Toxic Femininity

Not long ago I met up with my bridesmaids - six of my dearest friends - for morning coffee. Socialising with other women post-lockdown has been a bit of an eye-opener for me - embarrassingly, I had kind of forgotten that not everyone has been in the same echo chamber as me, worrying about climate change and learning how to cut down their consumption. Actually, I kind of completely forgot that lots of people aren't generally thinking about their consumption as problematic (whether it is or isn't, which of course is not for me to decide, although I would suggest that all of us in the global North perhaps need to think twice about our normalised habits) or obsessing over ethical fashion and cosmetics, and had to work at not pulling a disapproving-grandma face any time anyone mentioned PrettyLittleThing or L'Oreal.

What I have been working on, however, is being more open and honest about stuff (hopefully in a gentle way), so at one point I did find myself saying to two of my particularly glamorous friends - one of whom I haven't seen without make-up and impeccably coiffed hair since we were in primary school, and one of whom I have never seen without the whole arsenal of femininity in play - that I'm amazed by how they do it with two children apiece when I find it a challenge to shave my legs with any kind of regularity, let alone find the time for flicky eyeliner, and I wished I could ever manage to be as groomed.

Once they'd finished laughing at me, they told me two things: firstly, that skinny jeans can be hiding all sorts of things, so even the most fabulously turned out woman might possibly have not got around to shaving for three months, and apparently this is pretty normal. 

Secondly - and here one of my very oldest friends flicked her elegantly curled, highlighted hair, looked me dead in the eye, and said, "Well, I wish I didn't feel like I have to bother with all this -" she waved a hand to indicate her make-up and curls "- just to feel like I can leave the house. I wish I could be more carefree. I feel like other girls who don't wear make-up all the time are way more comfortable in their skin than I am. This is what I have to do just to feel acceptable, and I love it when I can get home and take my make-up off so I can rub my eyes without smooshing my mascara all over the place."

Okay. So that was me told. I was kind of stunned, to be honest. How had I managed to angst about my girl envy all this time without ever considering things from the other side of the fence?

Another thing we talked about a little bit - perhaps inevitably - was weight. I guess out of the seven of us, probably three or four are on a diet at any given time. Even I bought a scale this year, but I'm going to talk about that whole mess in another post. Suffice to say for now that eventually I had to sit down and re-read Just Eat It, and that while I was doing so I suddenly realised that the way a lot of women feel about their weight and looks - not good enough, must constantly improve - is also how I very often feel about the way I dress and the things I own.

What diet culture and consumer culture have in common is simply this: it's about control. When you fall too far into these twin traps, your thoughts are forever rattling around the same hamster wheel: what should you eat, how do you look, what should you wear, what should you buy. When you walk into a room, or down the high street, you automatically and semi-consciously rank yourself against other women - who's the thinnest, prettiest, best-dressed? 

More and more of us now are becoming aware of the toxic and damaging messages of diet culture, but I haven't often seen it linked to the parallel trap of overconsumption. Yet to my mind the insidious connections are obvious - people with low self-esteem are far more likely to spend more, not just on gyms, diet foods, supplements and all the other accoutrements peddled by the nutribollocks industry and its influencer poster children, but also on clothes (to conceal, to sculpt, to flatter, to commiserate, to aspire to), cosmetics, treatments and surgeries. Treat yo'self - self-love can be yours, right now, for this one-off bargain price of the cost of bath bombs, crystals, candles, lingerie, gym gear, hair dye, new nails, fake tan, gym membership, microblading, laser hair removal and a plant-based wellness spa retreat in the heart of the Cotswolds. 

I feel like this weird self-hating soup of diet culture, overconsumption and influencer culture is to women and femme-presenting people as toxic masculinity is to men. Things we might otherwise enjoy for their own sake (clothes, fashion, beauty, movement, food) become tainted by this bizarre set of rules for how we are 'supposed' to look (exist).

