Nimue Brown's Blog

All standing stones seem to me to invite touch. The careful placing of hands on rock has always been part of how I respond to these ancient sites. Touching and tracing the contours with affection and respect, mindful of the wellbeing of lichens and other such spirits of place.

Some taller stones invite you to stand with them or lean on them. Others are good for sitting with. Yesterday at Avebury I sat, and leaned my back against one of the large stones. When I tilted my head back I found that the shape of the rock supported my skull perfectly.

Avebrury is the most tactile stone circle I have thus far encountered. Each stone seems to welcome physical communion, having shapes that support and hold an array of body parts and postures. My first visit, more than half my lifetime ago involved a great many discoveries about how my body could be held by that space.

It is tempting to think that these stones may have been selected and stood up with consciousness of their tactile powers.

I find Avebury to be a welcoming place. Simply being there is nourishing and inspiring. There is magic in just showing up and letting the place happen to you, without assumption or intent.

Last time I visited back in March I could hardly see anything and had to be guided to a stone I could touch. Yesterday the stones were visible to me, appearing in the strange mists of my vision as otherworldly giants, more alive to me than ever. Even as my perception shift costs me in many ways, it offers back unexpected gifts, too.

(Nimue)

All too often, we don’t appreciate things that seem normal to us. I’ve run into that repeatedly this year.

Human faces are amazing. Each one is unique, shaped by ancestry and life. Each face conveys a wealth of expression and feeling, which is a key part of how we communicate with each other. Conversations in person are the richer for this, and much harder without those cues.

At this point I can see faces when people are very close to me – which is fine for closer relationships but not optimal when dealing with strangers.

During my most blind period, I missed faces, and the beauty of expression. Smiles are glorious things, and a world in which no smiles are perceptible is much the poorer. To be able to see warmth and welcome in someone’s eyes is a wonderful thing. The way faces show kindness, joy and delight is also really beautiful.

These are such everyday things that it is easy to overlook them when you ca see them. Loss can be a great teacher. I hope I can inspire you to take a little more time for the everyday wonder of human expression, and the intrinsic beauty of faces.

(Nimue)

This is a recent photo of Keith and myself on Rodborough common – a hilltop near our home. It was the first time I’d tried walking up there since the vision loss. I can’t make much sense of the ground – I see little detail and have no depth perception. On the flat I manage pretty well, but on uneven walks I need my stick, Keith’s arm and a lot of verbal guidance. He’s very good at talking the terrain as we go, translating the shape of the hill into useful information. Walking like this isn’t easy, but it is possible.

I can no longer see much of the landscape. My distance vision is very poor, but enough to give me the shape of the hills. As I know this land well, I don’t need a lot of prompts to know where I am. I often navigate from memory.

Moing through the landscape means feeling the shape of it. I can hear flowing water, birds, wind in trees. I can smell fallen apples and late flowers. I’m using my other senses as much as I can. I’m also drawing a lot on memory. I benefit in so many ways from the treasure stored up in previous years. Sometimes I can help Keith identify plants simply because I know what’s grown somewhere in the past.

I find intense joy being out on the land even with all the challenges. Moving, feeling and being present are powerful experiences. I’m missing a lot of the beauty of the world, but remain alert to everything I can experience. The trick, I am learning, is to find workarounds whenever possible, and to make the most of what I have.

Having a sense of purpose is associated with good mental health and also with longevity. The Okinawa lifestyle is something to check out if you want to explore that. I don’t believe that any of us has a specific purpose, although if you do and find it helpful than don’t let me get in your way! I have more of an existentialist outlook and I think we have to create our own meaning in life.

For me then, being purposeful does not rest on the idea that I am in this world to do something specific. My sense of what is purpseful derives instead from thinking about what would be good. What would help, uplift or inspire? What can I do that would bring joy or comfort into the world? Of late the answers to those questions haven’t looked like much at all. I have struggled with feeling adrift and not feeling purposeful.

Being able to type again helps greatly. Having more scope to communicate has given me back some sense of purposefulness. It’s also fair to say that writing – in all its many forms – has been so central to my life that the loss of it was disorientating during the months of not being able to see much at all. This week I have regained a part of myself, and that makes a lot of odds.

During the months when I could do very little, I thought a great deal about what I wanted to do. Writing poetry loomed surprisingly large. The first thing I physically wrote was a poem – on paper and using a marker pen. At the moment I’m not sure how anything will work, it is all baby steps at the moment, wobbly and nervous. I need to focus on doing the best and the most that I can with what little I have. I need to figure out what that would mean, and what is most important for me. It is all a process.

(Nimue)

Yesterday I got my new glasses. Today, with an extra lamp and my face very close to the keyboard, it is just about possible to type, albeit slowly. I have been able to read comments here – not an easy thing either, but possible.

I need better tech – there are keyboards for partially sighted people. A better screen will help, too. In the meantime I am learning to use what I have. It may take my brain a little while to adapt to this limited vision and I may still be healing. I get very tired very quickly as this all takes an outrageous amount of effort.

But it id possible, and that’s worth so much.

From here, I get to focus on putting my life back together and rebuilding my health. It is a huge relief to be able to write again, and read a little – very large text on the screen gets a lot done. I shall be moving genttl as I get to grips with life as it now is for me.

I’ve dreamed about today. It seems likely that many things will be hard for me now, but at least they are possible, and that’s well worth celebrating.

(spoken by Nimue, scribed by James)

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This week, author Craig Hallam has a new novel out. I’m in the happy position of having already read it and am able to heartily recommend it. This is a gothic novel with strong folkloric elements and some horror. It’s more crepy than overtly violent. It’s a strong story with engaging characters as you would expect from Craig.

