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Imbolc 2007
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Greetings!
This is Dr. Geo Athena Trevarthen's newsletter. You're receiving it because you or someone at that email address signed up at my website, www.celticshamanism.com. Please let us know if you wish to unsubscribe and notify us of any change to your address. Please also make sure that your email server and spam filter will accept email from tuath@btopenworld.com as that's where this mailing will normally come from.
This newsletter contains some musings on what I'm learning from babies. I hope it won't just be relevant to people who've had babies. All of us were babies, after all.
I'm adding events to the newsletter that don't involve me but that I think may interest you.
No one interested in shamanism in or near Edinburgh should miss the talk to be given by Mihaly Hoppál on Cosmic symbolism and Siberian shamanism on the16th of February. Details below.
There's also details on the upcoming Sumerian spirituality workshop I'm leading in Edinburgh on February 22nd
Later events include the Magic of Harry Potter class I'm teaching at Edinburgh University starting in April and a shamanism conference I'm speaking at in May. In September I'll be giving a talk at Druidcon in Glasgow. There's also details on the Pagan Federation Scottish Conference in June.
Enjoy!
Le Beannachdan,
With Blessings,
Dr. Geo Athena Trevarthen, Imbolc 2007
Events
1) Cosmic Symbolism and Siberian Shamanism
Mihaly is a great speaker and world expert on shamanism in Hungary, Siberia and elsewhere. I was fortunate enough to meet him some years ago and very much look forward to seeing him again. This is an event sponsored by the Traditional Cosmology Society, an excellent society for anyone interested in, well, what it says on the tin. Their website is: www.tradcos.co.uk
There are four events I'm involved with coming up in Edinburgh over the next few months.
The Edinburgh International Festival of Middle Eastern Spirituality and Peace 2007, http://www.mesp.org.uk
I'll be teaching a one-day workshop I'm very excited about. Through various synchronicities, visions and research, Sumerian traditions have become central to my spiritual path over the last fifteen years. There are themes in Celtic tradition which can be further illuminated by looking at their Sumerian antecedents. This is the first chance I've had to share any of these teachings, so I'm really looking forward to it.
Sumerian religion fascinates me as part of a continuum. While it's impossible to be clear what elements came from what source thousands of years ago there are lots of possible influences on Sumerian religion.
Some ancient spiritual influences may go back to Çatal Hüyük, an important Neolithic site. It dates from the 8th to 7th millennium BC. Çatal Hüyük is near Konya in Anatolia in Eastern Turkey, and is the biggest town of the early Neolithic in this area, with 7,000 inhabitants at its peak.
The Sumerian continuum comes all the way forward to the present, in large and small ways. For example, we have sixty minutes in our hours because they divided time this way for religious reasons.
Abraham, founder of Judaism, came from the great Mesopotamian city of Ur. The Sumerians had a particularly strong focus on a personal God. This prefigures Jewish, Christian and Muslim theology.
More recently, medieval angelic magick, such as that practiced by John Dee in the 1600's, owes a lot to Sumer. The workings of some ritual magicians to the present day represent a 'Sumerian revival' of sorts...I could go on but...
The basic course description is:
2) The Treasures of Sumerian Spirituality (Day Workshop)
Sumerian tradition is literally an 'Ur' spirituality, taking us back to the 'trunk of the tree' from which facets of many Middle Eastern and Western traditions have branched. Studying it can bring us to a deeper holistic understanding of the underlying unity of all spiritualities, and the deeper meanings of themes in many traditions, ranging from Judaism, Christianity and Islam to Western mystery traditions such as alchemy and ritual magic. Here we'll have the rare opportunity to experientially explore some of these themes through discussion, meditation and Sumerian chants. Topics will include Sacred Marriage, especially as an alchemical, internal process, Sacred Sovereignty, or governing your own life, bearing the oscillation of union and loss nobly in life, and, one of the central pillars of Sumerian religion, our relationship to what we might call a guardian angel, a personal manifestation of the Sacred.
3) The Magic of Harry Potter
The fictional world of Harry Potter has inspired a huge response from children and adults alike. Here, we'll explore the narrative themes in the books and films, trace their roots back to myths, legends and ideas about magic and spirituality, and discuss their literary and cultural significance to us today.
