Experiencing different realities

(Nimue)

We each experience the world in our own precise way. This is informed by our experiences and beliefs, our expectations, choices and behaviour. We get some say in that, and it is possible to radically change how you experience life, although it isn’t easy, and the more dramatically you want to change your perspective, the more work it takes.

This is especially relevant around spirituality. Two people in the same ritual will not experience that ritual in the same way. Shared experiences can mean radically different things to people. It’s important to have space for that and not to try and dictate how people ‘should’ feel or what their experiences are ‘supposed’ to mean.

It can be disorientating when someone else’s take on an experience is radically different from your own. It can leave you feeling that either you must be wrong, or they must be wrong. Life is often much more plural and complex than that. Much of the time it’s not too hard to manage having a different take on things, but sometimes it can become really problematic.

What do you do when someone else asserts that their version of reality is right, and yours is wrong? This happens a lot around spirituality. When it happens in the context of massive power imbalances, people can be forced to act as though they accept a reality that is not real for them. That’s a really psychologically damaging thing to experience. That kind of controlling can be done deliberately in the context of cults, and other abusive, manipulative situations.

At the same time it is of course possible to be wrong. We can all misunderstand things or not have a context for making sense of what we’re experiencing. Some of us jump at shadows. Sometimes being told that you’ve got it wrong is a helpful thing, if you can hear it. In safe and sane situations, there’s evidence to back up the right take, or explanations that make sense. In healthy situations, a challenge to your perceptions is likely to improve things for you, not distress you.

Being able to relate to a consensus reality is vital for our mental health and practical functionality. Being able to hold our own understandings of things is also vital. Healthy situations will let you have your own take on things to a fair degree, and unhealthy situations will tend to want to control your understanding and keep it in line with someone else’s view.

These are not easy things to judge. Perhaps the most useful question to ask is how able to function effectively you are. Being able to function effectively indicates having a healthy relationship with reality. Problems in functioning, difficulty making decisions and not being able to get the outcomes you expected can suggest that you might not have a good or useful understanding of what’s going on. If someone else is trying to impose a reality on you to control you, then the ways in which that impacts on your functionality can feel like you’re going mad, not like you’re being manipulated. It’s not easy to recognise this when it’s happening.

Druidry and forgiveness

(Nimue)

Forgiveness is often held up as the spiritual thing to do. However, if you’ve read any broadly Celtic myths, you’ll know that it doesn’t feature heavily in those traditions. Where does that leave us as modern Druids?

While going on an epic revenge quest and dying tragically makes for a good story, it doesn’t make for a good life. What stories we have of the ancient Druids indicate that they were peacemakers in a culture that could be quite violent– at least some of the time. Forgiveness is often key to peace. However, the forgiveness that allows harm to continue isn’t a basis for real peace at all.

Sometimes we have to decide whether to forgive or stay angry. There isn’t a neat answer to this that will work in all situations.

Ask what it’s costing you to stay angry. Also ask what it would cost you not to stay angry. Protect your boundaries, and if the reasons to be angry continue, forgiveness is not an answer.

Ask what good forgiveness could do. What would it allow? Could you move forward in some meaningful way if you were able to forgive and put it behind you?

For me, it matters a great deal whether someone asks for forgiveness. If someone owns a mistake and apologises then normally I would want to forgive them and move on. Not so much if they keep doing the same things and apologising, beyond a certain points that’s just manipulative. The person who wants forgiving but has no intention of acting responsibly or sorting anything is someone I am unlikely to keep dealing with.

Often when people hurt us it isn’t deliberate, or about us. Accidental harm is something I will tend to forgive, along with bruises to pride and stuff that is unfortunate and uncomfortable. When it’s obvious that people were doing their best, or what they needed to do for their own wellbeing, I don’t usually take it personally.

We  all normally make exceptions for children and teens. But then, a person who is young, learning, dealing with wild bursts of hormones and so forth, needs the room to make mistakes and try again. I’ve also done a lot of forgiving around other people’s mental health issues in the past, but not always. Sometimes I’ve needed to act to protect myself.

Compassion is always a consideration, I think. That includes acknowledging what you can bear, and not seeking to martyr yourself in difficult situations. Declining to forgive can be a learning opportunity for someone who is not acting in a fair or responsible way. Forgiveness can, in some situations, turn into enabling. It’s not easy to call that, and these are seldom comfortable decisions to have to make.

