A sense of self

(Nimue)

We get a constant stream of information from our bodies about how we are experiencing the world moment to moment. We have all kinds of senses that tell us about ourselves and our inner states, including things like balance, and where our limbs are in relation to each other.

We also experience ourselves emotionally. How we feel in response to experiences forms a key part of who we think we are. Those emotional responses have been formed by experience, most especially what happens to us in childhood. Humans have evolved as social creatures and our sense of self is deeply informed by the feedback we get from those around us. Being exposed to racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice can really harm a person’s sense of self.

This is why bullying and domestic abuse are so harmful. Part of the process involves undermining a person’s sense of self-worth so that they are easy to control. The person who feels worthless is more likely to accept being treated badly. At the same time, people who feel loved and valued are much less likely to let anyone get away with treating them badly.

I’ve become very aware of how much my sense of self has been shaped by the people I have lived with. It came as a huge surprise to me that Keith finds me easy to live with and fun to be around. I no longer have the constant sense that I am ruining everything and making terrible mistakes.

Today I am sharing a recent portrait Dr Aby drew of me. For those of you who do not know the history, Dr Aby is a Japanese wizard with whom I have collaborated on a number of projects. I can’t see the picture but I wanted to share it anyway. 

Human warmth is such an important thing. How we treat each other has a huge impact on how we feel about ourselves. When we choose to be kind, we experience that as part of who we are, and we shape each others’ inner realities in positive ways. When people seek to reduce and control each other, the outcome can only ever be miserable.

When we support each others’ confidence and joy, the world is better for all of us. 

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Pathways to inspiration

(Nimue)

Over this last week, I’ve been exploring the idea of doing a workshop on seeking sacred inspiration. This will be in July as part of a bigger event. This has had me thinking a lot about the process of finding inspiration. Like many Druids, I consider inspiration to be sacred and it is an essential part of everything I do.

One of the key things for me is having a sense of purpose. I can and do make things for my own amusement. However, I am much more likely to feel inspired when I have an audience in mind. I like to think about who I am creating for. I write for specific venues and events, and find music on those terms as well. Sometimes I write with a particular kind of audience in mind, but most often I write for specific people. When I write for the blog, I always have in mind you readers who most often comment. I have some sense of what interests you and I often take topic cues from comments. The interactive aspect of posting here is really important to me. The same is true on Patreon where I am often inspired to write stories and poetry for people who support me.

One thing that almost always fires my imagination, is being asked to do something. Every month, publisher Harvey Duckman sends out the proposed title for a flash fiction collection. Every month without fail, that title sparks an idea and a short story emerges. For this reason I very much enjoy what happens when I am asked to contribute to other people’s projects.

In my experience, raw inspiration is not hard to come by. What I find difficult is focusing inspiration into something worth doing. Knowing what someone wants from me saves me a lot of time and work. I take real pleasure in knowing I am creating something that is wanted, and that in turn motivates me.

I know there is often a perception of inspiration as a very private lightning bolt. The idea of ‘real’ inspiration being all about personal vision does not hold true for me. I am more inspired and more creative when there is a community aspect to whatever I am doing. For me, the flows of inspiration are responsive and are nourished by interaction. This also goes against the popular image of the lone creator going off on their own to do some special thing. I see connection as a critical part of creativity. I am not one person alone.

Everything I do is held by an ecosystem populated with other peoples’ needs and ideas. Inspiration can then flow to where it is needed, and the whole process is about relationship and sharing. 

4

Singing with ghosts

(Nimue)

One of the things I love about the folk tradition, is the sharing and passing on of songs. New songs enter the tradition when people other than the songwriter pick them up and carry them on. This is very different from karaoke, where you are always close to the original material. It is also very different from only doing a cover, although I think those differences would take a lot of explaining, so I am going to set that topic aside for now.

When we share within the tradition, there is a collective sense of ownership, even when the writer of the song is known. It also means that you can hear many different people sing the same song, or versions of it. Spend enough time in folk spaces and you will form relationships with many songs. This will be about when and where you heard them. Who else you have heard sing them and what that means to you. Thus what is traditional is also often very personal and impactful.

I always have a bit of a moment when I hear someone sing something my grandmother used to sing. One of the members of Carnival of Cryptids learned a song from my grandmother and sings it very much the way she did, which I find deeply affecting.