Contact: Office of Lifelong Learning
4) Shamanic Spirituality Conference Both of these will be on Friday the 4th of May.
Shamanism is well-attested in Celtic cultures over a wide range of times and places. We find it in the classical authors descriptions of the 'visionary' Celts and in later Irish and Welsh literature. We also find shamanistic techniques in use up to and beyond the 19th century in Scottish and Irish folk traditions. This lecture explores some effects of shamanic practice on the Celts, distinctive features of Celtic shamanism, and why the existence of Celtic shamanism was so hotly debated until recently.
The Shamanism Conference is organised by:
Edinburgh International Centre for World Spiritualities
Conference information here:
http://www.eicws.org/component/option,com_docman/task,cat_view/gid,43/Itemid,29/
5) The Pagan Federation Scottish Conference Both of these will be on Friday the 4th of May.
Speakers so far booked include:
Tickets are available from PF Scotland and Ireland, PO Box 14251, Anstruther KY10 3YA. Please enclose your cheque for £6.50 (members) or £8.00 (non-members) made payable to "The Pagan Federation (Scotland and Ireland). A full name, address and phone number must be supplied for each person requiring a ticket. Please enclose an SAE. You can also pay through Paypal from The Pagan Federation (Scotland) website. For those interested in running a stall, these cost £6.00 plus a donation to the raffle. All stallholders must also buy a ticket. We regret there are no facilities for children.
6) Druidcon, Glasgow
Article
Happy Baby, Happy Mummy
The festival of Brigit on February 1st goes by two names. 'Brigantia' carries the obvious meaning of the festival of the goddess, and later, saint Brigit. Imbolc has several possible meanings. One is i mbolg, 'in the belly,' which could refer to sheep, heavily pregnant at this time and/or the idea that winter is 'pregnant' with spring. This is in line with Celtic ideas of things beginning with darkness. (The day begins the night before, for example.) This relates to ideas of creation — the baby begins in the darkness of the womb, the plant begins with the seed in the earth. Another possible etymology relates to washing and purification.
In later Gaelic tradition, ideas of washing, purification and milk often go together, for example, in the 19th century Scottish Gaelic Invocation for Justice. While washing their face in a stream, the reciter says "I am bathing my face in the nine rays of the sun, as Mary bathed her son in fermented milk." (Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, volume 1, 1900, pp. 53-56). As a baby, St. Brigit would only consume the milk of a special white, red-eared cow. Later, she was baptised in milk. (Bethu Brigte, translated by Ó hAodha; McNeill, The Silver Bough, 1959, vol.2, p. 21). At the end of this article I have put links to an article about Imbolc and an Old Irish Life of Brigit.
Brigit is often said to have been the midwife who attended Mary in Gaelic tradition, and is patron of healing, smithcraft and poetry. Her festival is a good time to reflect on all these, but on this occasion I'm going to focus on birth, babyhood and the Mother archetype. Imbolc is the only old Celtic festival explicitly associated with a feminine deity.
Women's lot in life has changed in many ways in the modern West. We are miraculously safer than we ever were, yet paradoxically, we're more frightened. We're terrified of terrorists, breast cancer, being assaulted by a loony or a thug.
Reading the book The Red Tent by Anita Diamant has certainly made me glad to be alive now, not in the ancient near East, despite my love of Sumerian!
It's a good book focussed on women's relationships and concerns in early Jewish history. I do think however that it concentrates a bit much on the grimmest aspects of childbirth. While people can die in this process, if it wasn't actually designed to work there wouldn't be so many of us!
Nonetheless, the fact is that the average life span in ancient Egypt was around three, meaning that although some people lived to be over seventy an awful lot must have died in early childhood. A healthy mum might well have seen a number of her children die. Now it's a blessedly rare occurrence, at least in the modern West.
When I have fits of worry about my children, I comfort myself that the average female life expectancy here is around 82, and that includes people who were poorly supervised as toddlers and went for drunken nights out as teens!
