Rewilding for Butterflies and Moths

Rewilding for Butterflies and Moths

In the tidal wave of gloom, doom and dreadfulness I personally find myself often crushed entirely by the weight of what’s wrong with the world. I find myself feeling helpless, useless and worthless, beating myself up over existing and consuming like a Westerner. Much of what we’re urged to do is couched in DON’Ts. Don’t fly, don’t have an SUV, don’t buy X, don’t have children. Sometimes it makes me feel like removing myself from the equation entirely, because it’s impossible with the DON’Ts to even begin to come close to being carbon neutral.

Rewilding is a buzz-word that has attracted both criticism and praise. It’s quite a Zen sort of thing, because the practise of rewilding is something that is very active but in a way that can look like doing nothing. Not hauling up the dandelions in your lawn might to some look like laziness but it’s a conscious decision based on a deeper understanding of ecology. To spend time in careful, conscious, loving observation of a natural space is a radical act that to someone outside may look like doing nothing. Sitting, watching, waiting, making notes of what you see and then thinking deeply about it does not have the drama of chainsaws and spades. The act of letting things be is one that is counter-cultural in a way that baffles people. We are brought up with a colonial, saviour-complex mentality that infiltrates our existence: our patch cannot possibly manage without our interventions. We must treat our lawns and destroy the cockchafer and daddy-long-legs larvae that eat the roots of our grass or we’ll have no bowling-green-smooth expanses to admire from afar. The fact that a garden that encourages the presence of starlings (among others) to peck in squadrons of downed murmurrations will reduce the burden of those larvae and the presence of bat-roosts and swift boxes locally will thin the population of the adult insects. It’s about balance.

One of the things people are happy to do in their gardens is to plant flowers that encourage pollinators like bees and butterflies. Growing fruit and veg in your garden benefits from having such critters around, which is why, I suspect, that many do it: the collateral benefit to the self. Contrary to popular belief the honey bee is not endangered. It’s the other sorts of bee that is. Not to mention the wasps that everyone loves to hate. But butterflies are struggling. If you grow nectar plants, you may have noticed a reduction in the range and numbers. That’s because they need a lot more than just nectar. The adult butterfly we love to see is the final stage of a complex life cycle. At the point we see them, yes, they need nectar but they also need the food plants their caterpillars need (and these are varied, and species specific. A species that requires jack by the hedge (aka garlic mustard) cannot just decide it’ll eat nettle instead. And while a number of species do eat nettle, there’s a huge number of lepidoptera that lay eggs on grasses. Grasses of different species and heights offer a menu to a great deal more butterfly species than the shaved carpet of monoculture that’s the prized lawn. Since we began to care for our lawn differently, encouraging other types of grasses, reducing how often and how close we mow, we have had a boom of butterflies and moths that are beautiful grass and heathland species and even some woodland species as well. Meadow browns, small coppers(edited as someone informed me I am unlikely to have seen a large copper as they are supposedly extinct in England. I’m still not sure!), skippers (large or small, hard to tell as they are our fastest flying butterflies, heath butterflies, gatekeepers and others, have begun breeding in our garden. Holly blues and the common blue butterfly flit around like pieces of sky. I’ve seen a surge in moth species I’ve never seen before, from the dramatic and colourful like small and large emerald moths and the huge yellow underwing moth, to the cunning and intricate like The Shark that disguises itself as gnarled wood, or the angled shade moth.

The imago stage of butterfly/moth life is also one we forget about. They spend a varying amount of time in chrysalis, hiding in undergrowth, under leaf litter, in dead wood, and close to the ground under the grass. Raking away and burning all that destroys them all. Leaving space for untidiness preserves them. Nature is not tidy. Flowers seldom grow in rows naturally. If you leave these areas of “mess” there are places for birds to forage for invertebrates, to feed themselves and their young, and over time, the balance between too much and too little of those invertebrates will be sorted. You may still get holes in your cabbages but once the ecosystem has built up, you won’t find them reduced to skeletons. You will have the delight of seeing birds, insects, small (and larger) mammals, amphibians, and if you are lucky, reptiles too, in your own backyard. And if everyone who has even a small space (window-boxes and pots are mini nature reserves) changes the way they manage it, that adds an immense amount of space for nature to be and to thrive.

It also helps stop people feeling as if there is nothing they can do to fight the climate crisis. When we forget that we too are part of nature, when we choose to pretend we are above all the creepy-crawlies and the weeds and the vermin (as people will deem invertebrates, wild-plants and the creatures we find troublesome) we doom ourselves.

A New Year Begins At Imbolc

A New Year Begins At Imbolc

Happy New Year!

You might think I am late but it depends when you decide a new year starts. The Celts started their new year at Samhain (our Halloween). The Romans chose their Saturnalia celebrations to mark one sort of new year. We’ve also recently celebrated Chinese new year (year of the black water rabbit, in case you weren’t sure) and now we have just celebrated Imbolc, Candlemas and St Bridget’s Day, all of which herald new beginnings. I stepped into the garden on the 1^st of Feb to hear a wren trilling his heart out and to find a clump of snowdrops at the end of the garden under some of the apple trees. There’s been sweet violets blooming shyly in the front garden for at least a couple of months, sheltered from the cold in a raised bed overshadowed by taller, denser plants. Winter is receding but knowing the British climate, we’ll have snow later this month. But the light is returning, several minutes every day and the bird song has changed from contact calls (“Are you there? Did you survive? Hey, I survived too!”) to the first of the spring songs.