There are no hard rules about when we should forgive, and for Druids there is no rule that we are supposed to always forgive. Sometimes it isn’t the answer. Some things are truly unforgiveable, and we’re seeing a lot of that on the world stage at the moment.

Being committed

(Nimue)

I wrote recently about how asking people to make high levels of commitment can exclude a lot of people. Today I want to explore what kinds of commitments we make ourselves, and what we ask of ourselves.

Promises are important things, and if we don’t keep them, that impacts on our relationships. This is true of our human interactions, and also of any promises we make in a spiritual way. Commitment is a matter of honour.

It’s important to think about what you promise. Can you really do it? If you promise to do something every day, or every week, how long can you sustain that for? What are the consequences if you don’t? I’ve been an everyday blogger for years, and it’s rare I miss a day. It’s also not a huge problem if I do. I also put up Patreon content every week, and because that’s more of a contract with the people who support me, I feel honour bound to deliver. Similar issues apply with our spiritual commitments.

It is better not to promise than to promise and then not be able to deliver. It is better to make small and realistic promises and keep them. In the heat of the moment, inspired and perhaps intoxicated by ritual and a sense of magic, it might be tempting to commit yourself to some big, dramatic thing. It might sound good and feel good and important, but if you haven’t thought it through and can’t manage the commitment it will do you more harm than good.

Broken promises don’t just cause harm in terms of damaging our relationships. They also impact on us. We find ourselves unreliable and untrustworthy. It’s hard to feel good about yourself when you know your word isn’t worth much and you don’t follow through. It’s hard to respect yourself or take yourself seriously on those terms. And if you are able to believe your own PR and put that ahead of your actions, you will damage your relationship with reality.

Of course we all find ourselves now and then in situations where we can’t do what we intended. There are plenty of honourable ways of dealing with that – getting to the promised thing when we can, apologising, compensating, re-balancing the situation in some other way. We can be flawed and human and dealing with the messy realities of life and still remain honourable and just in what we do. We can ask forgiveness. Sooner or later each of us will let someone down, or drop a ball accidentally. You haven’t failed as a person or a Druid if that happens – not if you are honest about it and deal with the consequences.

Sometimes promises cannot be kept. If what you agreed to isn’t what happens, then there’s a limit to what you can do around keeping your own promises. If circumstances change, sometimes we have to renegotiate how things work, or put down things that just aren’t viable any more. To break a promise clearly and give fair warning about it can be a workable and honourable choice.

Big, impossible promises can be a form of self-sabotage. It can be a way of setting yourself up to fail. Realistic promises can help us grow and develop, and can create helpful structure. Ongoing promises (like posting to a blog every day) can be satisfying and of benefit to the person doing it. Unrealistic promises lead to stress and discomfort at best.

Gratitude and balance

(Nimue)

In winter, the bedroom window has a view of the nearby stream, which we greatly appreciate. In summer, the leaves on the trees enclose the space and it feels like living in a secluded treehouse. Both are lovely.

It would be easy enough to go the other way, lamenting the loss of the stream view in the summer, or bemoaning in the winter the visibility of nearby houses. It isn’t always the case that we shape our realities with our choices, but sometimes that really is the case. In terms of everyday life, our choices about what we focus on have a huge impact.

When you don’t have a lot of good options, it isn’t possible to make good choices. However, unless your life is beset by constant strife, there are usually some good options available. I’ve lived through some grim domestic abuse, but even then a beautiful flower or a pretty sky could still impact on me and I was always open to those things.

When the only good things are the tiny joys, it can feel like a diet of crumbs. It’s still better than nothing, and there’s a lot to be said for going after those crumbs. It’s also important not to internalise the idea that the diet of crumbs is either enough, or deserved.

The most unhappy people I have met along the way have not also been the most unfortunate people I’ve known. What the unhappy people have had in common is a tendency to focus on whatever makes them unhappy and to ignore or reject better things. People I know who have endured truly terrible things actually tend to be better at making the best of anything good that comes their way. Some of this is clearly about perspective and whether a person sees small setbacks for what they are, or as massive and unfair disasters.

We all experience horrible, difficult things sooner or later. To some degree we get a choice about what we do with it and how we carry it. When you’re recovering from trauma, the trauma can continue to dominate your world, and that takes a while to sort out. You can’t recover if the trauma is ongoing. Sometimes all you can do is try to focus on surviving.