Stay in your box. Keep your attention fixed on the way you look. Build your brand. Get thin. Get thicc. Get strong. Get noticed. Be different, but also accessible. Be relatable, but also better. Have the right kind of eyebrows. Suck your stomach in. A little bit of FaceTune never hurt anyone. So authentic (#ad). It's not a diet, it's a lifestyle change.  Don't rest on your laurels. Don't rest, period. Don't consider being content - there's always something else you can tone, sculpt, tweak, improve, buy, buy, buy. 

It's all the same trap.

Imagine: if being a woman wasn't a secret competition to be the best woman.

Imagine: feeling content. With what you have. With who you are.

Imagine: if you took the time you put into beauty routines and wardrobe overhauls and decluttering and shopping and diets and faux wellness and used it instead to rest and recharge. 

If you could walk into a room without a) picturing how you looked walking into the room and b) immediately ranking yourself against everyone there.

What your social life would look like if no one was worried about their body, their skin, their clothes, their hair. 

If we re-framed self-esteem as something you build, not something you buy, and made it contingent on something other than looks or wealth.

If we stopped buying - literally - into the bullshit.

Why I Deleted Goodreads

I've been toying with the idea of deleting my Goodreads account for years, but I've finally done it. If you Google 'thinking of deleting Goodreads' you'll find that lots of people struggle with the clunky interface, the ownership by Amazon, the mining of the fairly intimate data about what you do and do not like to read, the new policy that deletes reviews that focus on scandal to do with the author, the fairly arbitrary star rating system that some feel devalues authors' work, or the annual reading challenge, which makes finishing books into a numbers game.

The clunky interface was, for me, the least of these issues. For some context, I've been on Goodreads for seven or eight years, minus a six-month break at the start of my first shopping ban. It was the only social media I kept using when I deactivated all others - I was only tracking my reading for my own interest, not really networking with others or promoting my 'brand', so I didn't see it as harmful. 

I stopped doing the reading challenges a couple of years ago, as I realised that it was becoming more about reading more and more than about savouring, pleasure, enjoyment, or knowledge. Just ploughing through one book after another. 

For similar reasons, during my shopping ban I deleted all the books I had saved on my 'to read' list, and stopped looking at my recommendations. Now, I know many people use Goodreads specifically for this feature, and certainly it was one of the things I enjoyed most about the site early on. But for someone trying to release themselves from the grip of buying too much, it wasn't helpful. 

There are always going to be new books out there that I want to read. But between lending with friends, charity shops, phone box libraries, the actual libraries, the independent bookshops I frequent, magazine reviews, authors and reviewers on blogs and on Instagram, publishers' websites, newsletters and catalogues - and, yeah, okay, Amazon, big chain bookshops and supermarkets as well, I don't think I will ever be short of ways to discover them. I found that relying on recommendations based on things I'd previously read - the Kindle store does this as well - can tend to create a kind of echo chamber, and I could fall down a rabbit hole of reading fifteen books about the same thing from the same perspective. Of not feeling 'done' if I hadn't read every single book about a topic, even when I felt I'd scream if I had to read about one more variation on - for example - circle casting, or the Wheel of the Year.

I also found that reviews from other readers could make or break a book for me before I'd even made the purchase. Reviews on Goodreads tend more towards the negative than those on Amazon (for some reason), and although I'm aware how subjective opinions are (I once gifted a copy of my favourite book to a friend, in what I believed was a fairly inspired move - she never could make it past the first chapter), it was fairly easy for a low star rating, or even a well-written negative review, to put me off even trying a book.

I did try to stop using Goodreads a few times over the years, because I was uncomfortable with the way it seemed to be taking over my reading behaviour. I'll put my hands up and say this is probably more a me problem than a Goodreads problem, as there are echoes of it in my previous obsessions with blogging and with Instagram (apparently I really, really like documenting myself for an audience). I noticed that I was sometimes choosing my books to make sure I seemed well-read on a certain topic, in case someone (who?!) checked my Goodreads to make sure I was qualified to hold an opinion. (In fairness, when I was a goth blogger, someone did once trawl and screenshot my last.fm to prove that my music taste wasn't goth enough. Too much Black Eyed Peas and not enough Bauhaus. It's a fair cop, guv.)