I did some clearing of old files a few days ago, mostly to keep myself from thinking about the insoluble problems my country faces right now. There’s a big bag of paper to be disposed of securely; old bank statements, medical letters and the like. But among the paperwork I found a printed-out email from my friend Dr Jean Raffa, from Feb 2012, about a dream I’d had. It reminded me first how long I have been working on my inner life, and especially concentrating on dreams, and at first it made me feel disappointed in myself that I seem to have made so little progress. I have had now over ten years of almost unremitting depression. Deep, deep depression that might lift a tiny bit for a week or two, only to be plunged back in, either by outside circumstances or by absolutely nothing. That feeling of sliding inexorably into the black pit is possibly one of the worst feelings possible. In this time I’ve dealt with major illnesses, surgery, serious bereavements and the chaos that follows in their wake, and the acquisition of a handful of chronic conditions that all include constant pain, low mood and little hope, plus the diagnosis of being autistic (which has taken time to process – it really makes sense of so many other things). With all that is the grind of ordinary life – cooking, cleaning, shopping, rinse and repeat. I have been so tired it sometimes feels like I need to rest constantly yet at least one of my chronic conditions is worsened by inactivity. I’ve walked this tightrope between too much and too little, and I have fallen off repeatedly.

I said that at first it made me disappointed in my lack of progress in this essential soul work, but over the following few days, I found I felt more proud that I have persisted. I have a brooch my dear friend Gill gave me, that says, “Still I rise,” and I wear it often, usually without realising its truth that is embedded in my every day. I have persisted. I am still here, I still get up in the mornings and face the day. Sure, I sometimes go back to bed later but that’s understandable. I show up.

About twenty years ago, my husband went for an interview to be minister to some villages somewhere south of us. One of the factors that had interested us was the place had a holy well, a wellspring that had healing powers recorded for many hundreds of years. We both felt that renewing the connection between that spring and the church was something that we felt was important. But the job wasn’t right and that was that; we went somewhere else entirely. I kept that spring in my heart, tucked away in a quiet corner, wishing that it might one day be recognised and rejoiced in by more than occasional pilgrims, and for the connection between earth-based spirituality and the core of Christianity to be renewed in that place. The other day, in one of those random coincidences, I saw a series of photos from the village with the spring that gave me a real lift: the local ministers holding a beautiful service for Candlemas, including mentions of St Bridget, at the spring. Lots of smiling people in the sunshine, participating in a gentle rite that connected them with both the past and the present, rejoicing in the clear bright sparkling water. The things that are meant to happen (I hate that phrase) find their way. Life, uh, finds a way. We’d tapped into something deep and old in our resonance with that spring, but it wasn’t us who did it. But it’s happening and while it’s twenty years later, I must believe that it is in its own right time.

I must believe that my own soul work is in its own right time, that I am not slow or pathetic or stupid for being stuck working at what sometimes feels like the same old same old for more than a decade. About 18 months ago, I began to receive help on this journey (not something I want to explain further) and sometimes it has felt as if I am walking through that dark wood of Dante’s, but sometimes I get glimmers of hope that something, something very different to what I might have expected, is taking shape. The last few days it has felt like there is more happening, as if the first gleams of light at sunrise are turning the grey garden to brighter colours. I didn’t want to let my long silence here go on without writing something; I have felt often so lonely, so excluded from the vibrant conversations I sometimes witness my online friends participating in, because I have not had the energy to respond, to comment or to reach out to the many friends I have here in this non-physical sphere. Friends who have new books out, new projects, exciting discussions; I feel some mild guilt I have not been able to support them better or indeed, at all.

So I say again: happy new year. I hold a tender bud of hope; let not the frosts blight it.

Not Too Bad, All Things Considered – 2022 and all that it involved.

Not Too Bad, All Things Considered – 2022 and all that it involved.

There’s a profound difference how different nationalities respond to being asked how they are. The wonderful Bill Bailey evokes such differences in his sketch, “Not too bad all things considered.” (I’m not doing links to anything but this sketch is to be found on You Tube) I’d recommend watching it because it does encapsulate how most Brits are. Self-effacing and with a level of quiet pessimism, we’re often incapable of being enthusiastic about how things are going. Maybe there’s a fear the gods will hear us and think, “Ha ha, let’s see about that then!” and send us something truly awful. Maybe it’s the constitutional reluctance to boast about the good things (again, lest they be ripped away from us). Whatever it is we’re often to be found playing down both the good and the bad that life sends us. Well, I am, anyway, hence the title of this blog.

I’ve only blogged once this year till now. Given I began blogging in 2009 and sometimes blogged a number of times a week and even daily, that’s a huge change. Blogging itself is not the draw it used to be, either for readers or for bloggers. The instant-noodle appeal of such platforms as TikTok (avoid, avoid!) have taken over, though I hope that will change. I can’t cope with short form anything and I can’t watch TED talks, or listen to podcasts. It’s rare I can watch anything much; it grates on my nerves.

