Disability and AI

(Nimue)

When generative AI tools first appeared, I saw quite a few people claim this would help disabled people. As though disabled people were normally not able to be creative. This bothered me greatly at the time and stuck me as ableist. Disabled people have always been creative. Being disabled tends to make things more challenging, but not impossible.

I want to take a moment for the visual artists who hold tools in their mouths, or with their toes. Helen Keller learned to write, and was an exceptional communicator. She was both blind and deaf from early childhood. Beethoven was deaf. World famous percussionist Evelyn Glennie is deaf. Blind musicians and performers have been numerous through history. One of my favourite composers, O’Calolan, was blind. Disabled people have been being creative for as long as humans have been creative. Sometimes we need a bit of practical support, but we do not need software to do the creativity for us. It is a dehumanising and unfair suggestion.

Recently, one of my publishers had a discussion about acceptable use of AI in the creation of books. There was some rapid consensus that using AI to write your book is not acceptable. Passive software like spellcheckers and grammar checks are ok, although with the rise of AI those have become more invasive. Grammar checkers now encourage you to make your words as bland as possible, and having heard from Keith about what they suggest, I would not use one.

There are a lot of grey areas with software that do some of the work. Transcription software is a case in point. Someone suggested that a blind person, specifically me, would only be able to write using that software so it had to be okay. This made me realise that I need to talk more about why I am not using that kind of AI.

Last year I went looking for dictation software. This used to exist and would convert words into text as best it could. Much of what is out there no longer does that. It would take my words, they would appear on the screen and then the AI would rewrite it to make it better. Only it wasn’t making anything better. Instead it was changing text to make it say more normal, obvious, average things. It is very hard to write about Druidry using software that thinks you are writing about something else. I spent more time getting Keith to edit the text than I did creating it. We had a couple of goes and gave up in disgust. Transcription AI is not a tool that helps blind people write. It is a sinister and invasive kind of software that will sabotage your writing.

Last winter, we put some gel dots on my keyboard to help me orientate. I type by feeling those out and thus knowing where the letters are. My typing is slower than it used to be, but this is workable. Keith proof reads for me, reading my work back to me so that I can edit it. When it comes to comments here, emails and social media, I dictate and he types. Sometimes James types for me. I can trust them to convey my words where an AI would not.

The existence of disabled people should not be used to justify generative AI. These programmes are built on the theft of original work. They are incapable of originality or true creativity. They do not help, they do not improve anyone’s work. They use far too much energy and water. As a Druid I cannot accept the environmental cost of these morally compromised toys.

There are bits of tech that are useful to disabled people. This is tech that has been designed specifically to meet the needs of disabled people. It focuses on solving real problems. An example of this would be the Seeing AI app. This has been trained in similar ways to other AI models, although it predates the current AI explosion. Using Seeing AI, you can point your phone camera at something and it will have a decent shot at telling you what it is. Doors, items of furniture, windows, items in the cupboard and the like. It can also read text, like letters, packaging and signs. This is genuinely helpful.

Part of the problem with most AI is that it isn’t useful. It hasn’t been developed to solve real problems. Instead, the marketing people are trying to persuade us that things we could do for ourselves are really problems we need a machine to handle. We do not need most of what AI does. The tech itself does have potential to be helpful, but not on these current terms. The capacity to work with huge bodies of data has uses, but we need to focus on using it to solve real problems if it is to have any value.

Disabled people have all kinds of real problems that are worth solving. This absolutely does not mean that disabled people can be used to justify any AI tech that wasn’t designed for a relevant purpose.

2

Defining abuse

(Nimue)

This week’s therapy homework was to look at definitions of abuse. As I wrote a little while ago, last year I was accused of domestic abuse and this is something I have been talking to my therapist about. I have a lot of fear around the possibility of somehow being abusive while not realising that I am doing it. I have spent a lot of time doubting my own sanity.

I explored legal definitions of abuse in recent UK legislation. I recognised all of the things I was accused of as relating clearly to those definitions. I also explored content on the Victim Support website, and this is where things became more complicated. Abuse is most usually defined in terms of the behaviour of the abuser. On this site, there is more consideration of the experience of the victim. I think that’s really important, and that paying more attention to impact might be a very good idea.

The site talked about feeling intimidated and unsafe, having a persistent sense of threat and fearing the anger of the other person. It described feeling anxious about unpredictable responses and not feeling safe expressing feelings and needs. It included things like becoming highly critical of yourself, suffering anxiety, depression and despair. It said about feeling responsible for everything and blaming yourself.