In this book Craig has done something very interesting. He’s taken the usual features of a gothic novel, but told a story that radically departs from usual gothic fare. Rather than the more usual aristocratic settings with big houses, this is an overtly working class novel. The setting is primarily urban, and the characters are dealing with some of the very real horrors of poverty. I’m keen on this new movement towards a more socialist take on the horror genre, and Shuck is a great addition to that.

Folk horror can often be about treating the folk as other. That doesn’t happen here. The folk element is rooted in the landscape and part of the culture of the people dealing with it. Those people are not threatening Others, but quite regular individuals, making this distinctly different from the Summerisle approach. The fantastical elements are spooky and compelling. Mingled with the gothic tradition of possible madness, there’s ambiguity in the threat, and for much of the book it isn’t clear what is real.

I very much enjoyed this spooky tale. If you’re looking for a seasonal read, it’s a perfect book for Halloween. It’s also entirely readable at any time of the year. Creepy things are not just for October.

(created by Nimue, written down by James)

At the weekend, my feral folk choir – Carnival of Cryptids – took part in a celebration of the River Severn. This meant that we got to stand near the river and sing across the river in the direction of Newnham. We sang Ivor Gurney’s Fisherman of Newnham as set by Johnny Coppin. There’s something really powerful about getting to sing a song in the landscape it relates to. For me, singing to the river, about the river was magical experience. There were also people who listened and enjoyed what we did.

Across the river, another group of people had assembled with drums. We could hear them, and they could hear us, although the river is too wide for other kinds of communication. Once upon a time, it was possible to ford the severn at this point, but not anymore. The river is changeable, and wild, and I feel very strongly about the importance of keeping that wildness alive.

I’ve come away from the event with ideas about how we might participate in future gatherings and what I might write or borrow to that end. Having my creative process so informed by the landscape and the community here is an exciting possibility. It feels resonant to me and gives me a sense of how I want to take my bardcraft forward.

(Spoken by Nimue, scribed by James)

Folk music has been part of my life since childhood. There are songs I know that date back to my early years. Most of the material that I sing I picked up in my twenties when I started attending, and later running, a folk club. I have dabbled with song-writing along the way, and there are a lot of people who write songs in the folk tradition. In my twenties, I decided that writing material was not going to be my focus, and I’ve stayed with that.

Every song starts somewhere. The ones we think of as traditional must have originated with someone. The nature of oral tradition means that they change and evolve over time. As a consequence, some songs have multiple variants in terms of words and tune. Some songs may well be what people have cobbled together from what they recollected of a song they once heard. It’s a very organic process, and therefore a bit messy. For a song to travel from the person who wrote it into tradition, it needs more people than the songwriter to pick it up. What I’ve been doing since my twenties, is picking up more recently written songs that I want to carry forward and keep alive. Some of the songwriters I draw on are not well known. Several are no longer with us. Keeping their work alive feels really important to me.

One upshot of this is that there are now a number of songs other people only know because I’ve been sharing them. James (hi) sings several things that he’s learned from me, not from the original songwriter. Those songs change as they get passed along. While I make a point of saying where I got songs from, I’m quite aware that people may just remember that they learned them from me. For me, this is part of being involved with a living tradition. I’ve got songs I only sing because my grandmother sang them. Some of them I only ever heard from her. And on it goes.

This year, I’ve been really glad of the treasure hoard of songs, stories, and tunes that I learned by heart when I was younger. From here, it will be harder learning new material, thanks to the limited vision. However, I know a huge body of folk, enough to be going along with for the rest of my life. The things we bring into ourselves endure in a way that casually consumed media cannot. If your brain is at all open to committing things to memory, I can heartily recommend it. Not everyone is able to do this, but if you can, it’s a really good choice.

(created by Nimue, typed by James)

I had to use a large marker pen to be able to write. It took ages. but it is readable.

The wonder of trees
Green leaf glory
Framed in perfect blue
Of early autumn
Car park margins
Vanished gift of sight
Returning impressionist
Miraculous after months
Deprived of such beauty

(spoken by Nimue, scribed by James)

For most of the time that there has been life on Earth, that life has taken the form of single celled organisms. However, most creation stories postulate the existence of human-ish gods existing before anything else. Clearly, gods focussed on farming, and human concerns make no sense at all in the context of single cell lifeforms. You can get a fair amount of drama into the life of a bacteria, or similar. They’re born, they die, they eat, the survive. It is possible to imagine that even a single cell entity, if it could think, might have some use for deity.

As an aside, we don’t really know how consciousness works, and we have no idea how the tiniest living things understand themselves or the world. Maybe, there are gods of viruses.

If you think that humans are the whole point of life on Earth, then human-ish creator gods make some sense. This is a story in which everything has been set up from the beginning to result in us. On the whole, I think humans suffer a lot from hubris and might benefit form considering stories in which humans are not the be all and end all.

We know that the conditions for life were created by the geology of the planet as it settled. We know that those first single cell life forms led to more complex life. We know that early life forms transformed the world in ways that make it possible for life to exist in the many forms it now takes. I don’t think evolution is especially intentional. We are what happened, or at least part of it, but we do not represent a pinnacle, or an end point, and maybe we need to get over ourselves as a species.

Human gods can only have evolved alongside humans. To me, there is no other way of squaring spirituality with science. I don’t think this means that human gods are therefore pure fantasy. I think it means that everything at every level is evolving or could be, and we’re all doing that together. We are able to evolve because others evolve.