So how has the year been? Another curate’s egg, I fear: excellent in parts. I published “A Voice From The Cave”, which did very nicely for a few days, being a mover and shaker in Hot New Releases, and was a bestseller for a few small categories on Amazon. I have doggedly continued to chip away at one work in progress “On Hob Hill” and it stands at 85k words, and almost finished. The hardest bit by far is to come: to complete it, tying up all loose ends in a neat and entertaining bow. I need a couple of weeks without any sort of crisis, chaos or difficulty. Other works in progress await me getting back to them.

There has been too much of ongoing health challenges, both mental and physical, to find energy for much more than surviving. Every time I think I might have carved out some time for me, for writing or for exploration, something else comes along. Given that my cousin died shortly before Christmas, I am reminded that life is uncertain and one needs to carpe diem (seize the day) but I’d rather just watch the carp instead.

Day job, I had a single assignment this year which I enjoyed immensely, working with a primary school group, and visiting the beautiful and historic city of York for a couple of days in May. There was an incident in the hotel we stayed in that may one day be woven into a ghost story but I won’t spoil that by explaining further. Keep your powder dry (so to speak) is good advice for writers.

I’ve read a fair bit; my notebook tells me I’ve finished reading 57 books, but it may be higher as I kept forgetting to write them down after I finished them. Highlights include, “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating” by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, “Maus” by Art Spieglman. “A Closed and Common Orbit” by Becky Chambers, “Precious Bane” by Mary Webb, “Transforming Depression” by David Rosen, “Bone” and “The Maiden King” by Marion Woodman, “Gathering Moss” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Beauty Myth” by Naomi Wolf and “The Mystery of the Coniunctio” by Edward Edinger. I was less than impressed by “The Thursday Murder Club” by Richard Osman but given the propensity of celebs/celeb writers scouring the web for criticism, I’m being cautious in my comments. I will say that I won’t be bothering with the rest; were the author not already a celebrity I would not have felt that was a sufficiently impressive debut to justify to continuing series. There are many superb writers whose series got cancelled because their first book didn’t do well enough. Publishing is almost entirely about money, something I still find difficult to accept.

I’d like to thank anyone who has bought, read or reviewed any of mine this year. You don’t know how much that has meant to me. I feel ever more invisible and without value or worth, and that makes it even harder to keep writing and publishing to a largely indifferent market. I keep telling myself it’s not about the numbers but it’s hard not to feel useless.

As 2022 ticks (not toks!) to its conclusion, I would wish all my readers (long-standing and new) the very best. I saw a meme recently that talked about how instead of hoping for good things to come to oneself in the coming year but rather resolving to BRING good things to it, and to others, and that is what my own resolve is. To bring good into the world in whatever ways I can manage.

May 2023 bring you blessings, though. We all like those.

Love,

Viv xx

Voice from the Cave – a new book

Voice from the Cave – a new book

I’ve not written a blog since November last year. Six months of silence. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say. I have. I kept thinking of all the things I want to say, and the words just drained away like spilled water down a sink. Depression has bitten deep and held on hard. I look at the various news stories, UK and worldwide, and sink further. That carrion comfort, as Hopkins called it, despair, has been my companion. Outwardly I have functioned. I’ve talked with people, done things, smiled, laughed, and inside, there’s still that aching, resonant, black void of everything.

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man

In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me

Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan

With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,

O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.

Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,

Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.

Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród

Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year

Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

There are many good things in my life, without a doubt, things that I am grateful for, but I feel almost nothing. Anger is my go-to emotion, closely followed by resignation and withdrawal. The causes of all this are clear but there is nothing I can do but keep on keeping on. So I have.

Long time readers of this blog will have seen the various posts over ten years, where I have written about a cave, a mythic, mystical location. I have had requests for them to be collected into book form, and with what I can only describe as a gargantuan effort disproportionate to the task as perceived from outside, I have now done so. One of the hardest parts was writing a blurb. Every writer I know loathes doing this. How do you sum something up in a few hundred words? I came across a couple of paragraphs in a book that inspired me and helped find the right words.

“According to the Sufis, there is a human world, and a world of pure spirit and an intermediate world of the imagination in which those two worlds can interact.” Raff, Jung and the Alchemical Imagination p 141

“…there is the normal human world of ordinary reality and there is the divine world that transcends reality as we know it. Between these worlds is the world of the imagination, in which spirits and the divinity Itself may personify themselves as imaginal figures. Since relating to the image is the same as relating to the entity itself, it is through imaginative experiences that the divinity may be known and transformed.” Raff, Jung and the Alchemical Imagination p 144.