I recognised all of that only too well. However, for many years I took these as symptoms of my own mental shortcomings. I overreact. I make a fuss about nothing. I jump at shadows. I do not properly understand what is going on or what is really intended. I was the problem, my wonky brain was to blame for everything. I was the crazy, abusive person, unable to overcome this no matter how hard I thought I was trying.

Keith has been living with me for more than three years now. He is confident that I am not delusional, and not full of incomprehensible or invalid feelings. Three years represents a lot of data. Enough to make me question what went before and to reconsider how I view myself.

Something was very wrong in my previous relationship, on that point at least there was consensus. I was afraid of expressing distress or asking for that which I needed. I became increasingly unable to imagine being cared about or taken seriously. This has impacted on all of my relationships, and also slowed me down around asking for medical help when I so desperately needed it.

For a long time, I was convinced that the other party was doing his absolute best, that he loved me and meant well but was struggling with a lot of things. My therapist wants to focus on fixing the damage done, and is encouraging me to be less invested in whether he could help it or not. It is powerful, feeling allowed to centre my own experience and distress. It feels very different from always having to view it through the lens of what he said he meant and what he thought I should feel.

At this point I have a lot of evidence of how much he lied to me. He spent the divorce claiming to have contributed money that never existed. He also claimed not to be living with his girlfriend and not intending to do so. He posted on social media that I had made him homeless. I think that was meant to damage me, and it also justified not having to give the court an address. He and his girlfriend have just moved into a new house together. So I have a measure of his honesty and integrity that I did not have before. I no longer have any reason to think he was doing his best.

Knowing what I know now, I do not think he ever loved me. He just wanted my resources, my domestic labour and my work to support his career. I feel sick to the core when I think about it. I keep going back to the Victim Support list, thinking about the relentless anxiety and self-blame.

Building a new reality is not easy. Finding a new story that relates to the facts is an important part of healing. I am writing about it as a way of pushing back against the relentless feelings of shame. I have been lied to, I am not who I have been told I am. To move forward, I have to find what is me amongst this ugly tangle of lies. I have to work out who and what I can trust. I am slowly building confidence that life can be better and it is becoming possible to imagine that I deserve better.

Thank you to everyone who has been there to witness these struggles. Thank you for the kind words that have helped so much on hard days. In the past, this blog was one of the few things to give me a sense of purpose and self worth. 

17

Blindness, safety and electric cars

(Nimue)

I’ve had a few people tell me that the quietness of electric cars make them much more dangerous. As a blind person, I have opinions. For context, I have very good hearing and am very good at processing sound to help me make sense of my environment.

In a context involving a single petrol or diesel vehicle, you can indeed hear useful things that might help you stay safe. The more cars and other vehicles there are, the harder it gets to work out what you are hearing. Most of the time, car noise is not a help when it comes to road safety. I’ve tested this a lot over the last year and a bit. Using sound alone, I have a limited idea of where any given car might be, some idea of how fast it might be going and an inkling as to what direction it might be going in. This might get me across a small, quiet road. Even so, my social worker does not think I am safe going out on my own, because listening is not considered a safe way for blind people to try and negotiate around traffic.

I’ve been a pedestrian for a lot longer than I have been blind. The car you cannot see is a car whose speed, trajectory and threat level you cannot judge. Fleshy entities are a lot slower than cars, so if you do hear a fast moving vehicle screaming towards you, by the time you know about it, the odds are you cannot get to safety. Wild creatures die to traffic all the time, because the sound of the engine is not enough information to keep them safe. I very much doubt that quieter cars will be a problem to any greater degree. The issue is the speed of a car, more than anything else. That and the shortage of safe places for wild beings and people alike to cross busy roads.

The noise of cars is a constant source of stress to humans and other living beings. Reducing the noise would be helpful.

As a blind person, I am at greater risk from air pollution and the climate crisis than I am from an individual electric car. We need to radically cut back on fossil fuel consumption, and shifting towards electric cars is an obvious choice. However, it isn’t a full answer. We need fewer cars on the road. That should happen thanks to reliable, affordable and effective public transport. We should be making public transport such a pleasant, cheap and easy choice that it would be the obvious preference for most people. We also need to tackle the misery of work related commuting. I’m a fan of the fifteen minute city concept, where people can more easily access the resources they need. Centralising everything on the assumption everyone can drive there, creates huge pressure on people to own cars. We could do so much better for ourselves with a little thought.