Just as infant mortality used to be a greater problem than now in the West there were times in history when the women didn't fare so well either. It's salutory to learn that while the leading cause of death for women in the 1800's in Britain was childbirth, the next cause was setting fire to yourself while cooking. Imagine that.
We have many blessings that go uncounted just because we take them for granted. We've probably got the best chance in childbirth there has ever been now with educated doctors, modern medicine and midwives often all working together. 1 in 3 deaths in childbirth in Edwardian times is down to 1 in 10,000. These facts head my current list of reasons to be cheerful.
Cheerful Childhoods
Our capacity for cheerfulness is influenced by how we start out in life. This isn't to say that we can't be happy if we had a less than ideal upbringing. It can just be easier to be happy if we did.
Jean Liedloff looked at child rearing amongst some of the happiest people she knew, the Yequana Indians of South America, in her book The Continuum Concept. She noticed that they were jolly even when working hard and having accidents trying to portage a 17-person canoe over half a mile of boulders. She came to feel that their baby rearing methods laid a good groundwork for happiness.
Our capacity for happiness, as well as our modes of child rearing, can be seen as an ancestral legacy. (In positive or negative senses.)
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, for obvious reasons. (I've recently had my second child.) I've been chatting with my father-in-law, Professor Emeritus Colwyn Trevarthen, an expert in infant development. I've also been reading a lot, including a recent article by Sir Richard Bowlby (whose dad pioneered work in attachment theory. There is a link to his article below. ), Sue Palmer's Toxic Childhood, Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté's Hold Onto Your Kids, and Liedloff's book, mentioned above.
I'm far from expert here, just thinking aloud from my experiences so far with my daughters and what I've been reading. There are so many ways of looking at baby rearing and the effects that our own babyhoods had on us. None of us can be positive that we're doing exactly right by our children, we can just do our best.
Our ancestors have helped — even if our immediate families had failings. The love between mother and child is a very basic and central mammalian relationship — maybethe basic one. It has greater longevity for many mammals than the one with a mate. It's reflected by the way so many people, after a lifetime of relationships, still call for mum in their last moments on earth.
In all our lineages there must have been thousands of caring mother / child relationships, beginning with little lemur-like mummies and babies millions of years ago, or we wouldn't have survived. I know I feel that legacy behind my relationship with my daughters.
Most of the time people say 'happy mummy, happy baby,' (the inverse of this article's title) which is partly true. Children are influenced by their mum's mood, especially if mum is withdrawn or post-natally depressed.
Happy Mummy, Happy Baby
The formulation 'happy mummy, happy baby,' has been quite reasonably used to justify mum taking care of herself. But it's also been used less reasonably to justify mums doing just as they think they want to do — which often doesn't meet babies or mum's real needs.
I've been finding that the more I do what seven-month-old Aurora would like, the more I follow my own natural instincts, and the happier I personally feel.
Those of you reading this will know, that as a hereditary shaman, I'm keen on maintaining ancestral continuities of spiritual practice. Shamanism is part of the ancient 'continuum' of human experience and understanding.
But the continuum is bigger than spirituality. The continuum consists of what's worked for our ancestors for thousands of years in a wide range of areas, from social structures to farming methods to psychological well-being, from child-rearing to transcendence.
A Continuum of Care
Leidloff's book, The Continuum Concept, as noted above, focuses primarily on how the Venezuaelan Yequana Indians (and other traditional cultures) treat their infants — co-sleeping, breast-feeding on baby's request, and carrying baby with them in a sling until she's ready to start exploring more on her own.
Babies aren't left to cry or isolated, but are also not the centre of attention. Discipline increases along with the child's understanding. Liedloff notes that the continuum evolves gradually, rather than changing drastically, and we carelessly discard bits of it at our peril. This idea strikes me as really useful.
While none of us can be positive that we're raising babies and children well, if we raise them to some degree as traditional cultures have successfully raised children for millennia then maybe we'll be alright.
It's like diet. We've introduced millions of novel chemicals into our diets all at once. Many of us live on refined starches, sweets and fats that didn't exist until recently, and that have only been widely eaten in vast quantities for a century or so. The health effects are becoming obvious.