The finished blurb is as follows:

“I found the cave high in the mountains by accident, if such things exist, wandering through tunnels of ancient rock, in pitch darkness, feeling my way for miles…”

This is a work that hovers between fiction and non-fiction, in that imaginal space that is both and neither. That imaginal world, known to the Sufi mystics, is where the human world of ordinary reality and the world of pure spirit and imagination, meet and interact. Outside of the limitations of linear time and space, I have explored a small segment of my own imaginal world; in it I have met with guides and with challenges that have pushed me to my limits and then beyond.  Each fragment is from one of those festivals during which we mark the growing and the waning of the solar year and the passing of the moon cycles within those. Time does not pass as you think it should and nothing is quite as simple as it seems. 
(This is a shorter work of around 8,500 words)

The cover art was done by my friend Bethan Christopher http://www.bethanchristopher.com/  who did the cover for “Ice Cream for Breakfast” and the graphic design by my friend Karl from We Lack Discipline https://welackdiscipline.com/ 

The book is available through all Amazon channels, in paperback and in kindle form. It’s only a short thing, but the effort of getting all my metaphorical (and metaphysical) ducks in a row was exhausting. I’d strongly urge you to consider reviewing it after reading, because reviews help visibility. I have a small (and I do mean small) stock of my own copies and within the UK I can potentially do signed copies, though if you have a problem with buying anything from the mighty ‘Zon, then be aware my copies are directly from them so I am merely acting as your sin-eater so to speak. I have no other way of getting books out there than using this means. 

I am proud of this little book, because it is good (putting it simply) but it is also an oddity. It doesn’t fit neatly into any big genre or category. When I got the paperback out, it charted in the category Gaia and in shamanism. I’d love to see it hit number 1 in one or both of those if possible. 

Anyway, here’s the link to the UK page, and for all others, change the UK part of the URL to whichever store you buy from, or put the title and my name into the search facility. 

Thank you for reading. I am hoping it won’t be another six months before I write anything here! 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0B14RT5F8/ 

On Hair and Hairiness

During the early part of the pandemic, one of the things that a great number of people have found hard was not being able to access their hairdresser or barber. My FB and Twitter feeds were later full of people being joyful when they finally could get a hair cut and expressing how much better they felt about themselves once they’d had a cut and restyle. The last time I can remember having a trim was in 1998, so their joy wasn’t something I could relate to directly, because I’ve never enjoyed having anything done with or to my hair and having it cut filled me with fear and dread as a child and a teenager. Aged 14, I decided to grow my hair long, having been mistaken for a boy at school; a year prior to that I might have been delighted but something had changed. My mum insisted I go every six weeks for a trim, to ensure I didn’t have split ends ruining the entire strand of hair.

That’s the first big myth I want to explode. The trimming of long hair is done mostly for aesthetic reasons, because people like to see tidy, even ends, much as they like to see neatly trimmed and edged lawns. It was put about by hairdressers that hair NEEDS to be trimmed to stop splits extending up the hair shafts. They don’t split like that. Yes, I know, you can often see multiple splits along a single hair. That’s not one split running all the way, like a dropped stitch or broken thread in weaving. Hair is dead. The moment a hair emerges from the follicle, it’s dead matter. It’s made of a protein called keratin, same substance as your nails and indeed, the horn of a rhino. How long your hair grows is also subject to certain issues of personal biology. Each hair has a life span (between 3 and 7 years is the usual range but some can live a lot longer) before it drops from the follicle. We lose between 50 and 100 (ish) hairs every single day, but fear not, the human head contains between 90 and 150 thousand follicles and therefore, usually, hairs. Redheads have fewest but seem to have the thickest hair as each strand tends to be thicker, and blondes have the most, but it’ often the thinnest. Brunettes are in the middle. Hair goes through a cycle. The cycle involves growing, resting (ie, not growing) falling out, pausing before beginning again. The rate of growth of hair is also a factor. Some hair grows very slowly, some very fast. It grows faster in the summer and it also grows faster on the side of your head that tends to be on the pillow more. Average growth is about one cm a month. If you have a head of hair that grows fast and each hair has a longer life span, you will be able to grow your hair very long. If you have slow growing hair with a short life span, it may well never get beyond your shoulders. You can’t change this. You can ensure that the bed (the scalp) your hair grows from is kept healthy and nourished so that the hair has the best chance of growing well. Once a hair has emerged from the scalp it is dead matter. Conditioners cannot repair the hair; they can make a superficial coating to smooth the hair, prevent further damage and ease the passage of a brush or a comb. The oil the scalp produces is called sebum and it’s the body’s natural lubricant for hair, to keep it clean and water repellent. So we wash it out, sometimes daily. My scalp is prone to psoriasis and general flakiness which can make it unbearably itchy at times. Nonetheless I have unusually long hair. After my parathyroid tumour was removed, my hair started growing properly again, having stalled around hip/waist length. Wet it now reaches below my knees and touches my calves. And no, it’s not difficult to look after. It’s easier than short hair, for me.

But it is very much a part of my identity. Who I am, if you like. There’s a lot of information about hair, that claims there’s a connection between hair and being terribly spiritual. One story cited Native American (don’t ask which tribe, I have no idea) beliefs that hair is a sort of cosmic antenna, connecting us to the cosmos, making those with long hair supernaturally sensitive. There is some truth to this, but not how people think. Hair serves various biological purposes on us mammals. It keeps us warm, keeps us cool and is also used for display to the opposite sex. It also serves as part of a sensory system. If you have a cat, you will notice that they have whiskers on other parts of their bodies. These are called vibrissae, and they each attach to the body and feed back sensory information about their surroundings. That’s how a cat knows it can fit through a gap. The vibrissae provide proprioceptive feedback to the nervous system of the cat. I suspect there is a lot that needs more research. Human body hair (now so anathema to many that it is shaved and ripped and chemically removed) serves other functions too. Our nervous systems respond to stimuli like fear or uneasiness by erecting the hairs on our body; often this is a very primitive response, atavistic perhaps. I’ve used the sense of the hairs on the back of my neck going up as a warning. Something is out of place and my conscious mind hasn’t spotted it but my unconscious has. If you have seen the hackles of a dog go up, it’s the same thing.