I’d like travelling to be fun, and not an ongoing environmental disaster. I’d like to be able to go into wild places and not be able to hear cars that are miles away. I’d like to walk in urban spaces without the stink of exhaust fumes. 

The biggest factor in pedestrian safety around cars, is how people drive. Careless driving, ignoring crossings, speeding, not indicating, these are the things that put other road users at risk. Whether I can hear you won’t make much odds if you are speeding, or somewhere you should not have been. Cars do not reliably bring out the best in us, and that is especially true in heavy traffic. A calmer, gentler and less pressured society might be inclined towards greater mutual consideration.

The care and respect we bring to what we do can make a lot of odds around safety, or the lack of it.

1

Braille adventures and other personal updates

(Nimue)

For various reasons, I’m not online much this week, so I apologise in advance for slow responses to comments. I thought some updates were in order, as there is a lot going on.

I have a fair few gigs lined up for Carnival of Cryptids. You can find our music on Bandcamp. This is an anarchic folk choir, and we mostly sing at community events in Gloucestershire. I have started writing songs for specific events, Patreon followers get to hear those first.

We’re now looking for more local winter gigs for Jessica Law and the Outlaws, and figuring out the larger events we want to play at next year. The band travels more widely, and between us we also offer talks, workshops and MCing, if anyone fancies any of that.

This summer, Keith and I are doing some historical interpretation work for our local museum. It turns out there are quite a few jobs I can still do blind, and of course disabled people have always existed. I will be talking a bit about disability and illness in historical contexts.

I’ve been learning Braille for about six weeks now. I was told at the beginning that it can take three to five years, but I am aiming for basic capacity in six months. I read like a four-year-old, which feels weird. I can remember learning to read the first time round and it is odd being back to figuring words out letter by letter. I’m finding it difficult and frustrating, but I am pushing hard.

The reason for pushing is that there are some amazing bits of tech out there. A company called Bristol Braille make a device that gives you a screen/Braille interface. This means being able to read text on websites. I had a brief patch last autumn when I could just about screen read, but then some other things went wrong and my vision is now too fuzzy. I hate the software that reads text, I could write an entire post about why. The voice readers do not make it possible for a blind person to edit text, which has left me really limited in the writing side. This tech means I will be able to read and edit my own work, which would make a huge difference to my life.

This is some months away. We’ve put down a deposit, and I keep slogging on with the braille. I’m currently about half-way through the alphabet with numbers and punctuation still to go. Learning the letter shapes is easy; I know what they all are. Leaning to identify them by touch is the challenging bit. While I write right-handed it turns out that I read better with my left hand. One of the challenges is that I get very cold hands, and if they get too cold I lose sensitivity and cannot tell one dot cluster from another. There may be electronically heated gloves in my future.

I am fortunate to be dealing with blindness in an era with so much useful tech available.

9

Druidry and relationship

(Nimue)

Relationships are very much at the heart of modern druidry. Most Druids seek relationships with the land and the seasons. Beyond that, it can vary quite a lot, depending on a person’s exact beliefs and priorities. Some seek deity, and some seek the divine within the world. Some of us form our relationships on an animist basis, some focus more on the material world, some on the realm of spirit.

These Druidic relationships are not based on utility. It isn’t about seeking power or the means to be important. Instead, it is a way of moving gently through the world. We live with awareness of our interconnectedness, our mutual involvements and interdependence. We understand life as a complex web of connection and interaction, and we honour that. Relationships are something to seek for their own sake, rather than having an agenda. We can then flow with whatever emerges from those relationships, rather than trying to control things.

This puts us very much at odds with much of contemporary human society. Humans at the moment seem far too interested in power and utility, rather than exploring the wonders of actual relationships. Too many relationships are either transactional in nature, or exploitative, and this affects all of us. There is only so much we can do as individuals to explore living Druidic lives when aspects of our lives are informed by transactional and exploitative ways of being. Still, whatever we can do to seek harmony and real connection is well worth doing. This stuff is difficult for one person working alone, but the more connected we become, the easier it gets.

When there are truly reciprocal relationships, everything changes. This has become much more apparent to me in recent years as I have learned what reciprocal relationships can do. Living with Keith is a day by day process of co-creating a way of life. It is a shared exploration of love, care and support, which means ongoing growth and learning. What we share gets deeper and more complex with time, richer and more fertile. Oddly I feel this is much like the kind of relationship a person could have with a plot of land. People are prone to using and exploiting land, treating it as a resource. When human relationships are approached in the same way, you end up with something dry and barren. The person who lovingly nurtures the ground of their relationship gets bounty and is nourished.