Last week at the singaround I run, two people sang songs that I associate strongly with my beloved dead. It brought other times and places back vividly and made those people seem very close and present for a while. It also put me in mind of a few lines from Jon Harvison’s wonderful song, Turning of the year; “The spirit of those who’ve gone before, will join this throng and sing once more.”

Traditions carry all kinds of things within them. Some more visible than others. Anyone who shares a song becomes part of the living tradition surrounding that song. As the song continues, so does some part of them. The voices of the dead can come back to us through the songs they used to sing. When I share songs my grandmother used to sing, I keep her memory alive in my mind, and I share something of that memory with my son. Who was very young when she died.

What is remembered, lives. Connecting with the past creates roots and helps us feel less adrift. When we do not feel separated from those who went before, community becomes something that can hold us across time.

4

Relationships with the land

(Nimue)

Like a lot of Druids, I feel a strong sense of belonging to the land. Alongside this, I find ideas of land ownership highly problematic. Here in the UK, as in so many parts of the world, we are so normalised to our current system of land ownership and use that it does not get the scrutiny it needs.

All land ownership is rooted in violence. This is true of land held by families over generations, land owned by companies and land owned by individuals. Where land is owned by indigenous people, there is still all too often a history of violence and colonialism. Owning land is a process that starts with violence, and is often continued through violence, war, conquest and power imbalances.That any land can be owned is a consequence of this historical violence. Even when land is in better hands, that history does not go away.

Most of us do not own land. Most of us are not benefiting from ancestors who were able to take land by force. Most land ownership has little to do with working the land or caring for it. Land simply exists, but we have chosen to commodify it, and allow those with most power to exploit it as they see fit. Most of us suffer in many ways as a consequence.

Owned land is managed for profit and not for the common good. This leads to the relentless harm of wild beings and wild places. Most of us would choose to protect green spaces, not create agricultural wastelands, grouse moors or golf courses, to name a few of the more obvious horrors people create.

When land is farmed, it is done for profit and not for the good of all. As a consequence, farming pollutes rivers and depletes the soil while adding to greenhouse gas emissions. Food grown on nitrate fertilisers is less nutritious, fuelling health problems and obesity. Industrial farming creates a green-coloured wasteland where nothing much can live. We are eating ourselves to death in truly alarming ways.

When land is built on, this too is driven by profit, not need. So in the UK, we have some people owning multiple houses while others rent overcrowded spaces. Housing leaves many people with little access to green space. New housing is increasingly unaffordable and we have so many young people with no prospects for owning their own homes. There is no logic or overview to the building of homes, and far too little thought or resources go into the infrastructure people need when there is new build. Villages can be swamped by the sudden addition of a housing estate.

I like to wonder what would happen if we saw land as a shared good and a common resource. What if we considered land use in terms of human need, recognising that the needs of the natural world are actually part of our human needs? If we could only let go of ideas about private profit and ownership, we could explore equitable sharing and better ways of carrying on as a species.

Very few people are well served by our current systems. Most of us are experiencing the impoverishment of our denuded and exploited landscapes. We all suffer from air pollution, we are all affected by climate change. If the food isn’t good to eat, that impacts on everyone. The people who think their money will protect them are wrong about that. As the saying goes, there is no profit on a dead planet.

We can do better than this. Which calls upon us to imagine better things. Our current systems are not natural or inevitable. They can be changed.

Whatever we can do to seed change for growth in healthier directions has to be worth a try. 

4

Finding your own path

(Nimue)

It is possible to do religion by following the rules and going through the motions. This can give a person a sense of cultural belonging, but that is all it gives. To get something meaningful you have to engage. No one can do it for you. Even if you are operating inside a strong religious framework, the decision to be spiritual is the decision to follow your own path. Living a spiritual life is all about personal experience.

Some years ago, I wrote a small book exploring these ideas. It is a punchy little text, poking about in a lot of different aspects of lived spirituality. Following your own path does not mean having to figure everything out from scratch. There is commonality between all faiths, and looking at what is shared tells us a lot about what is most human and most needed.

Over the last year, I’ve not been able to do much to promote my own work. I’m hugely grateful to my publisher, Moon Books for putting this together, which involves text from the book. At time of posting this has had nearly two thousand views on YouTube, which is heartening.