Even without the reading challenges, even without marking my 'current reads' to avoid a numbered total at the end of the year, I was still racing through books. Partly to defeat my TBR pile, which shrinks and grows and shrinks again but never completely goes away - which I want it to do for a little while so I can re-read some older books, slowly and in a leisurely manner, without guiltily side-eyeing the teetering stack at the side of the bed - but also partly to hit that arbitrary and subjective star rating (which for me ranged from 1 - hated it through to 5 - loved it beyond measure). 

The biggest factor for me in the end, though, was feeling as though someone was reading over my shoulder all the time. Although my friends on Goodreads were predominantly my real-life friends, I imagined that the sceptics were rolling their eyes at yet another spirituality book; the cool punk people laughing behind their hands if I picked up a Jenny Colgan. The star rating began to feel like an author popularity contest and I worried about hurting someone's feelings. The irony is that when I tried to take breaks from Goodreads, one of the things that kept pulling me back was if I read something that I knew one of my friends on the app would enjoy!

Deleting my account took all of three taps. Goodreads is built into my tablet, so I'd found it pretty impossible to just not go on there (which is how I ended up back on the app after that six-month break). Amazon punished me for those three taps by immediately deregistering my tablet, losing all my bookmarks, which was unhelpful but didn't diminish how liberated I suddenly felt. Interestingly, the TBR pile suddenly lost its grip on me. 

I think this was the right decision for me, possibly one I should have made a long time ago, but postponed because I didn't want to lose the big list of books I'd read. Will I forget some books? Almost definitely. Will it matter? Almost certainly not. And now I feel like I can do what I should have been doing all along - reading whatever I want.

Style vs. the World

Often, when I am thinking about clothing and style, I am thinking about me. What will my style be. What do I like. What will I wear. What will I buy.

Occasionally I am jolted out of this me-centric microcosm and I catch a glimpse of the macrocosm. I am reminded, again, that none of my choices exist alone, that I belong to the Earth, that 'what I do to the web, I do to myself' (to paraphrase Chief Si'ahl). The True Cost was a memorable incidence of this (and I still recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone who wears clothes). More recently, I read Consumed by Aja Barber, and it was another much-needed reality check. 

It's not that I don't believe that we as individuals deserve nice clothes and great style. It's just that it's easy to get fixated on the nice, glossy, surface aspects of the fashion industry, and big business in general, and then we can kind of ignore the difficult truths that our purchases are often doing harm in the world, and that climate change is fairly likely to pull the rug out from under our comfortable existences in the next ten years or so.

Let's tackle the first aspect of this first. Consumed was not a comforting read for me as a white person. I knew that the fashion industry of the global North was both exploitative and extractive, but I'd never understood it in terms of colonialism before. It strongly reinforced, for me, that there is nothing whatsoever good about the fast fashion business model, and we need to stop supporting it and pumping our hard-earned money into it, stat.

There were sections of the book that kept me up at night. I'm not sure how exactly to describe what I was feeling, but I think the best term is horror. 

"The settlement of Old Fadama is where a lot of the unsold clothing from Accra ends up; it's home to 80,000 people and is built on top of dumped clothing. These people are becoming physically displaced by the clothing that is disenfranchising their way of life."

I just... I'm still processing that. People are living on top of our unwanted clothing. Accra, in Ghana, is home to Kantamanto Market, the biggest second-hand market in the world. Up to 90% of donations made to charity shops in the UK will eventually end up there, because there is so much. Even in Kantamanto much of this waste remains unsold. But the landfills are struggling to cope, so there is waste clothing in piles on street corners, on the beaches, in the sea... If you want to know what that looks like, click over here.

I am mortified that this is what we, collectively, as a society, have been doing to other people. 