If we think more of a continuum, and decide to live mostly on the whole foods our ancestors lived on, we're healthier. Caution and the scientific method dictate that it's better not to change everything in an experiment at once. If we do, we can't single out what went wrong or right.
Traditional cultures can give us a sense of what the continuum looks like to use as a model. Of course, there are parts of these cultures we may not adopt for ourselves. For example, while we may acknowledge a need for rites of passage, we might not want our twelve-year-old's teeth knocked out or their skin lacerated in said rites. Although, as Joe Campbell said, they fulfil a real psychological purpose, "There's no return to babyhood after a show like that." :-)
Once We Were Babies
The question of how we treat babies isn't just important if we have babies. It's important if we ever were babies. (I'll assume you were! :-) ) The effects of our culture's 'modern' parenting experiments may be felt in our own lives long after babyhood. As you read what follows, you might reflect on how you might have felt as a baby if you were treated in certain ways, and how this might still effect you.
We've moved rapidly away from everything people have traditionally done in rearing their children. Even something as simple as a pram is a big and recent innovation, only adopted on a large scale when Queen Victoria got one.
I've had old Scottish ladies come up and say how happy they were to see me carrying my babies in a sling. They said they always used a tied shawl to carry their babies, and they were much happier than sitting isolated in a pram.
Babies in most traditional cultures typically spend 90% of their time in physical contact with someone. By contrast, babies in our culture spend around 90% of their time in physical isolation. Babies are actually getting flat heads from lying on their backs all the time. Why? They're babies, not invalids! :-)
There are many ways of integrating babies into activities. I'm writing this with Aurora on a bolster in front of me nursing. Liedloff makes the point that 'parenting' isn't a full time job in traditional cultures. It's an adjunct to most other activities. Mum carries baby around as she does her daily work. Baby learns to do all the activities she'll do as a grown up.
All this companionship doesn't make baby helpless or self-absorbed. Indigenous babies are capable of things that surprise us. I saw a three-year-old Inuit girl in a documentary competently filleting a fish with a razor-sharp knife as long as her arm. In one indigenous culture in Tierra del Fuego (the Southern tip of South America) babies still unable to walk were seen to crawl to the sea, gather shellfish, throw them on the fire, cook them, bash them open and eat them.
Having a baby in these cultures doesn't end mum's life in any way. Mum has to work, it's not like she can stop gathering food or cultivating it or getting water. She can also chat with friends, make handicrafts and art and dance at parties. A lot of our problems with babies come from the way we isolate activities and ages. Babies aren't generally welcome at work or at nightclubs!
Parenting in traditional cultures bonds — in ours it often isolates. Young Yequana men often seek out babies to play with when they get home from hunting. Everyone has fun with the village children and learns to enjoy and care for them along the way. Here in the UK, families with young children don't often live next door to each other, so mum and children can feel isolated.
Often, the first time we even hold a baby is when we're handed our own! It's no wonder we have such a hard time knowing what to do. It's no wonder we can react badly when things aren't working well. The problem is, because we're out of the continuum, the techniques we try may cause the very problems they purport to 'cure.'
Reactions
We sometimes lose sight of the fact that children aren't problems to solve, but fellow humans we're in relationship with. I had an irritated tone in my voice at the end of a long day and Téa said, "Mummy, I'm your friend." That told me!
Some widely recommended ways of treating children may create problems that other techniques then purport to 'solve.'
For example, it's taken for granted that new parents, mums in particular, will be exhausted by baby's nocturnal 'demands.' This problem is then 'solved' by 'controlled crying' where baby is left alone in its cot crying longer and longer until she gives up and stops crying. Help and comfort won't be coming.
Here, compliant behaviour is not 'settling in' it's giving up. I think this is an awful lesson to teach a baby, especially one who's been out of the womb for less time than she was in it.
Some books go so far as to say that if baby is so upset she vomits, the carer should go in, clean up without even making eye contact, and leave again. If a carer treated an equally helpless disabled adult that way, they'd likely be imprisoned, yet we're told to treat our babies this way.