Spirituality without Structure is easy to pick up from online book vendors, as are all of my Moon Books titles. You can also order it from bookshops.

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Spirituality and parasocial relationships

(Nimue)

The term ‘parasocial relationship’ is one that comes from psychology. It describes an aspect of human experience that I think has huge spiritual implications. It is also one of those things that is so ubiquitous that mostly we don’t even notice it.

A parasocial relationship is one we form without anything reciprocal going on. This includes the human capacity to invest emotion in attachments to celebrities we have never met. For many people it includes the capacity to respond to fictional characters as though those were real people. If a sad film has ever made you cry, you have been affected by a parasocial relationship. For some people this can be so intense that they cannot separate real life from parasocial life in a helpful way. This can manifest as stalking a celebrity, or not being able to separate an actor from the character they play. Stories abound about soap stars being accosted by members of the public who have intense feelings about what their characters have done.

I do not think we could have religion if we did not have this capacity for parasocial relationships. Could we have numinous experiences without it? Could we have a sense of the divine or feelings of communion if we were not able to have intense feelings about people we meet in stories and who are not physically in the room?

This in turn raises interesting questions about the evolution of parasocial relationships, and the evolution of religion. If you come at this from the more religious angle, there is reason to think that we evolved this because we needed the spiritual dimension of life and this aptitude allows that.

One of the features of the parasocial is that it enables us to learn from each others’ stories. Whatever else this is, I have no doubt that it is deeply involved with our being storytelling creatures. Our ability to learn from each others’ stories confers obvious evolutionary advantages. What one person takes a great risk to learn, can then be shared with others at no risk at all. This clearly helped our ancestors to survive and is an important aspect of our being a social and cooperative species.

Like many human attributes, this parasocial capacity can help us or harm us. I don’t think celebrity culture does us much good at all. We are not currently picking leaders and influencers who genuinely help us to learn and thrive. A useful evolutionary trick seems to be leading us astray more often than not.

I suspect that how we do these kinds of relationships is informed by how much empathy we feel, how vulnerable we are willing to be and how open we are to growth. Our current culture encourages us to obsess over superficial things. This links to consumerism, capitalism and the idea that you can buy happiness. We are focused on the wrong kinds of answers, so of course we make idols of the people who lead us in the wrong direction. Our basic evolutionary tricks are being used to fuel that mad capitalist system we have invented.

Seeking our parasocial relationships in a spiritual way is clearly better for us than following the next famous disaster who can show us how to destroy ourselves. We do not have to line up to jump off the cliff. Better to bring this capacity to the voices of winds and rivers, to trees, the land and to deities we find helpful.

There is no way currently of knowing exactly how or why we evolved the capacity for parasocial relationships. We seem to like them and need them. I think they have scope to help us or harm us, depending on who and what we invest in.

Identifying with brands, corporate media and aggressive politics leads us one way, but other stories and relationships are available and give us better options.

3

Mayday celebrations and lessons about love

(Nimue)

Much of the English folk material relating to May is about sex. If a song starts out with someone heading out on a bright May morning then you can be sure that there will be courting at the very least. The month itself stands as an indicator of love, sex, casual shagging, romance, relationship and even marriage. This might simply be because the sap is rising and there is a decent chance of it being warm enough to get your clothes off outside. It is worth noting that May songs tend to have the action set outdoors.

This is cuckoo season, and the bird has a slightly odd role in folk traditions. The cuckoo’s nest is a euphemism for the pubic region. Songs in which something is happening with someone’s cuckoo’s nest can be confusing to the uninitiated, because of course actual cuckoos do not build nests.

By happy coincidence more than by design, Keith and I started living together at this point three years ago. We have been through one hell of a lot of difficult things since then, but even so these have been the happiest years of my life.

Life is always going to throw up challenges, none of us are insulated from that. What makes all the difference is how we are held by our relationships. Adversity is so much more bearable when you meet it with love and support. All of our connections are relevant here. Ties of friendship and family, community and all those more fleeting human interactions, too. We are impacted by how our societies hold us and by the socioeconomic systems in which we live.