Taking time for gratitude can really help with all of this. Identifying good experiences and giving them extra attention can be part of a healing process. Watching out for what good there is can help make awful situations more bearable. Alongside this it’s important to be aware of the things not to be grateful for. You do not have to be grateful for the lessons if you’re being crushed by what’s happening to you. If devastating experience has forced you to be strong, you do not have to be grateful for having to find that strength.

Being well, and having a good relationship with the rest of the world depends on having a realistic understanding of what’s going on. It’s worth shrugging off the small hurts and stresses to focus on better things. It’s important to acknowledge deep wounds and serious harm and not to try and persuade ourselves that this is somehow ok. Balance, as ever, is the key.

Being in the flow

(Nimue)

Sometimes going with the flow is a good choice, because it is the choice that involves least fighting. It’s an idea that comes up a lot in Taoist thinking and in the Tao Te Ching – the idea of being like water, flowing, and not trying to push back. Taking that approach can result in more peaceful and gentle ways of being in the world.

There’s also a line of thought that says ‘Don’t go with the flow. Dead things go with the flow.’ Fish tend to swim against the current to stay in one place in moving water. Salmon and eels have to work their way upstream to reproduce. Sometimes what’s called for is resistance and pushing against the direction you are being carried in. If you aren’t in a gentle and safe space, then the flow might be going somewhere vile.

I have an experience of flow that goes beyond this. It’s not about being carried along by whatever immediate forces bump into you. It’s about being in tune with something deeper and more underlying and being able to work with it. This is more like managing your sails so that you can go where you want to go even if the wind isn’t blowing exactly that way. Or it might be about working with undercurrents. It’s the spring tide that comes up the river even though the river mostly flows the other way. Life is full of such moments and opportunities.

Going with the flow can be a very superficial, unconsidered sort of thing. Seeking the flow, looking for what aligns and how best to navigate is a more deliberate process. It means being open and sensitive, and alert. Sometimes it requires wild leaps in the dark, acts of faith, trust and optimism, but I often find those work better for me than being cautious. Getting to where you want and need to be isn’t always going to be a smooth and easy process, sometimes you have to get in the metaphorical river and wade upstream.

It’s such an exciting feeling though, when it works. Like riding a wave, freewheeling down a hill, there’s a letting go and also a second by second process of working with what’s around you. When it works it is wild, and beautiful and Things Happen in unexpected ways. Sometimes you can even become the flow that lifts and moves other people.

(With thanks to Wanne for the inspiration.)

Killing time, saving time

(Nimue)

The language we use around time can have a strikingly capitalis quality to it. When we talk about saving time or spending time there’s an economic echo in that language. ‘Time is money’ as the saying goes. Wasting time, killing time, free time, time management… how we think about time is inevitably informed by other aspects of our cultures.

Clock time is a relatively recent invention, and ties us to industrial and working. This leads us to the idea that we have some ‘free’ time we can ‘spend’ in the way we choose, rather than to a feeling that our days and nights, breaths and moments belong entirely to us. They are part of us. Time is our heartbeat, and we are creatures who live in the flow of it.

Capitalist thinking inclines us to feel that we have to use our time productively. We must be busy, and doing something and ideally that something contributes to either earning or spending money. We work longer to have the money to buy time and labour saving devices. Our time is not saved by this. As many of us are paid by the hour, a lot of worth and cost can be understood in terms of the time it represents. It can be a useful perspective, but it can also suck the vitality our of lives.

It’s interesting to think about different kinds of language that we can bring to thoughts about time. ‘Gentle time’ has become an important one for me. I like quiet time and social time, and time that feels expansive. I like slow days and languid days, because these lend themselves to daydreaming.

There is no time I want to kill. I don’t have to be busy, and I don’t have to be occupied – gentle time allows for window gazing, for being present to a journey, or waiting for what comes next in a relaxed way. 

There is time that I give and time that I devote, and those are happy choices. Inevitably there are deadlines and challenges and busy days when I have to juggle and be clever, life requires this sometimes. But I don’t have to make it the default or treat it as something natural and inevitable. I don’t have to live there. No one should have to live there. Time is too precious for that.

(With thanks to Irisanya Moon for alerting me to this language in the first place.)

The virtues of hope

(Nimue)

Recently, I was reminded by philosopher Brendan Myers about the powerful, ethical reasons for staying hopeful. (If you aren’t familiar with Brendan’s work, I can recommend his books.)