I’m going to take this metaphor a step further and include the crap. When the crap goes back into the soil, fertility improves. Life produces crap, both literal and metaphorical. Dig the crap back in and your relationships will produce roses. It isn’t by avoiding crap that we get to the good stuff, but by learning to work with it.

Water your garden, remove whatever chokes out the good stuff. Think long-term, do not strip mine your land, or your other relationships. Think long-term, think cyclical, think ecosystem. Harmony is a team effort, and no matter how good we are, it is hard to create beauty and bounty when you are obliged to deal with something rapacious. All we can do is keep trying to get more people onboard with ideas of community and reciprocity.

The world urgently needs humans to be kinder and more considerate. Anything we can do to push in that direction is well worth doing.

2

Jackdaw magic

(Nimue)

When it comes to myth and magic, crows and ravens are the corvids who get the most attention here in the UK. Magpies and rooks get some attention from folklore. Jackdaws not so much. For every species with a mythic presence or some folkloric aspect, there are a lot more species with no stories at all. That doesn’t make them unworthy of our attention.

I like jackdaws. There is a huge roost site at a park a couple of miles from me, and another in the trees about half a mile away on the cycle path. A few years ago, a couple of jackdaws took up residence in the trees near my flat. Their numbers have grown steadily, and now quite a crowd of them show up each evening.

Jackdaws are chatty, gregarious birds, and consequently make a lot of noise. I find them cheerful neighbours, and as I seldom see them, their noise is welcome communication. If I am lucky enough to be in the right place when they come in, I can sometimes see something of the flock.

There is nothing dignified about jackdaws. I love their jaunty way of walking, their no fucks to give attitude, and their sheer liveliness. They assemble into large, loud communities and apparently have a lot to say to each other of an evening. They are very much the commoners of the corvid world, smaller and less shiny than the rest, not dramatic or mysterious in any way. I like ravens a lot, too, but I am no sort of majestic raven, I’m more of a jackdaw person.

For a long time now, modern Paganism has been borrowing indigenous ideas about spirit guides, animal totems and power animals. I prefer to stay away from this language because at the very least it borders on appropriation. At the same time, it seems fair to assume that our ancestors had similar relationships with the living world. We have lost that language and tradition, but cannot replace it by pinching ideas and terms from oppressed peoples. 

Inevitably, people working without proper cultural frameworks are attracted to whatever seems sexy and powerful. Consider the Pagans in the UK who form relationships with beings who do not live on this land, and in some cases, never have. Without the immediacy of first-hand experience we run the risk of creating affirming fantasies. I think there is a lot to be said for getting outside and finding out who is making themselves known to you. We could do with more people of the hedgehog, mole people, vole people, shrew people, ant people, shield bug people. Fewer apex predators maybe, and more connection with the lives around us.

Honour what you experience and the spirits of place who are discernibly around you. This is the best way of avoiding both appropriation and fantasy in our spiritual lives.

9

Contemplating Shame

(Nimue)

Shame is a complicated emotion and while no one tends to like feeling it, shame can be incredibly helpful. In healthy situations, our capacity for shame is key to our being social and cooperative creatures. Shame is the emotion that comes from letting people down. It pushes us to do better, try harder and to learn from our mistakes. It may be deeply uncomfortable, but much like the experience of pain, we evolved it because it helps us.

Alongside this we have the process of being shamed. This happens when the society as a whole, or individuals within it, set out to cause feelings of shame in others. We have an unpleasant history of shaming people for being different or unfortunate. Shaming people can be a convenient tool for letting those responsible for harm off the hook. So you shame the slave and not the enslaver. You shame the pregnant victim, not the rapist. You shame the homeless person and not the system that exploited them to breaking point. When people are being shamed in these ways, it is all about deflecting attention away from truly shameful behaviour.

Unfortunately, when you are caught up in this, it is very had to tell what kind of shame situation you are in. Shaming people pushes all the buttons of natural shame. It involves making the victim feel responsible for what is done to them. Blame someone enough and you can convince them that everything is their fault. You don’t ask for help when you think you are the one causing all the problems.

Bullies like to play the victim and pretend that the victim is oppressing them. Do anything to level the playing field and they scream their dismay. Anything that diminishes unfair advantages and the scope to oppress others, they treat like they are being abused. This is ugly stuff.