Now, thinking about climate change. I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I find it quite difficult to reconcile the way we are currently living with the devastation that - worst case scenario - could be occurring in the next ten years if we don't radically alter our trajectory. I am aware that the first and worst hit by climate change will be the already-marginalised peoples of the South (where climate change is already happening, lest anyone still think this is a future possibility - no, climate crisis, climate deaths and climate refugees are a reality that is happening right now), but I'm going to couch this mainly in UK terms, as I'm writing this mainly thinking about people who are privileged like myself, looking at this mess from the same position as me, but also, like many of us, not actually looking at it, because it's complicated and scary. People who, like me, say, "Ah yes, climate change, very terrible, much sad," and then turn right back to our phones and feeds and carry on shopping.

I think I've gone over a lot of these points before, so I'll just recap some of the highlights, as I notice that a lot of my friends in the UK are still thinking of climate change as something that will affect, say, the Amazon rainforest, or a handful of ice caps - and yes, yes it will affect those things, and that would be tragedy enough in itself, but also the UK will be facing:

- Increasing flood risk

- Crop failure and failing fisheries (that's food shortages)

- Climate refugees and potential conflict (when those low-lying coastal regions are under water, people will be in competition for the remaining land and food)

- Increased risk of pandemics

- Increased risk of fires

- More storms and extreme heat

- London mostly underwater by 2050

All of those at once sounds fairly apocalyptic to me, and makes it very difficult to plan for retirement or my child's future. I'm doing my best, but when the signs point to 'business as usual spells environmental devastation' but everyone in charge is doing a good impression of an ostrich, I'm also looking quite seriously at moving to higher ground and learning how to function off-grid. Did everyone else start talking about who would be on their zombie apocalypse team when The Walking Dead came out? Time to start dusting off those survival plans, IMO. Build your communities now. Unless you trust Boris and the gang to save us all. (My husband is a mechanical engineer; my skills include spinning, weaving, archery, foraging and some basic herbal medicine. It's a start.)

So, while in the short term I'm thinking about accessories and trips to Glastonbury, the long term future is uncertain and hard to look at directly. Is anyone else experiencing this disconnect? 

A book I have found useful is Climate Cure: Heal Yourself to Heal the Planet by Jack Adam Weber, who is himself a climate refugee, having evacuated from wildfires in California and then lost everything to volcanic eruption in Hawai'i. Weber directly addresses the weird limbo we are currently in: "I've also let go of the expectation of living indefinitely in a comfortable and standard home, with money in the bank. We are all now more nomadic and vulnerable than we realise or might prefer. We cannot know when we will be stripped of all for which we've worked so hard."

Despite the title, which for me conjures visions of white light and sending positive thoughts, Climate Cure focuses on tackling eco-anxiety, engaging with climate breakdown and building resiliency, both on an individual and community level. Weber says, "Outer solutions remain only as effective as our passionate care to radically minimalise our personal lives so we 1) consume less, 2) free up time and energy to engage in regenerative acts, such as growing our own organic food and showing up to help one another, 3) demand top-down change from our governments, and 4) learn about climate crisis to support ourselves and others through it."

Books like Consumed and Climate Cure really help me keep things in perspective. It's not about how many pairs of shoes I have or what brands I buy. It's about de-growth; it's about what I can do if I'm not busy consuming, it's about doing my best in my lifetime to mitigate the damage that has been done. It's about learning new ways of living that are more viable within the parameters of our planet.

Honouring Myself

I've got to level with you: digging up all those old photos for my Memory Lane post got me feeling really nostalgic for my old style. Sure, there's some stuff I don't miss from that time in my life - underneath the veneer I really didn't like my natural face, I thought I was fat, I was the girl who wore full make-up to the gym. My eyebrows occasionally washed off in the rain, and simply put, I no longer want to dedicate hours each day to achieving any kind of 'look'. 

When I was a serious goth blogger, I was generally in part-time employment, and in hindsight I suspect fairly depressed - it wasn't uncommon, on my days off, for me to stay in bed until mid-afternoon, then get on the computer until 3am, then back to bed. I could commit hours to getting dressed if I wanted to, because I didn't have much else in my life. I also didn't have the financial commitments or responsibilities that I have now, so if I spent all my money on boots, eyeliner and absinthe, it didn't impact anyone but future me (thanks for not saving anything from ten years in employment, past self, that was so helpful). 

