the coolness others can see. A bigger part than superficial things like her resemblance to Debbie Harry, as lovely as that is. The private sharing of those secrets is the most intimate thing you’ve ever experienced.

Will you stay together? You hope so. Dearly. She hopes so too, but who knows what life will bring?

Will you marry, two years from now? Will you have children? Will you survive storms that arrive out of nowhere and batter you almost numb, but every time one of you is struggling the other will be there to haul you in to safety? Forty-five years from now, will you still be together with grandchildren adding to the love that fills your family home?

Yes, you will. You can’t know it while you’re enjoying this late-night slow dance together in early summer 1979, but yes you will. Life will be good. Even the difficult bits will turn out good in the end, looked at in a certain way. Peace and love and trustworthy strong companionship will be yours, together.

Dance away, kid.

The child and the gun

(Nimue)

I saw a thought online recently to the effect that you should always back the child against the gun. No matter whose child. No matter whose gun. It’s one of those things that I think should be entirely obvious, and yet somehow isn’t to far too many people.

Most of the time I try to do my politics softly. I think it gets more done. I talk about alternatives and possibilities, I try to share things that foster kindness and that might inspire people to do better. On some social media that means I share on a lot of nature photography from other people. Relentless activism is exhausting, and often results in conflict. People who feel exhausted by other people’s relentless activism are more like to shut down than to engage. I try and make it comfortable, and easy where I can. I’m having to change tack at the moment.

You should always back the child against the gun.

There’s an awful lot I can’t do. But I can share and amplify. I can challenge. There is never a moral case for killing children. Never. I don’t think anyone should be trying to justify killing any civilians. Genocide is never the right choice. It shocks me that anyone needs to say this in any context.

Terrorism is hideous, but if you use it to justify genocide, what you’ve got is still genocide.

When humans do terrible things, there’s always a justification. There’s something we tell ourselves and each other that helps us feel justified and like it’s ok somehow. We have to do this. We are good people. This is the lesser evil. I’m not sure how anyone can persuade themselves that the murder of thousands of children counts as a lesser evil, but that seems to be happening.

It’s easier to do terrible things when you believe in the virtue of your actions. Making sacrifices is easier when you’re sacrificing someone or something other than yourself. The people who strut about in public talking about the hard choices they have to make aren’t usually the ones to suffer the actual hardness of the choices.

Being time poor

(Nimue)

When I reviewed Sarah-Beth Watkins’ book, I talked briefly about time poverty. Someone queried this as a concept so I thought it would be worth writing a post about it.

There are plenty of people who don’t have enough time for things because they manage their time badly and could do better. That’s not what I mean by the term ‘time poverty’. It also isn’t my term, I’ve seen it in use in other places. Being time-poor isn’t a choice or something easily fixed.

Some neurodivergent people really struggle to manage their time. ADHD is particularly a source of this, but difficulties with executive function are an issue for a lot of people. If organising your time is technically very difficult for you then that can limit your options.

Time-poverty is likely to go with economic poverty. When you don’t have much money you often have to do things the slow way – if you need to go to a library to access a computer to hunt for jobs this is going to use up a lot of time compared to someone who can job search from a home computer. If you have to buy your clothes second hand then hunting through charity shops for things that are suitable takes a lot more time than buying new.

If you are working minimum wage jobs, then you won’t be earning enough to live comfortably. If you’re working multiple jobs to make ends meet, you will be time-poor. Long, unavoidable commutes create time-poverty. Not being able to afford to live where you work causes massive problems for many people.

Time-poverty also goes hand in hand with illness and with caring roles. Being ill takes up a lot of time. It slows you down. If you have a lot of medical appointments, that takes time. Managing a condition can involve a lot of daily work. Caring for someone else also takes time. If you are both a parent and working full time the odds are that you are time-poor and have little time to spend purely on yourself. If you are caring for children and one of them is ill, or your partner is ill, or you have to look after your parents as well, you will be time-poor.

You can’t time-manage your way out of this. You can’t be better organised enough to offset the impact of working two jobs or having multiple caring roles. A person can be in an adequate financial state but also time-poor, and that particular kind of poverty has a huge impact on your mental health, even if your physical needs are all being met. We all need time to ourselves and time for the things that make us happy. We all need rest time and downtime, but not everyone has that, or has enough of it.