How do you tell what kind of shame you are experiencing? This has been a difficult question for me, and one I have found it hard to talk about. Shame encourages silence. I have been told that I am the villain, guilty of physical, sexual, emotional and economic abuse. The police interviewed me for two hours, but did not arrest me or charge me. The CPS did not take the case forward, because there was a lot of evidence to support what I had to say, and no evidence from my accuser. Even so it still haunts me, along with a sense of guilt around things I do not think I did. The fear has always been that I did what I was accused of while not realising I was doing it. I lost a lot of my sense of self in all of this, along with my faith in my own judgement.

How do you tell if your shame is a reasonable thing that needs acting on, or if instead you are being shamed in a deliberately abusive way?

I’ve been taking this through with my therapist, and this is where I’ve got to.

Healthy shame prompts us to appologise, make repairs and learn from our mistakes. If you are being shamed, you cannot actually do that. There is nothing you have the power to fix, and all you can learn from the situation is to be smaller, quieter, take up less space. People who are being shamed are not being allowed to fully exist as people, it means being denied some part of yourself or your experience, and not being allowed to protest about your treatment is part of it. If shame makes you shut up about suffering, then you are being shamed, not acting shamefully.

Being in distress should not be a source of shame to the person in distress. It should be a source of shame to the person causing the distress. Asking for kindness is not abusive. Protesting about mistreatment is not abusive. On the other hand, making demonstrably false accusations to the police at the point in a divorce process where only victims of domestic abuse get legal aid… that is pretty abusive. Lying about being made homeless because you don’t want the divorce court to know you have a girlfriend with money, is something to be ashamed of.

I spent so many years being treated as though my distress was offensive, that I lost all sense of myself. I am starting to assert that I am not the person who should feel shame in all of this. I am not unreasonable for wanting basic things in a relationship, like kindness and respect.

I have been shamed, and the shame in this situation is not mine, and I am determined to stop carrying it. 

8

Ancestors of tradition

(Nimue)

Modern Druids honour three kinds of ancestors, those of blood, of place and of tradition. In some ways, ancestors of tradition are the most interesting because these are the ancestors we choose. We each get to decide whose ideas to take forward. We pick our influences and sources of inspiration, and decide who we remember and honour. Some of us will have chosen Druidic figures as ancestors. Druids also tend to choose thinkers, philosophers, activists, bards and teachers of all kinds. If anyone wants to talk about their chosen ancestors in the comments, that would be most welcome.

One of my more important ancestors of tradition was a chap called Dave James. He taught me stagecraft and MCing, and from him I learned a great deal about running community spaces. He devoted a lot of effort to building people’s skills, turning nervous people into confident performers. He taught quite a few people to MC, and he departed this world leaving a legacy of ideas. My son and I have been very deliberate about carrying on many of his ways of working. Although James was quite young when he last saw Dave, the influence has been profound. As he grows into his own skills, his style is discernibly closer to Dave than mine is. I have no doubt this would have delighted Dave, who greatly encouraged my lad as a young performer.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how a person gets to be an ancestor of tradition. I currently have three young people I am mentoring to run spaces, and who I hope will take on an assortment of things I have been doing. Passing things on means being willing to make yourself expendable. It can mean relinquishing roles to let other people have a go. The person who wants to be powerful and important will find this difficult. The irony here amuses me, because it is the people who do not make it all about them who have the most scope to become ancestors of tradition.

Where you get a cult of the individual, what exists around them tends to falter if they leave or die. We don’t get traditions from people following in the wake of greatness carrying on in someone else’s name. By definition, traditions have to be bigger than one person. When you help people do what they want to do, there is more chance some of your ideas will live on in their work. The more dictatorial a person is, the more likely rebellion and rejection will follow, as they get replaced by the next person who wants to be at the centre of a cult of personality.

I think OBOD is a good example of an organisation working to create tradition and longevity. We’ve seen a number of people who worked key roles for a long time hand over smoothly to new people taking up the work. I’m not going to name anyone whose druidic enterprise did not outlive their active leadership in any significant way, but if you’ve been on the Druid scene for a while you will have encountered some of this.

Coming from a folk background, I have a longstanding interest in tradition. Real traditions belong to communities, not individuals. Tradition is what we share, bigger than any one of us. To be a folk person is to be a few stitches in a great tapestry connecting past and future. This is a good antidote to self-importance and illusions of grandeur. We are all of us small beings with elements of greatness, and there is significance in being a link in a chain.

For the long term, the solid links in the chain of tradition are far more important than the self-aggrandising folk who often leave only dead ends behind them.