On one level, of course, it can be argued that a carer driven mad and exhausted will be a bad carer, so these means are the lesser evil. However, if the problem is caused in the first place by bad baby-rearing advice, it can be 'solved' before it starts.
I was certainly exhausted when I had my first daughter, Téa, and attempted to 'settle' her in a Moses basket at night. My husband took her two nights a week from 6-12 weeks to give me a rest. Over-full breasts impeded real rest.
Finally at twelve weeks, she let us know in no uncertain terms (two hours of unremitting screaming) that bottles and separate beds were not acceptable. She's stayed in my bed from that night forward and I'm happy to leave it that way till she's ready to leave. I began to feel better right away.
There have been no such problems with my second daughter. She co-slept with me from the start. (I sleep between her and her older sister.) Breast feeding on her request is easily accomplished, and I sleep during most of it. (I dislike the term breast feeding 'on-demand' as babies can't demand, that is, they can't make their adult carers do anything.)
The waking doesn't feel tiring, though I sometimes sleep an hour or two longer. It's quite pleasant waking intermittently to snuggle with Aurora and feed her.
Though it is now recommended that parents not co-sleep for baby's safety, I'd be interested to know the risk factors associated with the numbers of infant deaths. It cannot be solely attributable to co-sleeping, as Japan has a very low rate of sudden infant death syndrome and co-sleeping is the norm.
It would be particularly useful to know how many deaths occur where the mother is slim, non-smoking, non-intoxicated at bedtime, breast feeding and sleeping between the baby and dad or sleeping alone with the baby. I wouldn't sleep with a baby between my husband and I, as I don't think men are as biologically programmed to be alert to baby as a breast-feeding mother is.
The co-sleeping cautions we're given are more broadly, of course, an indicator of our unhealthy society. Many of us are obese, and occasionally or frequently drunk and drugged. In these and other cases, we have to try to do our best for our children in our circumstances.
I often carry Aurora, (as I did Téa) in a sling as I go about my activities. Aurora attended her first formal dinner at two months in her sling at the Clan Lamont Gathering and was happy as a clam. She only woke when I performed Old Irish songs at the ceilidh after, and then was quite happy to just look around.
A Sacrifice?
None of what I've discussed above is a 'sacrifice.' It's all about creating a positive sense of companionship between parent and child. This is a win-win situation, but our culture doesn't frame it that way.
The idea is that mum and dad 'sacrifice' to give children what they need. I think that this perception is a piece of what makes people unhappy to stay home with young children, or frightened of having children at all.
I went into motherhood fearing I wouldn't manage without hot and cold running nannies, having been very vocation-focussed until 39. (I received my Ph.D. when four months pregnant with Téa.)
In what follows, I'm not saying that we should all breed. We live in an overpopulated world. I'm just saying what having children has done for me. It's also worth reflecting on the idea that those of us who think hardest about bringing a child into the world or adopting one may be some of the best people to raise children.
Before Téa was conceived, I even considered not having children, despite having really wanted them for over two decades. That thought gives me chills. I would have missed the very best experience in my life — better than driving onto the Paramount lot as an employed screenwriter, better than meditating in Anatolia, better than public speaking, better than anything!
I could have saved myself the misery of indecision if I'd paid more attention to my ancestral continuum. All my family, and many others I knew, said that parenting was 'the toughest job you'll ever love.' (To paraphrase the Marines! :-)
As I learned to trust my instincts and do what felt best for my daughters, I was surprised to find that many anticipated 'sacrifices' were also best for me.
Co-sleeping means I sleep and it's also snuggly and pleasant. I would have missed some of the loveliest moments of my life cuddling my babies if I hadn't co-slept. Sling wearing means I get to enjoy my baby's company while I get on with other activities and my fitness improves more rapidly post-partum than lots of mums I know. Breast feeding on request means that I never get mastitis and baby and I are in sync. My breasts fill up just before Aurora starts to make subtle signs of hunger, so I feed her. No crying. I've read that at three months, three hours a day of fussing and crying is typical. Most days three-month-old Aurora did five minutes or less.