I also don't see myself as a super-gothy type person any more. I like my rainbow dungarees and harem pants. I love a bit of colour. But there were definitely elements of that past style that I'd like to take forward into my new look - I'd forgotten how much I used to enjoy layering (decorative belts, lace sleeves under t-shirts, skirts of different lengths), and a wider variety of accessories than the necklaces and earrings I tend to fall back on nowadays (gloves, wristbands, hair accessories, tights, stockings, hats and brooches). 

Again, I'd have to remember appropriate dress (tights and skirts not always useful on the nature reserve, but fine for going to a cafe; t-shirt and jeans great on the nature reserve but also you are allowed to make an effort when you want to), but at least when I visit Glastonbury and Brighton later on this year I now have more of an idea of what sort of things to look out for (past me is kind of astonished that I now only have one small box of jewellery and one decidedly non-decorative belt). Having a greater range of accessories, and items like vest tops, scarves and shrugs bought with layering in mind, also meant that I could be more versatile, and make a wider range of outfits from a selection of favourite items. I spent the last couple of years trying to shed items that I deemed 'purely decorative' or 'unnecessary', which I think went hand-in-hand with my crisis of confidence, when I just wanted to be a little bit invisible. I feel like I'm going to spend a chunk of my early thirties trying to undo some of the decisions I made in my twenties. 

At the risk of sounding a bit dippy and New Agey (who, me?), the way I've been thinking about this is that I want to honour myself. Not subscribe to a label or someone else's dictates of how I should dress, not get carried away and obsess over my clothes above all else, but be true to myself, have fun, dress in a way that I find beautiful.

It has to be said that one thing I miss about dressing in a way that is markedly different, is people's reactions. Okay, not all of them (having beer cans thrown at my head can go), but there's this little vain part of me that loves a compliment. After I posted some of those old pics on the Book of the Face, I got a flurry of messages along the lines of: "you used to look really cool!" Thanks 😂 Whilst I don't want to go courting acclaim for its own sake, it's notable that I seemed to have decided that being older, and a parent, meant that I was no longer 'allowed' to feel a bit special or want beautiful things. Instead I should be happy with an anorak and jeans. Nothing wrong with my anorak and jeans by the way - but it's not like there's actually an age limit on "looking really cool", after which the fashion police will come and take me away if I look to be getting too interested in pretty things.

This reminds me again of that remark my friend Alice made about, "this isn't really you, it's just how you got used to dressing when you were pregnant." I was so angry at the time, but just as Dai occasionally contributes a pearl of wisdom, sometimes people who aren't me seem to have a better idea of what's going on with me than I do.

I'm weirdly nervous about re-learning how to accessorise. I've been trawling the charity shops looking for items to suit my current style and the direction I'm going in - so far, without much luck. This time, though, I'm determined to go slowly and be patient, instead of flinging my money at fast fashion 'alternative' brands, or things that are 'nearly right'. Honouring myself means not compromising on my ethics, too.

Beauty Care for Wild Women

A change I made around the beginning of this year was that I started carving out a little more time to take care of myself. Beauty and I have had a fairly chequered history - I've swung from surface glamour - elaborate hair and make-up routines, but at bedtime taking a halfhearted swipe at my eyeliner with a bit of damp loo roll and sleeping with my foundation on - to letting nature take its course in the - apparently mistaken - belief that if I followed the same skincare routine as my other half, my skin might end up as clear as his.

Paradoxically, I am quite self-absorbed yet pretty bad at the basics of looking after myself, which is why I have plantar fasciitis (bad shoes) and sensitive teeth (turns out you shouldn't drink multiple cartons of juice a day for several years if you don't want to tear up every time you eat something with sugar in it). I have been a person who buys new outfits on a daily basis, but once left a bout of tonsilitis untreated for so long that it spread to my stomach glands. I was basically unable to eat from the pain and felt so run down and ill that I fell asleep in public places on my lunch break, but I assumed it was some weird new psychosomatic manifestation of my eating disorder and didn't bother to see a doctor for a rather long time. I honestly didn't know that tonsilitis of the stomach was a thing that could happen.