Our closest relationships are the ones that tend to impact us most. A person’s sense of self and wellbeing is often shaped by those most intimate connections. Living with someone who is inattentive and unavailable can turn a materially reasonable life into a nightmare. Equally, warmth and mutual support can turn nightmarish times into endurable ones. Where there is love, there is scope to find the best in everything.

One of the greatest lessons for me in recent years has been learning what it means to be loved. After a lifetime of pouring out love but struggling with loneliness, this has been a revelation. To be met on a daily basis with warmth and welcome is a remarkable thing. Feeling safe and appreciated, and free to express myself has been deeply healing. At the same time I have had the pleasure of watching Keith flourish. Met with love he has become more relaxed, confident and creative. Both of us struggle far less with depression than we used to, and have more to give as a consequence.

When people are only interested in what they can take, life becomes mean and narrow. When we are all able to give and receive, life is richer and we all have more scope to flourish. When we nurture each other, we all have more to give. When we focus on scarcity, jealousy and competition, we all have fewer options. People who only know how to take, experience far less joy than people who are able to give and receive.

Love is a choice we can make every day, in our simplest interaction and activities. Anything we do, can be done with warmth and care. When we make the choice to be generous and open-hearted, we can take the sting out of the worst things life might throw at us. Each small and everyday act of warmth has transformative power. Love is something to seek and celebrate all year round.

In the meantime, may all your cuckoo’s nests be safe and happy on whatever terms work best for you. 

3

Seeing by not seeing

(Nimue)

Forgive me for the title that sounds like a mangled Zen koan! This is a post about blindness, philosophy and things I have learned from Taoism.

I have read many interpretations of the Tao Te Ching over the years. It is a text that fascinates me and that I keep coming back to. There are many ideas in it that can be boiled down to a sense of do without doing. The sage makes no effort and yet everything is done, is very much the vibe. Sometimes, if we try too hard we just get in our own way. This is often true of spiritual practises, where trying too hard can make us rigid, dogmatic and unspiritual. 

I am in the weird position that if I look at something directly, I can’t see it at all. This is really unhelpful for eye tests and also pretty useless when trying to look at anything specific. I have what is technically called eccentric vision in the one eye still capable of seeing a bit. This is due to scar tissue from my retinal detachment. What I can see depends very much on my not trying too hard to see it in the first place. This puts me in mind of Taoist thinking most days.

Back when I was studying Tai Chi, I was introduced to the notion of the soft gaze. This is a technique for looking at the world. You aren’t looking for anything in particular, and you try to bring as little judgement as possible to your gaze, just being open to softly seeing what is there. I brought this approach into my walking pilgrimage practice. I found it significantly increased my ability to notice wild beings. It opened my awareness to more of the beauty around me and helped me to avoid looking at the world through a veil of assumptions.

The soft gaze now seems to be the most relevant tool for dealing with eccentric vision. I cannot try too hard or look too directly. However, if I relax, soften my gaze and let myself be open to whatever comes, then more gets in.

Living well with my very limited sight is demanding a radical shift in my thinking. My default problem solving approach has always been to strive and to try hard. If I try to look at the world that way, I see less of it. I’m obliged to learn softer ways of being in the world in order to get the best results. This is turning out to be a hefty life lesson with a lot of implications.

As I learn to see by not trying so hard to see, all of those Taoist ideas about doing by not doing make slightly more sense. As do ideas about learning to flow rather than pushing all the time. 

2

Healing by feeling

(Nimue)

Over the last year, I have been trying to figure out how to heal both my body and my mind. It is increasingly obvious that this is going to be a holistic project and not just trying to mend different broken pieces. I have explored a lot of body science, and some important themes are emerging for me.

By 2020, I was so deep in dissociation that I could not feel my own skin. I had hardly any body awareness left. This kind of numbness turns out to be a common enough trauma response. It is what happens when you spend so much time in a panic state of freeze that you don’t ever emerge from it. Diabetes has been a great teacher in this regard. My blood sugar goes up in response to body stressors, including being tired, hungry and cold. In monitoring the blood sugar, I have learned to notice a bit more about when my body isn’t feeling right. I am learning all the time about my need for both rest and movement, comfort, quiet and more.