Of course, I sometimes feel frustrated that so much of my 'other' work is on the back burner. However, it will only benefit in the long term. Because my writing and other work time is so curtailed, I'm really hungry to work, and I accomplish more in two hours than I used to in ten or twenty. When the girls are more occupied with school, I'll probably be a tornado of activity. For now I make do with the early morning hours and the girls' occasional dual afternoon nap.
There are other ways that having them has improved my life in unexpected areas. Things like sitting out in a cafe are acutely pleasant, much more than they used to be, because I seldom do them. I'm enjoying things much more than I used to. It's ironic that I thought I'd have to sacrifice certain pleasures to have children. Instead, though I do some things less, I enjoy them more.
In fact, I enjoy most things more. Children are so funny. The average adult laughs fifteen times a day, the average three-year-old, four hundred! Part of me thought having children would age me, but it's mostly the opposite. Having two lovely girls actually makes me feel better about time's changes to myself. When people say they're pretty it's a compliment to me too. After all, they came out of me!
I think it's also likely that my quantity, as well as quality, of life will be increased. Having been expecting or breast-feeding since 2003 has improved my diet and health habits quite a bit.
Coming from an ancestral tradition, there's also a sense of having done my duty by the ancestors. There's a lot of pleasure in carrying on traditions with my girls. The challenges come in the ways that facets of modern life make it harder to raise children, in some ways, than it was for my ancestors.
Isolation
I realised after talking with my mum last week that I am the first woman in our family (to our knowledge) to raise children without the help of other women. Before we left the Highlands, we lived in extended family and village situations, where child rearing was a communal activity. When we moved to the cities (Aberdeen, then Liverpool and London) there was still a sense of community within neighbourhoods and the men had good enough wages to pay for servants.
My mother had my grandmother living with us. She helped care for me while mum went back to her job as a barrister.
By contrast, David and I live pretty much on our own in the midst of the country. The nearest neighbour is single male friend who is not keen on child rearing. The farmer and his wife who we rent from are working the farm 24 / 7.
All the people I see at toddler groups live miles away or we might be more able to support each other. David's family is a three-hour round trip away. My mum is overseas. Hence, there's no real family support.
The whole question of moving away from families and communities for work is a big one. It's been taken as a 'given' that children grow up and move far away, returning only for holidays, but that is a very recent phenomena for the majority of people. There have always been times when people emigrated and never saw each other again. However most people stayed in extended family groupings for most of human history. We have to consider the trade offs. Career opportunities come and go. Few of us have lifetime jobs any more. Good relations with a community and/or family can last a lifetime and transmit stability to future generations.
What we need versus want, is another huge question — and not just if we have babies! My staying home with the girls means that we do without many things our culture deems 'necessary,' like a mortgage and holidays. A toddler doesn't know if the home they live in is rented or owned, but they do know if mum is there or not — and so does mum.
Our Inner Baby
Maybe one key to improving matters for babies and parents in our culture is to emphasise the benefits to parents of staying home with baby. What's in it for us. It's funny — we've gone a long way off track when someone has to tell us that a baby needs its mum or that a mum might enjoy being with her baby!
Understanding what babies need is also important to understanding our own psyches, as many of us were treated in less than desirable ways as babies ourselves.
Maybe we have abandonment issues; maybe we become sex or romance addicted to get the physical connection we missed out on. How do we heal? If we have children, we can try to do better for them, which can make us feel better.
For example, my mum was generally quite sensitive to my needs, but when I was five months old, my dad came home from abroad with a cold she didn't want me to get. She abruptly put me out of her bed at night into a cot and grandma took care of me. I was never left to cry, but I must have been a bit upset — I weaned myself overnight at five months of age. :-) Maybe that has something to do with the fact that I now co-sleep!
It's not just my own experience I'm drawing from. I've worked with clients with terrible abandonment issues who discovered, upon questioning their mums, that they'd been left to scream for ages to 'exercise their lungs,' or so that they wouldn't be 'spoiled.'
Perhaps it's not surprising that such children might take a less than compassionate view of mum and dad as they enter their dotage. This is another reason that the treatment of children is important to us all. Do we want to be old and possibly incapacitated in a culture of people who were raised compassionately or harshly?