Some cultures equate long hair with a kind of spiritual holiness. The wandering holy men and women in various places have extremely long and often unwashed and matted hair. There are theories spoken of, like hair containing life force and cutting it cuts the life force and therefore the special powers these people are believed to possess. I have never personally encountered such a figure. But I cannot help wonder if the long hair is about display rather than anything holy. How is anyone meant to recognise the holiness is there’s no physical marker? No one would ever suspect someone going about their daily business, wearing ordinary clothes and hair, of being anything special and holy, would they? I might be a tad cynical. Other cultures cut the hair off, shave the head in whole or in part, for their holy people.

Hair is connected deeply to both sexuality and gender. For many in the west, at one point in fairly recent history (Beatles, I’m looking at you!) long male hair was seen as deeply subversive, decadent, emasculating; the cutting short of female hair (in the 1920s) as a radical act of defeminising. It’s a contentious issue. It was also a thing that over a certain critical age, a woman ought not to have long hair. I see comments abounding online where people denigrate older women for keeping their hair long. It’s seen as somehow false advertising, this pretence that you are still young and fertile and therefore desirable (because you can potentially bear some man a child) and the fury and the nastiness is depressing. So much bound up in what a woman chooses to do with her appearance is about squashing women into a box marked, “Men’s playthings only” and women can be fierce collaborators in this. One tiny change, expanded by the pandemic, is the growing numbers of women choosing not to dye their hair, and embracing their silver and their grey. It’s more acceptable than it was. It’s equally acceptable for older women to dye their hair fun colours, that were more associated with student age; I have seen friends get their mermaid hair colours and it looks amazing. It’s about being allowed to choose, and not having someone brow beat you into having a bob just because you’re now 41. My mum never much liked me having long hair; she said on more than one occasion that long hair was “ageing”.

For those wondering how it is possible to care for getting close to five feet of thick, slightly curly hair, and whether it’s heavy or uncomfortable, I’ll explain a little. These days of decent power showers means it’s easy and simple to wash long hair. Modern shampoos are a huge improvement on ones from when I was growing up. You lather up only at the scalp, because that’s where the oil and the dead skin need the shampoo. Gravity means the rest of the hair gets a smaller dose, which is all it needs usually. I stand upright and let the water do most of the work. It gets wrapped in a super absorbent high tech towel (the kind you take camping because they take up less room). I don’t use conditioner every time because it doesn’t always need it, though I do sometimes use either jojoba oil (closest in structure to human sebum) or coconut oil on the last foot or so to protect. I don’t often use a hair dryer, I’ve never straightened it (or dyed or permed). I keep a close eye on hair care products, and will try new brushes/combs. Currently the range of Tangle Teezer brushes do a superb job of detangling and grooming without pulling or damaging the hair. Once the hair is dry, I usually plait it and that’s it. It gets brushed in the morning, and before I go to bed, and replaited. It takes a few minutes, but the process is soothing and reassuring, and some claim that you are activating acupressure points on the scalp when you brush. It just feels very nice. I don’t find it heavy (it’s probably silly to try and weight it) but hair doesn’t actually weight a lot anyway.

Anyway, that’s about all I can find the energy to write. Hair is deeply personal, but I don’t think having long hair makes a person more spiritual or psychic.

“Bleeding for Jesus” by Andrew Graystone – a review and some comments

“Bleeding for Jesus” by Andrew Graystone – a review and some comments

I don’t often review books on my blog; I’ve tried to steer clear of being a book review blog. Others do it better than I could ever hope to; plus my reading is so eclectic that there would be no discernable pattern for readers. But this book needs to be mentioned here. I’ve talked a bit about spiritual abuse, here and in some of my novels (especially “Square Peg” which draws liberally on my own experiences), so it feels as if this is the best forum for my thoughts on this book. I have done a brief review on Amazon (which was not yet showing when I began writing this) and hope that may help anyone wavering over whether to buy it.