For a long time, I lived a life that undermined my physical and mental health. Relentless work and exhaustion took a huge toll. Relationship stress was a massive factor and I am still making sense of what was done to me. There was no room for me to safely feel many of my feelings and so I retreated into the relative protection of numbness. 

The more I learn about stress and trauma, the more I have to consider the idea that my feelings are valid. For a long time it felt as though my feelings, and the things I thought of as needs, were the real source of all my problems. It has taken me a while to start accepting that my needs could be real and that my feelings are not intrinsically problematic.

One of the things brought home to me by books about the nervous system is this: unmet need is stressful at the very least and in excess becomes traumatic. Trauma is in essence about unmet need, most especially the need to feel safe. At the moment, some of my needs can trigger panic attacks because of how those needs were ignored and disrespected in the past. Trying not to be alarmed by feelings and not to see them as potentially dangerous, is a work in progress. 

I spend time every day just paying attention to my body and trying to find out how I feel. It’s like excavating layers of archaeology in a fort built up over a long time. There is a lot to unearth and make sense of. There are many feelings I suppressed in the past that need carefully bringing to the surface to be named and understood. The amount of mess to sift through is daunting, but this is what it will take to heal. Where I have broken down areas of intense dissociation, my circulation has improved. I am able to let go of some of the considerable tension I hold in my body. The background level of panic is easing. That in turn is making it apparent to me just how afraid I have been, and for how long. 

I note also that my anxiety has not been a problem derived from anxious thoughts. Anxiety treatment often starts with the assumption that if you could stop thinking anxious thoughts, that would cure the anxiety. This does not help at all when you have very realistic anxiety caused by what has happened and is likely to happen. If it is happening right now, what you have is appropriate fear, and you can’t cure that by thinking differently. The only cure for fear is not to be stuck in a situation that frightens you. Recovery from trauma seems to be about teaching body and mind to feel safe, something you can only do when you are safe.

I have been shutting down as a coping mechanism for a long time. My own emotions are panic triggers because I was led to believe that my feelings were causing all the problems. In reality what I had was a cold and uncaring partner who would not take responsibility for anything and who did not treat me like I was a person.

I have a lot of healing and rebuilding to do as I learn to trust myself and trust my feelings. 

10

Celebrating new life as a blind Druid

(Nimue)

My experience of the seasons has been dramatically impacted by my going blind. However, I am still seeking connection and celebrating the turning of the year.

I have enough limited vision to make out a few things. For example, I can see the new leaves if I get very close to them. I can smell the difference as under the trees everything smells greener and more alive. I rely on Keith to tell me about the plants around me. Some of the larger flowers are just about perceptible, although I do not see much in the way of colour.

I have been able to smell the bluebells and the wild garlic, which helps. In my area, these are significant presences as we shift into late spring and I value having some experience of them.

I am incredibly fortunate in that I live near to the wildfowl and wetlands centre founded by Peter Scott. This place has been important to me my whole life, and is very accessible. At this time of year, many native birds on the site are breeding. These birds are technically wild but are used to people. That makes it possible to get very close to them without upsetting them. On my most recent visit I had a close encounter with a family of geese, and the joy of just about being able to see the goslings. There were also a cluster of young moorhens, who I could hear cheeping. These were tiny dark pompoms on legs, and I could not see them at all, only the parents. 

There is a strange ongoing mixture of grief, joy and frustration here. Everything I can perceive feels miraculous. I can be wildly excited by a flash of colour or fleetingly getting the shape of something. I am really alert to everything I can get from my other senses. At the same time, grief over what I have lost is a constant, and frustration is regular and perhaps inevitable.

The turning of the year teaches us that falling away, loss and decay are part of the natural cycle. There is nothing inherently unfair about any of this because loss is part of the natural order of things. The wildflowers are still beautiful even if I cannot see them. The young chicks are fragile wonders. Most of them will not survive to adulthood, because that too is part of what nature does. In new life there is death, and in death there is life. 

Learning to understand and accept life is really important to me. Part of that understanding is about recognising what I can change and what I cannot. After a year of blindness I have stopped being surprised by it, and stopped expecting things to change. Some things come to us in cycles and some do not. There will always be wonders to celebrate and losses to mourn. The two go hand in hand. Without love for what is, there could be no grief over the loss of it.

I choose the path of love and grief, rather than trying to protect myself from life.

Photos by Keith

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