Back at Lùnastal we spent an hour asking who lit the fire on your hill. This is the other side of it. Who are you lighting them for. And I want to be careful, because the obvious version of this episode is one you don't need. You have been pouring yourself out for other people since you were about nineteen and it's a large part of why you're tired. So here's what I actually think. Most of what we call helping is doing things for people that they could do themselves. It doesn't light any fires. It makes them smaller and it makes you emptier, and those turn out to be the same process. There's a piece of family systems work behind that, from a psychiatrist called Murray Bowen, and it's the sharpest thing I've brought you in this series. He described over-functioning and under-functioning as reciprocal positions. They produce each other. One person's taking over is what creates the room for the other's stepping back, and the stepping back pulls more taking over. So the woman doing eighty percent of everything is not surrounded by useless people. The people around her have become less capable because she does it all. Same fact, seen from two ends. He was clear that this isn't a character flaw. It's a way of managing anxiety and it works, which is why it's so hard to shift. The line worth having is that both positions bring the anxiety down, and what neither of them does is help anybody grow. Then the alternative, which our people had. The taigh-cèilidh, the visiting house. Every township had one, and it wasn't appointed, it emerged, usually because the fire was good or the woman of the house was welcoming. People drifted there after the work was done. The news first, then the songs and the long tales that could run three nights. And over in the corner, out of the way, the children, half asleep, absorbing an entire culture. The folklorists call these houses informal schools. And nobody in that room was teaching anybody. The adults were doing the thing, well, in front of people who knew when you got it wrong. That's the whole method, and it carried the language, the stories and the music of Gaelic Scotland across centuries with almost nothing written down. And the Queen of Wands, who is the warmest woman in the deck and is sitting down. She isn't out looking for anyone. She's seated, holding her own sprouting wand, with a black cat at her feet that cannot be commanded by anybody. And her body faces you while her head is turned away, which is a very particular kind of welcome. There's a practice at the end about handing one thing back, and it's the hardest one I've given you. Next week is the last of the twelve, on the equinox. A note: none of this applies to somebody who genuinely can't do the thing. Small children, people who are ill, anyone in a crisis. Doing the work for a person who isn't able is care, and it isn't what this episode is about. The episode says so. Take the quiz You already know. So what are you waiting for? Nine questions, about three minutes, and at the end you get the name of the pattern that's been keeping you where you are. Each result is a figure out of Scottish folklore. At sageinthesky.com. Answer as you are, not as you intend to be.