This is the blurb:

A Christian barrister and moral crusader who viciously caned young men in his garden shed. An exclusive network of powerful men seeking control in the Church of England. A shared secret of abuse that casts a dark shadow over a whole generation of Christian leaders. This is the extraordinary true story of John Smyth QC, a high-flying barrister who used his role in the church to abuse more than a hundred men and boys in three countries. It tells how he was spirited out of the UK, and how he played the role of moral crusader to evade justice over four decades. It reveals how scores of respected church leaders turned a blind eye to his history of abuse. Journalist and broadcaster Andrew Graystone has pursued the truth about Smyth and those who enabled him to escape justice. He has heard the excruciating testimony of many of Smyth’s victims, and has uncovered court and church documents, reports, letters and emails. He has investigated the network of exclusive ‘Bash camps’ through which Smyth groomed his victims. For the first time, he presents a comprehensive critique of the Iwerne project and the impact it has had on British society and the church. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1913657124/

I read the book in a couple of sittings. It’s not terrifically long (less than 250 pages) and is well written in an engaging but not frivolous style. I know that the publishers rushed through the publication (for a variety of reasons) and there’s some small issues with editing; some repetition of material without clarifying why that has been mentioned again, and also a conflation of Plymouth with Portsmouth in reference to a bishop. These are small and relatively unimportant matters. The entire book is shocking. One reason that I had two disturbed and sleepless nights after reading it was the realisation of various gigantic missing pieces in my own experience of spiritual abuse (which I do not wish to detail here) and a greater understanding of how the evil that came through the Iwerne camps filtered out into the wider church community and damaged many lives beyond the immediate reach of the camps and the leaders there. Imagine the mycelium of a malign and toxic fungus reaching through most of the trees in a forest and you get why I felt so shaken and horrified. The abuse itself detailed in the book is shocking enough. The cover-up that has ensued is also deeply shocking.

As a young person I was unaware of the existence of the Iwerne project for a very good reason: I was a state school student. Iwerne dealt exclusively with the boys and young men who came out of what were considered the top 15 private schools in the UK. Their intent was to recruit those who would be leaders in society, whether as clergy, as lawyers, doctors and so on, at the highest levels. The idea was that if they had such men (for until later it was universally male and much of the leadership were misogynistic to a terrifying degree) as Christians, their effect on the country would be powerful.

Except to anyone who has understood the gospels and the person of Jesus, nothing of what these people did was in the slightest bit Christian. The very choice to only recruit from the ranks of the privileged is frankly unchristian; not one of Jesus’s disciples was rich, highly educated or from a higher level of society. He chose from among ordinary people doing ordinary jobs; his reaction to the Rich Young Man who came to him was not to immediately ask the guy to join him but rather ask him to let go of his wealth and privilege first. The beatings, given in the name of promoting holiness and with a gloss of various select New Testament texts, are little more than the surfacing of pernicious gnostic heresies that deemed the body evil and to be subdued and punished. The effects of physical pain inflicted in this way is well documented in studies of S&M: endorphins kick in and a kind of high ensues, there is a feeling of catharsis and bliss and release. This is not holiness. It’s the body’s mechanism for surviving catastrophic injury and illness. Yet it’s close enough to a numinous and mystical experience to baffle those already brainwashed and enthralled by a man whose personal charm and charisma were enormous, that they believed themselves to be singled out for an extraordinary life. Iwerne was, to put it bluntly, a cult, and the members behaviours is classic cult behaviour.

The persistence of those still in power to keep the lid on this, not to address any of it, but sweep it under the carpet and hope it is swiftly forgotten, is impressive. My feeling is there is so much more to come out. Those who have been harmed will not forget. People have speculated why spiritual abuse is so damaging, asked why don’t those just walk away from the church, wash their hands of faith entirely, and forget they were ever involved. Graystone succinctly sums up why this is not possible:

“The nature of abuse is to inflict trauma on the personhood of the victim. It is a conscious invasion intended to violently challenge and destabilise the physical, sexual, cultural and spiritual identity of the other – to fundamentally devalue them and forcefully mark them with the identity of the abuser. In other words, abuse, whether physical, sexual, spiritual or emotional, is always relational. Where the abuser is deeply identified with an organisation or culture, as John Smyth was with conservative Christianity, the identity that is marked includes that of the organisation.

“So a victim abused by a Christian is indelibly marked as a victim of Christian abuse, and the relationship that is damaged is not only between the victim and the abuser, but also between the victim and God. When John Smyth beat his victims he was baptising them, not into the identity of Christ but into a false identity as a worthless object for his pleasure.” (p210)

From a personal perspective, this rings true. Much as I have wanted to stay away from the church since then, I have not been able to; what I experienced damaged my own relationship with the divine terribly badly. Any embryonic sense of vocation was aborted by what happened.

Touching on some of the wider ranging reach of the abuse, Graystone also says:

“This is a book about men who abuse men. Men abuse women too, both in person and through the institutions they sustain. Perhaps the hidden victims of the Iwerne movement are the thousands of women who have been led to believe that they are in some way created to be subordinate. I know that some conservative evangelicals who will want to say that the Bible carves out an equal and complimentary role for women alongside men, but again, the deprivation of opportunity for women is a matter of culture as much as teaching. I’m well aware too that there are more women who suffer physical and sexual abuse in the church than there are men; that the church treats female victims even more badly that it treats male, and that the degree of blindness to this in myself and others is greater than it is towards men.” (p208)

At the time of the activities of Smyth in the UK, the ordination of women was something being campaigned for, fought about and by 1992 was finally allowed. Yet it was held back and suppressed and damaged by Iwerne alumni, and to this day the divisions are still brutal. They still have great reach.