8

Death, summer and the wheel of the year

(Nimue)

Usually Pagans focus on death in the late autumn and during the winter. This fits with the solar narrative, but may not relate much to personal experience. People die all year round. The current heat wave will no doubt take lives, and the increased risk of forest fires can also be a killer. This is not just about humans, as most living beings are at risk in extreme heat. 

This week, we said goodbye to Keith’s mum. She was a remarkable woman who lived to be one hundred. I have great respect for her stubborn, independent spirit as she managed to stay in the home she loved until very nearly the end of her life. I have had the privilege of hearing many stories about her, and felt honoured to be able to support Keith in celebrating her life.

Keith’s sister is a person of deeply held Christian faith, and so her Minister took the service. She was brilliant, warm, wise and considerate. As a Pagan, I can find Christian funerals difficult, because I don’t normally connect much with what happens. This service was undertaken with such care and humanity that the differences of faith felt inconsequential.

I was deeply impressed by the congregation. There were people who had come from the church to support the service, never having met Keith’s mum. It was a beautiful act of community and solidarity, and I was deeply touched by the generosity of showing up in that way. 

Amazingly, the Minister included a deep peace blessing which I last heard in the context of a Druid ritual. She had not known we also use it, neither of us knew where it came from, and the sense of something significant shared was lovely. We talked afterwards about the blessing, about Celtic Christian traditions, and shared beliefs around community and taking care of people. I tend to find that Jesus-centered Christians share a lot of common ground and philosophy with me, even with all the differences of faith. I love a good interfaith exchange and I think we both learned a lot from it.

Death is always with us. Another friend buried her father this week. My grandmother’s funeral was in the summer. Life and death are not two separate threads we can pull apart, and we have to deal with them as we find them. It may be a consequence of aged-based segregation in society that human death is not so much a part of people’s lives until their later years. Having a lot of friends of all ages, I have already lost a lost of people I cared about.

Death reminds us to hug those we love most, and to appreciate our own mortality. None of us know how long we will get or when people we love will be taken from us. A life lived well is a life with few regrets, free from the torment of important things left unsaid. To live is to be wholehearted, fully present and engaged with life. When such a life ends we will grieve the loss, but without bitterness, anger or remorse. That is something I aspire to. 

9

Everyday Druidry

(Nimue)

There is a great deal to be said in favour of having a daily spiritual practise. Spirituality will only give us what we put in to it, so showing up and doing something is essential. There are no real rules for how to do Druidry or what your everyday Druidry should look like. Much of Druidry can be about being active in the world, with things like teaching, celebrant work, activism and healing work. I recommend making sure that you do something every day that is for you rather than making it all about acts of service or leadership. It is possible to end up doing so much useful Druidry that it feels like a job, and your own spiritual experience is neglected.

An everyday practice does not have to be a fixed thing. You can focus or diversify according to your needs and inclinations. Some days you will have more time to devote, other days not so much. Over the twenty three years I have so far been on this path, my daily activities have varied a lot. I have had patches of time where one thing has been a deep focus, and then I’ve shifted elsewhere. At the moment I have an array of things and am usually doing three sessions in the day. If you try to rigidly stick with something when it does not inspire you, spirituality starts to feel like some kind of rote religious business, and there is little good in those. There is no great virtue in sticking with things that no longer serve you. Consistency works for some people, but not for all of us. Learn to flow with your own nature and seek authenticity in what you do. Feeling authentic is the best indicator that you are on the right path.

Communing with nature has always been at the heart of my Druidry and I primarily do that by walking. As I am less robust than I used to be, I am more restricted by weather conditions. Sometimes communing is about what I can hear from my windows.

For anyone moved to devotion, prayer is an obvious daily activity. This can be combined with maintaining an altar. You do not need to have any particular beliefs to pray, and during more agnostic periods of my life I have found it helpful to address simple prayers to the universe.

I often include a meditative element. For me this is about reflection and contemplation as I do not get on with mindfulness approaches. Meditation can include music and movement, there are many ways and it is worth experimenting to find what suits you.

There are other small activities that can contribute a lot to your everyday Druidry. Taking time to focus on gratitude is good. Noticing and reflecting on small beauties also works well. A similar approach can be taken to being alert to moments of kindness. This should include kindness you witness, kindness shown to you, kindness you show to others and kindness you show to yourself. I’ve been finding this is helpful stuff to weave into a day, as it impacts on my mood, and helps me think about how I am moving through the world.

Whatever you do, be gentle with yourself and seek the things that nourish you.

5

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