Adventures with low blood pressure

(Nimue)

For some years I suffered badly with low blood pressure. This made it difficult to do anything very physical and gave me a lot of days when my options were sorely limited. There are various things that can cause low blood pressure – including anemia. It can kill people. There’s startling little information out there about what might cause it or how to deal with it.

I did some serious reading around during the period when I had to lie on the sofa a lot. It looks like the hormone responsible for maintaining healthy blood pressure in the body is noradrenaline and that we make it when we are happy. I found some science papers, I’m afraid I don’t have the links, and this all seems to be tentative, but if it’s right then the implications are huge.

In terms of my own body it turns out that sleep makes a huge difference. If I get enough good quality sleep then I tend to be ok – not always great but wholly functional. One or two bad nights are enough to cause me significant problems. Mostly I’ve been sleeping very well of late, but there were some rough nights when Keith was recovering from operations and the impact was obvious.

Sleep is really important for wellbeing – this is hardly news. There are all kinds of things our bodies do to regulate themselves that depend on sleep and don’t work as well without it. Exhaustion will make any problem far worse than it would otherwise have been, and sleep certainly has a big impact on mental health. Of course these things are all connected, they all happen to our bodies as a whole and you can’t separate mental and physical health.

Having better blood pressure means I can walk more, socialise more, do more. All of that has impacted in a good way on body and mind alike. That in turn contributes to my being less stressed which makes it easier for me to sleep. Stress has definitely been the reasonI struggled with sleep in the past.

A lot of what goes on in the human body is circular. We tend to think of cause and effect as a more linear process, but often it’s more of a spiral. Once something goes wrong, it can knock other things out creating a spiral into every greater difficulty. Equally, if you can push the other way, you can get a virtue cycle where improvements build on each other. That’s been how the last nine months or so have been for me.

Some problems do not have answers. Sometimes the margins of success are small but I think even the small wins are well worth having. After years of experiencing serious limitations it feels miraculous to get anything back, and I’m taking great delight in being able to be more myself. I’m fortunate in this regard and it is a source of daily gratitude for me.

Personal Challenges

(Nimue)

I intimated recently that there’s serious stuff afoot, but at the time I didn’t know how to talk about it. However, Keith has made the decision to chart his experiences on Facebook, and we’ve talked through how to handle the blog. I’m not going to be sharing anything too personal about him, but I will be talking broadly about how what’s happening impacts on me.

My beloved partner has cancer. At this stage he’s been through two operations, and now he’s dealing with radiotherapy and two doses of chemotherapy alongside it. We’re at the start of a six week treatment process and there’s a great deal of uncertainty ahead. How this impacts on people can vary a lot, most especially towards the end of treatment and around recovery time. It’s created a lot of uncertainty around events and gigs, but everyone we work with has been fabulous, flexible and supportive, which is deeply appreciated.

This is why we’ve dropped the idea of doing an online festival this year. Treatment is likely to affect Keith’s energy levels and his voice. Protecting his lovely singing voice through all of this is something we’re working on, but again, there’s no knowing how this is going to play out.

A week in and one of the impacts is just how much work all of this involves. The list of things that need doing every day is long, on top of appointments and daily treatments Monday to Friday. The amount of time and attention this treatment calls for is huge and I certainly hadn’t realised just how big the impact of all that would be until we got to this stage – not that we’ve had long to get to grips with the details. It’s also been a sudden and steep learning curve, with a lot of reading to do and a lot of information to get to grips with, especially around risks and side effects.

There’s every reason to think Keith will come through this without too much difficulty – he’s strong willed, physically tough, courageous and sensible in ways that will serve him well. He’s physically a very healthy person in all other ways and that helps a lot. But, there are no guarantees, and we’ll just have to see whether this works and take it all one day at a time.

One thing I’ve been feeling keenly is how very glad I am Keith chose to be with me, and that I’m the person who gets to take care of him through all of this. It’s not just about physically looking after him, but also about the emotional support he needs, and maintaining a decent quality of life. I know I can hold him through all of this. We’ve built an amazing life together, rich with joy, creativity and good things. We’re supported by good friends, and we’re good at taking care of each other. There’s a lot to learn about how to handle all of this, and handle it well. What I’m most likely to share here is what I’m learning around that.