It’s said that a participant in any battle sees very little of the battle at large, only being witness to what they could see and experience in their immediate environs. For me, this book has shown me what was going on elsewhere on the battlefield beyond the smoke and blood and fear of my own tiny part in that battle. None of this should ever have happened, to any of us. Please consider buying, reading, reviewing, discussing, buying copies for your church library/bookstall, because it might be the piece in a jigsaw you (or others) may need to make more sense of your own experiences. I’ve found this incredibly difficult to write about because of so many difficult emotions and memories, so I am going to leave it here and hope that it reaches those who need to read it.

Nine Perfect Strangers versus Six Imperfect Pilgrims

Nine Perfect Strangers versus Six Imperfect Pilgrims

I’ve been a subscriber to New Scientist magazine for many years; indeed, I’ve had a couple of letters published and I even won “The Last Word” once. We moved to digital only and I stopped reading it, largely because I don’t find reading on screen pleasant. The irony of writing that on a blog is not lost on me. A few months back, we started getting the paper magazine again; it means I can pass on copies when we have read them and I can stuff a couple into a bag if I am going somewhere where I am likely to be waiting around. Experience has shown me that sitting reading a copy of this magazine while waiting for a medical consultation improves my outcome of being listened to; following a botched (ish surgery) around 10 years ago, the same (admittedly exhausted) doctor responded very differently to me the morning after the surgery when he and the ward sister found me reading a copy (and a couple of novels in French laid on my side table too) from the night before when my belongings were still in my bag. We had an actual proper conversation; their opinion of me shifted in the light of my reading material. Sad but true.

Anyway, a copy from a couple of weeks ago caught my eye today because my daughter had mentioned something key from it the day before. She’d been checking out a mini series on Amazon prime called “Nine Perfect Strangers”, because the premise of it seemed at first glance to bear some resemblance to my novel “Strangers and Pilgrims”. The concept of troubled, damaged people seeking healing by going on a retreat somewhere remote and beautiful but with some sort of mystery at the heart of it, is not (thankfully) trademarked, and on reading the review of the series that appeared in New Scientist, I relaxed. The nine perfect strangers of the mini series could not be more different in circumstances than the six imperfect pilgrims in my novel. The nine are damaged and hurt people for sure, but their lives are otherwise ones of privilege and plenty. The wellness retreat of the series is plush, expensive and extremely well-ordered; visitors give regular blood samples to ensure their tailor made smoothies are perfect for them. The cottage, known as the House of the Wellspring (in “Strangers and Pilgrims”) is a tiny place, comfortable but not luxurious, and the food is plentiful but the pilgrims must work together to prepare, serve and wash up after eating. They choose classic, timeless comfort foods, of stews and crumbles and cheesy bakes, and the making and the baking is a part of their healing process. To spend time with others, cooking, eating, clearing away, serving each other, is a very elemental part of being human; to be waited on by servants is part of a form of elitism that is pernicious when it becomes something we see as our right rather than as an occasional treat or holiday.

At the heart of the “Nine Perfect Strangers” retreat is a guru; a mysterious, ethereal figure played by Nicole Kidman. At the heart of “Strangers and Pilgrims” is a mystery, yes, for each retreat member has come because they reached out, in their lowest ebb, to a shadowy but compelling figure, the Warden of the Wellspring. This person, in a series of emails, has shown both love and understanding to those who contacted the House of the Wellspring, and has offered the chance to visit and to drink the healing waters, that will heal their unbearable hurts. Each yearns to meet this Warden, to pour out their sorrow and rest in the quiet of understanding and of unconditional love. And so, they make their way there, trusting and hoping for healing.

I don’t have any streaming services for TV, so I haven’t seen “Nine Perfect Strangers”. I’m always late to the party; I’ve probably not missed much by not having any streaming. We watch only a very small amount of TV and these days I quite enjoy binge-watching a series I missed years ago, now that the hype is forgotten and the painful pressure of FOMO is gone. When it does come on ordinary free-view TV, I may well watch because it may be good drama. You may already have seen it. As I say, I’m always late to these kind of things. “Strangers and Pilgrims” was first published over ten years ago now, and it’s garnered some wonderful reviews. It’s also got one or two excoriating ones, because you can’t please everybody. It’s in need of a new cover, because things have moved on (and yes, I hope to do this at some point but I have zero energy and mojo), but the core of the book is what it was ten years ago, and if you didn’t read it then, perhaps now is the time to give it a try. The evenings will be drawing in and it’s a perfect autumn or winter read, especially around the time of All Hallows, during which the main part of the story is set.

“My heart is broken and I am dying inside.”

Six unconnected strangers type these words into an internet search engine and start the journey of a lifetime. Directed to The House of the Wellspring website, each begins a conversation with the mysterious warden, to discover whether the waters of the Wellspring, a source of powerful healing, can heal their unbearable hurts.

A journey of self discovery and healing awaits them, but will the Warden grant them their wish? Invited to spend some days at the House of the Wellspring each of the strangers comes with the hope of coming away whole again.

But where is the Warden they all longed to meet and where is the Wellspring they all came to find?

Chapter 3 gets the “We Lack Discipline” treatment

For those following this, the next chapter analysis is up.