The evil things humans do comes from many motives, including greed, selfishness and disinterest in the wellbeing of others. When people slide into apathy and feelings of powerlessness, they become enablers for whatever awfulness is going on around them. Doing nothing is a choice that supports whatever is going on.

Hope is a good antidote to this. Hope for better things, and the ability to imagine how the world could be made better go hand in hand. We won’t make meaningful change if we neither imagine it nor believe in it. 

With this in mind, the value of cultivating hope becomes more apparent. The personal battles to resist despair become distinctly political acts that have implications for the world as a whole. If you cannot do anything else, fighting to hang on to the idea that there is hope for better things and that keeping your hope alive matters, is important. At the same time, those of us who are better resourced can do our best to lift and encourage anyone we see struggling.

It’s easy to rubbish things, to knock people down, sneer at their dreams and meet their hope with unkindness and cynicism. Doing this takes little effort and no imagination. It calls for no wisdom, skill or insight. It gives a certain limited power to people who feel unable to act in positive ways. For the person who feels powerless, the path of cruelty and destruction clearly has its temptations. I believe it’s often a consequence of not feeling good about themselves.

Breaking things is easy. Creating things takes skill, knowledge and time. One of the key things for giving people hope is helping them to imagine that they have it in them to be a force for good. If you can imagine yourself making a good and welcome contribution I think you are more likely to want to invest in that. There isn’t much real pleasure in being destructive and no one will love you for acting in toxic ways. 

Creating hope calls for creating community, and space for people to share and to shine. When we work together to improve something, our combined power becomes larger than the sum of its parts. When we affirm each other and amplify each other’s efforts, we get more done.

Hope is something we can create together, and hang on to together. Sustaining hope is itself a meaningful act of resistance against all that is wrong in the world, and it gives us the foundations from which we really can build something better.

Centering my own experience

(Nimue)

Like a lot of Pagan bloggers, I write primarily about my own experiences. This is a considered thing for me and there are important reasons for doing it. 

Firstly, my Druidry is very specifically about the place i live in. What works for me is deeply informed by the landscape I call home, and by the way the seasons specifically play out here. The history in this landscape, the way my family history intersects with it, and a whole host of things around that inform what I do. It’s very personal. I can’t tell you how to do Druidry on your own terms because if you were trying to do broadly what I do, it would have to work differently. My hope is that by talking about what’s personal to me, readers can decide how or if to explore any of that.

I have biases, privileges I’m not alert to and all the usual human mess. I don’t want to present myself as some kind of all-knowing authority on How To Druid. I’m a work in progress, my Druidry is also a work in progress. I struggle with things, and I hope that by making those visible I can avoid any impression that I have it all figured out and that therefore people should do what I say. You, dear reader, are also no doubt a messy work in progress. Hopefully in seeing my messiness you will feel more empowered to get on with your own explorations rather than being slowed down by concerns about not being good enough. Perfectionism is toxic.

Stories are a good way of sharing information. Often what I’m doing here is sharing stories about my own journey. Your mileage may vary. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot from other people telling their stories, especially around domestic abuse, living with hypermobility and making sense of neurodivergence as well as the sharing of tales from the Druid path. I like stories. I like the way in which the telling of a story invites other people to also tell stories and it’s great when people share their experiences in the comments. 

There are of course personal aspects to this. Blogging is cheap, therapy is expensive. I find the process of writing helps me clarify my own thoughts and work things through. I also find if I put something personal into the world there’s often someone who finds that helpful for figuring out their stuff, or someone ahead of me in dealing with whatever I’m trying to make sense of. The scope to benefit from each other’s experience appeals to me. It’s encouraging when people come back with parallel experiences or can say ‘I’ve been where you are and it can get better’. It’s affirming when things I struggle with are recognised by other people and not rubbished – I think it’s normal to fear being rubbished by others. 

For me, the process of sharing my experiences is very much a process of wanting to learn and change. I’m working my way through the impact of a lot of trauma. I’m dealing with an array of challenges. I want to do better, to stand in my own power, manage my own thoughts and be deliberate in my life. Blogging has been a tool for helping me feel more in control of my experiences and more able to deliberately choose how I live. It works for me because I’m a very words-orientated person. No doubt other strategies would work better for other people.

How do you know yourself?

(Nimue)

‘Know Thyself’ was an instruction carved onto the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. If you mean to leave a considered life and to act deliberately, this is an essential foundation. Of course who we are changes over time as we grow and learn. But how do we know who we really are? How do we find our authentic selves?