Like children, elderly people are depersonalised by our culture. There's a pervasive idea that children, like old people, aren't fully people somehow, that they are problems to be managed.
Last year I saw a week of programs on this on Channel 4 here in the UK. Despite the attempt to raise consciousness, the programs kept discussing how 'we treat our old people,' as though 'they' were another species.
I wanted to say, 'I have seen the future, and 'they' are us!" This is, of course, another issue, but they're related. It's my hope that if I don't leave my daughters crying and alone now, they may extend me the same courtesy later.
Reparenting and Community
Whether we have children or not we can also try to reparent ourselves, or focus our spirit journeys on theophanies (manifestations of Deity) who can. One person I know who'd suffered horrid childhood abuse said that her mother was the Bear Mother and her father was Wolf and that was it.
She gave up her expectations of her parents. They couldn't, or wouldn't, be with her in the loving way she needed.
The tough bit about these two possibilities is that they both look exactly the same from the outside!
We can't know if anyone we're in any kind of relationship with can't or won't do something.
The most important thing in coming to terms with our parents' failings is to accept that we won't have our fantasy mum or dad, at least not in the physical. Depending on how good or difficult the relationship may be, we may need to let it go or there may be work — or play — to be done to improve relations.
My children teach me better ways of looking at things. As Ramsey Dukes terms it, there's more than the 'good' and the 'bad' in life, there's also the 'funny!' (see his book, The Good, the Bad, and the Funny.) Humour, as much as spiritual awareness, can help us transcend life's polarities of good and bad, union and loss.
All of us can learn something from the issues involved in parenting, whether or not we're parents.
After I had both Téa and Aurora, I was slightly shocked to be asked if they were 'good babies.' I wanted to ask, 'in an absolute or moral sense?' What the questioners actually meant was, is the baby good for me. I answered, "All babies are good. She's also contented — in part because I co-sleep, breast feed and wear her in a sling."
The question we need to ask socially, spiritually and environmentally, in the broadest possible contexts is, are we being good for each other? We need to focus on the attachments, the engagements, the relationships between ourselves and children, parents, environment, community, ancestors and Spirit.
Individuals are, like light, both particles and waves. We are ourselves, yet those selves are always in flowing motion with everything else. We exist in a relational continuum, in time, lineage and space.
Our culture's withdrawal from life's continuum on so many levels, our fear of it, is nothing less than a withdrawal from life.
Good Works
http://www.wavetrust.org/index.htm, an international charity dedicated to reducing child abuse and interpersonal violence through understanding its root causes. There are numerous links on their site to other organisations that help children.
http://www.children1st.org.uk/, one of Scotland's leading childcare charities. Their mission is to give every child in Scotland a safe and secure childhood.
Websites
Link to Tom Torma's Imbolc article: (Tom and I did our MSc degrees together at Edinburgh in Old Irish.)
http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/T201010/index.html
Here are some sites dealing with happiness and one specifically on making mums happy. I also gave them in the Samhain 2006 newsletter but am giving them again here because of the topic of my article and many new subscribers.
There was a recent UK program called Making Slough Happy. It applied various principles that psychological studies show make people happier. At the end of the project, test results showed that participants were, on average, 33% happier, a remarkable result. (2 links below)
A UK website adapted their program for mums in a project called Making Mums Happy. The project has ended, but all the materials can be found at
http://www.netmums.com/lc/makingmumshappy/programmeintro.php.
Some articles on attachment parenting can be found here: http://www.naturalfamilyonline.com/articles/attachment-parenting.htm
A really good magazine on conscious parenting is at: http://www.byronchild.com/
Another useful site: http://www.attachmentparenting.org/
An article I recently read by Sir Richard Bowlby about daycare for under threes is at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/21/nursery21.xml
Here's a link to a recent important event for Greek Pagans in particular and more generally, for those seeking to gain legal recognition for ancient European traditions
And this is a fascinating article on an ancient site in Turkey that may have been near the Sumerian city of Ur, but predates it.
(I just got sent this by D., one of the proprietors of the Wyrd Shop, a great Edinburgh and online establishment for your assorted metaphysical needs.)
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