I was surprised to find that I had a bit of resistance to reinstating any kind of grooming routine beyond soap, water, lip balm and a dab of botanical perfume. I felt as if I were, in some way, betraying my 'natural self'. Is my muslin face cloth a tool of the patriarchy? I still don't really have a clear answer on that one. I suspect it's somewhat akin to 'shopping ethically' under capitalism, and we can all only do our best.

Anyway, much like rebuilding my wardrobe after giving birth, I decided I wanted to feel good in my body again, and as well as doing my yoga and going for walks, for me this meant I had to give it a little TLC. I kind of feel like I shouldn't have to - surely my body will look after itself best if I just leave it alone? - but after a week of dry body brushing in the morning and applying lotion in the evening, my skin was so improbably soft that I had to concede that perhaps I could do with a little bit of looking after, after all.

I remind myself that women throughout history have cared for their skin and hair using nature's bounty - which, yes, has included lead and nightingale poo at various times, but given that many beauty products currently contain the likes of petrol, carcinogens and formaldehyde, perhaps we shouldn't be too quick to judge - and what I am doing is therefore no different. I make my own products where I can, but when the ingredients cost as much as ready-made products, I buy carefully chosen natural products from a small handful of retailers. 

Recently, I had a fitting for my wedding dress, and under the bright lighting I winced to see how unkempt I was next to my (admittedly exceptionally beautiful) bridesmaid, who is always very well-groomed. We got to talking about wedding make-up - when we first planned the wedding, a make-up artist and professional photographer were booked, but having rearranged four times due to COVID, they were no longer available (or affordable). I didn't mind doing my own make-up, but in that moment it dawned on me that my two-years-out-of-date Lush slapstick probably wasn't going to cut it. 

When I started looking into what was available, I learned that since I started my shopping ban, the world of beauty had kind of moved on without me. I didn't actually know that primer was a thing. At first I panicked, and begged my gorgeous bridesmaid Bel to take me make-up shopping, envisaging a sprawling department store where some glossy professional could teach me how the hell one fills in their brows without looking as though they have a couple of weevils crawling across their forehead. (That said, the last department store makeover I had, circa 2016, was appalling - I had to sneak into work to wash off the Batman-villain eyebrows whilst my glamorous co-worker laughed herself hoarse.)

The night after the fitting, I decided I wasn't ready to compromise my 'crunchy' standards (side note: I recently learned the term 'granola girl', and although I'm not really the right age group for TikTok trends, please know that this is me. Granola mumma?). I went online and ordered some samples from zero waste, organic, natural and vegan make-up brands - all through Peace with the Wild, link below - and yes, I found a primer. The foundation, concealer and powder all had four ingredients - all of which I could recognise and pronounce. I felt better knowing I could look my best for my handfasting without compromising on ethics, or putting toxic goop on my face.

I do love to try new products, but I'm extremely cautious and generally don't put anything on my body that I wouldn't eat (the exception is nail varnish - I haven't bought any new since the end of 2020, but I have a few bottles that I have been given by friends). I also don't hoard products and only buy new to replace what has been used up. Dai has more bathroom products than I do.

What I am trying not to do is focus on concealment, improvement or perfection, but instead think about nourishment and care. 

For the curious, I shop from:

Peace With The Wild

Lush (although I'm choosy about which products; some contain talc or parabens which I prefer not to use)

The Really Wild Soap Company

Bain + Savon

I also use flower essences to gently help me stay in balance, my essentials are both from Saskia's Flower Essences - I use Breathe Deep, Seek Peace and My Personal Space.

For further reading, I highly recommend:

Wild Beauty by Jana Blankenship

No More Dirty Looks by Siobhan O'Connor and Alexandra Spunt

Freedom Face: A Beauty Guide Free From Toxic Ingredients, Expensive Gloop and Self-Hating Bullshit by Lucy AitkenRead

(I did not realise until typing this list how many of these names and titles contain the word 'wild'!)