My aim is to keep doing what I do.  That’s clearly the better mental health choice. The medical advice is to try and maintain your normal life as much as you can, so we’ll be doing that.

Looking back at 2023

(Nimue)

It’s been a momentous year, with some massive upheavals in my life. I learned a lot about myself. Most importantly I learned that I’d been right all along about who I am and what I need to be happy and to flourish. I’ve gone from being a severely stressed, distressed, anxious and malfunctioning person to being a much happier person who is steadily healing. I’ve become able to sleep properly which has made me a lot more bodily well.

This has been all about life with Keith. He allows me the room to be myself, and it turns out that an unstressed me is an easy going person who defaults to being joyful. With space to explore my own needs and feelings, I’ve become a lot more mentally well. His love is supportive, he’s a co-adventurer and a wonderful accomplice for all kinds of glorious things. He’s also someone I can make happy, and discovering my own capacity to delight, uplift and be a good thing has also been a wonderful experience.

I’ve travelled a lot in the UK this year. I’ve walked more than has been possible for many years. I’ve sung and played at events, having reclaimed the viola. I’ve written a lot of fiction and non-fiction alike, with a new non-fic book published back in the summer, the final Hopeless, Maine graphic novel coming out, and having self-published some fiction as well. I’ve been busy, inspired and productive and am setting up for more good stuff next year. I feel like myself – not lost or hurting any more, but able to live in a much more happy and authentic way.

There have been challenges. It’s hardly been an easy year. There have been a lot of practical things to wrangle with, and assorted things that were difficult. We’ve dealt with those as they’ve come, and nothing has proved impossible. There are more challenges ahead in the coming months, we’ll deal with those, too. 

Ir has, without a doubt, been the happiest year of my life so far. 

My main line of thought this time a year ago was that I wanted to prioritise my own happiness. I’ve done that, and it’s been a very good choice. I’d spent too long being persuaded that my own needs didn’t matter much, and I’m not doing that any more. I have a life that allows me to be well and happy, to feel effective and fulfilled. Happy me is a far more creative and productive person than unhappy me was. My confidence has grown alongside my ability to trust my own judgement, and there’s a lot more I can do from here.

Why I’m not using AIs

(Nimue)

I could be using AIs to write a book every day and to create book covers for them all. I’m not. Some of that is because I don’t support the way AI companies are profiting from the work they’ve stolen from creative people to develop this software in the first place. Part is it is because for me that would be both joyless and pointless.

There are a lot of challenges in writing a book. It takes time and work, and the end result tends not to pay very well. I suspect the book a day folk are going to be sorely disappointed about the scope for achieving fame and riches through publishing but there we go. The thing is that I like writing, I like the process.

Many different things go into writing a book. I pull together threads of ideas from all kinds of things I’ve encountered. Often I need to deepen that with research. I spend time thinking about characters and their motives, about themes in the story and about what my readers might need from a story. Then there’s the crafting process – the pace, the precise wording, the quest for the perfect line, or joke, or shiver, depending on what I’m doing. I get a huge kick out of this, and moments when it works are joyful. If I got an AI to do it for me, I’d lose all of that. I wouldn’t get to learn and grow and develop my craft. I wouldn’t feel any satisfaction in finishing a book.

I don’t want to write books that are re-hashes of other people’s books. Yes, like an AI I have learned a lot by reading other people’s work. However one key difference between me and an AI is that I’m trying very hard not to write something that’s already been written. I’m not bringing the plots together from three existing books and mashing them together to claim I have something new. I’m trying very hard to make things that are genuinely new, and genuinely have new things to say. This is really important to me. As a reader I’m also not looking for books that are an awful lot like other books I might have read. I want to be surprised and I seek out authors whose books are distinctive.

Humans have the capacity to imagine things that have never existed. This is a wonderful thing about us. Our imaginations can go anywhere, to any time or place, any kind of life form. We have an infinite capacity for storytelling. This is a magical thing. It’s worth the work and the effort to be able to use your imagination effectively. It’s worth spending the time learning how to craft with this amazing mode of communication that humans have spent so much time developing. Language is beautiful and worthy of your close attention. 

What you can get from spending a few minutes prompting a machine to do something for you is comparatively little. The joy is in the process, in the learning and the pleasure of developing skills. The feelings of success you might get from writing come from the writing itself, and there are no shortcuts to that.