There are a great many different forces acting on each of us. We are each born into a specific family, informed by long ancestral lines. Our families exist in the context of the cultures that surround them. We grow up exposed to ideas about who we are and what we should aspire to. Adverts tell us what to want, politicians tell us what matters, employment demands conformity, fashion dictates our uniforms and so forth. 

It’s not easy to find your true self if you spend most of your time in situations where people are loud and clear about who you are supposed to be. It’s not easy to be authentic when economic pressures dominate how you spend your time. It is worth asking what you’d do differently if you had the financial freedom to do what you please, because that tends to be about what we most love and value.

It is possible to figure yourself out to some degree through the fine art of navel gazing. However, the more information you have to reflect on the more effective it is to ponder your own self. I don’t think the truth of who we are lies in what we think of ourselves. I think the true self is measured through action. Who we are is best expressed by what we do. You can’t make good choices when you don’t have good options, and this afflicts many of us but at the same time, what you do around the stuff you can’t control is also a measure of self.

Who you are when everything is easy may not be as telling as who you are under pressure. Who are you when you are afraid, or hurting? How do you act when things don’t go your way? What do you do when you’re thwarted, limited, let down or otherwise set back? Life throws up challenges all the time, and what we do in response to them tells us a lot about who we are. The more open we are to recognising ourselves in tough situations, the more whole and integrated we can be. None of us is perfect and saintly in all things. To be passionate and authentic and to care deeply about things will also make you messy and complicated sometimes. Seeing how the best parts of yourself relate to the most challenging parts of yourself can be illuminating – often these things run close together.

There’s a power in learning to be radically honest with yourself. That means uncovering your strengths and shortcomings alike. It means knowing where you are vulnerable and what you don’t handle well. Know what the best of yourself is and also know when and why you don’t meet your own expectations. Know how you impact on others but don’t let what other people want you to be entirely define you.

Life is an experiment. We try things and see if they work for us. We explore ways of being in the world, ways of thinking, relating and acting. Hopefully with enough experimenting we get to know who we are, and we become wiser, more patient with ourselves, more at peace with things. It’s good to feel like a work in progress and not like something that has gained its final form already. Know yourself, and know that tomorrow could radically change that for you.

Living in the moment

(Nimue)

I’m not a fan, honestly. I like the idea of being present for everything, but you can bring presence to a situation without trying to de-contextualise it. Context matters. We bring our knowledge, understanding and expectations to every moment we experience. It’s a big part of how we know what to do. Being purely in the moment is safe enough when you’re sat meditating, but you can’t live like it – because we need our knowledge of what’s harmful to us.

Acting ethically depends on a sense of past and future. You have to be able to see the scope for causality, and that what you do has consequences. Standing in your own power also requires this awareness. You can’t act deliberately if you aren’t in a conscious relationship with the past and the future and aware of how those relate to the present moment. You can free yourself from feelings of responsibility and obligation by living only in the moment and that is not a choice that leads to honourable actions.

Sometimes the whole notion of living in the moment depends on privilege. If you’re confident that you don’t have to think about the future, then either you are materially wealthy or you know that someone else will catch you. The ‘providence’ people living only in the moment depend on is mostly the labour and generosity of others. 

Many people like to express the idea that animals and other creatures live only in the moment and that all this past/future business is just an unnatural human affectation. This is not so. All living creatures learn and depend on a certain amount of knowledge. Creatures can be traumatised, can be trained, and can anticipate things that they want. These things depend on a relationship with time. Hunting itself is an act of anticipation. Creatures will grieve for lost ones. There’s nothing unnatural about being informed by the past or invested in the future.

To be present in the moment is to turn up with your whole self. You are the sum of your experiences. How you experience any moment is shaped by how you came to it. To be present is to bring this current experience into the narrative of your life and take it forward with you. It might make a very different kind of sense if you are trying to transcend this life and escape from body, physicality and lived experience. But that’s not Paganism.

In practice we cannot separate ourselves from where we have been and where we are going. We can pretend to be free from the experience of time, and we can decline to think about the past or the future, but it doesn’t get us far. It might have some value as a meditative practice, but like many things we do in meditation it’s not something you can do all the time. To try and do so defies your animal relationship with the passing of time, in days, seasons and years. The wheel of the year turns, the seasons change, and to appreciate the ways in which one moment is not like another, we need to be present.

Appreciate what you have, make the best of every experience and be alive to the details of your own life. Be present.