We Did It!

 

Earth-Based

Recently I got called out by an oracle card deck that I got for Christmas. The deck in question is a pocket-sized set of 40 cards by Nadia Turner, called Forest Fae. First of all let me mention how exquisite these cards are - enchanting and not a little strange. Unlike the other decks I use, they are also pretty straight-talking, as they each contain a short phrase or message. I appreciate this a lot on days when I'm not in the mood for decoding symbolism or intuitively analysing imagery. In fact, for a fae-based deck, I was a little startled by how forthright these cards can be.

As I shuffled, my mind was wandering. I was thinking about my upcoming visit to a medieval fayre, wondering what I might buy. What sort of clothes was I looking for nowadays? Did I want to lean into my more practical, natural side, my inner barefoot hippie, or did I want to go more Glastonbury glamour, with glitter and flower crowns? I have no idea what question I originally intended to ask when I picked up the cards, but it wasn't one of my interminable, imaginary wardrobe dilemmas.

The first card I turned said, "Take the cloud roads; delight in your imagination."

As someone who has bemoaned, at length, my inability to daydream and visualise, which has happened over the last decade or so and which I blame pretty much entirely on my total absorption with shopping, fashion and social media (and which has made it rather difficult to write any fiction in recent years), I felt like this was a strong nudge. Stop asking stupid questions; go and remember how to daydream.

But it wasn't really the answer I wanted. Shopping Brain wanted to be told to go buy stuff. So I asked for clarification and drew another card.

 "Seek inspiration in twilight wanderings."

I translated this as: remember that new novel you keep saying you want to write but can't get any ideas for? Perhaps you should stop worrying about clothes and pull your head out of Instagram. (And I've always loved walking in the evening, or at night, when things are quiet.)

Mainly out of curiosity, I pulled another card.

 "Go to the woods. Seek moss, mud, and magic."

Well, now my disappointment was forgotten and I was becoming elated. I couldn't have asked for more apropos advice. I couldn't actually go to the woods right that minute as I had someone coming to fit my smart meters, but I determined to go just as soon as I could. And not just to take pictures for Instagram, either. As my fourth and final card advised: "Be a caretaker of silence."

Coincidentally (or not), I had just downloaded a sample for Starhawk's book The Earth Path, in which she says: "To be a Witch (a practitioner of the Old Religion of the Goddess) or a Pagan (someone who practices an earth-based spiritual tradition) is more than adopting a new set of terms and customs and a wardrobe of flowing gowns. It is to enter a different universe, a world that is alive and dynamic, where everything is part of an interconnected whole, where everything is always speaking to us, if only we have ears to listen. A Witch must not only be familiar with the mystic planes of existence beyond the physical realm; she should also be familiar with the trees and plants and birds and animals of her own backyard, be able to name them, know their uses and habits and what part each plays in the whole." 

Like Starhawk, my initial interest in Paganism was sparked by a desire for a spiritual path that embraced and honoured the feminine, but I have returned to it lately due to my love for and connection with the land. Yet this is a connection I find hard to maintain; there's no denying that the jolt, the buzz, the shopping high (or the weirdly addictive mix of anticipation and unease that is my social media experience) can exert a greater pull in the moment than meditation, birdwatching in my sit spot, or walking in nature.

I'm engaged so much with my gadgets lately that walking in a green space does strange things to my eyes, as they readjust to different shapes, spaces, patterns of sensory input. It's refreshing, like a bath and a nap just for my eyes and brain. 

I'm not sure how many times I'll need to learn the same lesson before it sticks. But at least I'll have my cards to keep me on track when I need it. And in the meantime? I guess I'll be in the woods.

I'll be away next week celebrating my handfasting - which, all being well, will be this weekend. After three postponements and a brief and casual (but admittedly lovely) legal ceremony, I'm deeply looking forward to finally being able to have our wedding!