It’s kind of like being psychoanalysed via one of my books; albeit the book that I probably feel most sense of pride and achievement about. Check it out.

https://welackdiscipline.com/2021/08/02/we-lack-discipline-reads-the-bet-chapter-3/

Revelations of Neurodivergence

Revelations of Neurodivergence (part one)

This is a very deeply personal and quite difficult post to write for an assortment of reasons that I hope will become clear. It’s also something I feel is important and I also hope it may be helpful to others.

Last year in the autumn I was diagnosed as autistic, level one (what was previously referred to as Asperger’s). It took the better part of four years on a waiting list to get to an assessment; the psychologist at the pain clinic had been very helpful in getting me get that far. I’d filled in a 20 page assessment form, sent it off, and then waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually, worrying that it had gone astray, I rang and left a message. Nothing. Apparently they had NO admin staff whatsoever. Eventually a message was left on our answer phone, apologising for the delay, acknowledging both receipt of my form and also the fact that my information in said form strongly suggested a formal assessment was in order. Then they warned that the waiting list was very long. They weren’t wrong.

In the wake of my father’s death, I was contacted again, saying that I’d got close to the top of the waiting list and wanting to organise various things. This is where, for me, the process began to become painful. They asked whether they would be able to speak to someone who’d known me as a child, a parent for example. Bearing in mind I was 54 at this point, I found this first an offensive and pointless request, and secondly, when I explained my father’s recent decease and my mother’s dementia, a painful one. It did not occur to me that this information would not be placed front and centre of whatever records they then held.

Then there was another LONG hiatus. My mother also passed away. Then they made contact again. They wanted to know if there was someone who’d known me as a child who they could also talk to. I explained the recent decease of my one remaining parent, explained also that at 54 there was NO-ONE they could talk to who had known me in childhood and that my husband was the person who’d known me longest (since we were 18) and that he would have to do. I expressed repeatedly my distress and increasing anger that they were continuing to ask for “a parent or someone who’d known me as a child” when I had politely informed them this was NOT possible. There cannot be any condition, illness or anything that ever asks for such a thing. It is infantilising in the extreme. I told them this. I was informed that this was just how it was done. They apologised, but it began to feel very much like a not-’pology.

There were several sessions booked in via video link. Two people, a psychologist and a speech therapist, taking turn and turn about speaking to first me and then to my husband. They were both very pleasant. The process from my point of view was absolutely not. Again I was asked whether there was someone who’d known me as a child, explaining how it was needed for a proper diagnosis. I sensed the hand of a supervisor somewhere in the background insisting on prodding still further. Both my sessions were gruelling, taking several hours each. Endless questions, and most of them were those you would use with a child. I felt insulted and infantilised. I had to comment upon pictures from a children’s book, telling a story and describing the scenes. I’m a story teller, so it wasn’t difficult (but in my assessment letter, apparently I did it in TOO MUCH DETAIL) but frankly I was getting more and more angry at being treated as a child. The assessor was quite stunned at how much I could notice and observe in a single picture, and infer and deduce. That in itself is insulting. I have an IQ of something that is up there with the most intelligent people in the world; I’m a trained observer and a very experienced storyteller.

You’d think all that would be enough, wouldn’t you? But no. Again I get contacted saying that for a firm diagnosis they needed to speak to someone who’d known me as a child. Perhaps my brother, or an aunt or an uncle? At this point I became incandescent. I had thought I had made myself clear: there was no one who’d known me from childhood that it was even vaguely appropriate to speak to. More apologies. Another assessment session.

And a few weeks later, a letter, confirming that I am indeed autistic. I have read the letter twice, then shoved it in a file, because I am still furious. All of the markers that suggest autism were there, quite obviously, without the need for this endless requests for someone who’d known me as a child. There were at least 6 separate occasions when this was asked for, despite on the first time of asking me saying emphatically no. I cannot imagine a more disempowering and infantilising process, one which sought to deprive me of all personal agency over my own designation. I have considered making a formal complaint and still may but I do not have the energy to fight through the process. The assessors I do not blame; they were following the script of a poorly developed process, and I felt the heavy hand of a pernickety supervisor at every step of the way. But to insist that an adult of mature years somehow produces what is in essence a character witness to their childhood years is absurd and cruel. It shows the system is failing adults seeking assessment, because it fails to recognise that they are fucking adults. Sorry. The reason I went through the process was to try and understand myself. There are very limited resources for helping adult autists, and NONE of them address the long term trauma of being autistic in a world that despises and loathes difference. I will not be attempting to access those resources via the autism services locally. I cannot imagine they will be of any real assistance to me. Or, to be honest, any adult who has survived so far into middle age. I can only expect that they may be as infantilising and disempowering as the assessment process.

(part two to follow soon)

“The Bet” analysis of chapter 2

The inimitable “We Lack Discipline” are doing a chapter by chapter critique of my novel, “The Bet”. This is for chapter 2. I suspect it’s probably at least as long as the chapter itself.

Be aware that there are references to disturbing/upsetting themes, and some of the language is definitely not suitable for work. But it’s a superb analysis that has cheered me up enormously to know someone loved the book that much they’ve taken the time to work through it in this way.

https://welackdiscipline.com/2021/07/06/we-lack-discipline-reads-the-bet-chapter-2/