Ancient paganism in a land of orthodoxy.

Athena and Poseidon fight to be Athens's patron deity.
Lynne Cantwell | Athens, May 2026

I'm back from my refreshing two-week break. Folks who follow me on Facebook already know that I spent most of it gallivanting on a ten-day bus tour of Greece (although "land tour via motor coach" sounds classier). Unlike the European river cruises I've been on, this one was sparse on churches, partly because the country is mostly Greek Orthodox (their churches don't seem to feature the ostentatious wealth of European cathedrals that Americans like to goggle at) and partly because the country is rife with ancient pre-Christian ruins.

We toured a lot of those ancient ruins. Like, a lot of them. It seems like you can't dig anywhere in Greece without hitting the remains of an old Greek temple or Roman villa or something from an even older culture. But at every site we visited, there has been an effort to save at least a semblance of a temple to a god or goddess. Clearly the gods were important to the ancient Greeks.

Which is why I was shocked when our guide at Olympia, the site of the original Olympics, baldly stated that nobody in ancient Greece ever believed in the Greek gods. She said that the gods embodied the virtues that each person was supposed to aspire to, but people didn't actually believe they existed.

Seriously? Then why go to the trouble of building all this?

The Parthenon in Athens, dedicated to Athena. Other temples on the 
Acropolis are dedicated to other gods.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

The temple of Hera at Olympia.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

The temple of Zeus at Olympia. Hera's temple was built first.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

Info about the temple of Athena at Sparta. There's not much of the temple left.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

Temple of Apollo at Corinth, one of two structures the Romans didn't destroy.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

These people went to so much trouble to carve, shift and stack thousands upon thousands of tons of limestone and marble to honor beings they didn't think were real? Are you crazy?

At first I thought maybe what our guide was implying was that the ancients were misguided and only the Christian god is real. But now I think she was coming from a Christian-centric view not of the gods' existence, but of the nature of religion.

John Beckett has said many times that in its broadest sense, religion is about what you do, who you are, and whose you are. Christians have their Bible, Jews their Hebrew bible, Muslims their Koran; those books lay out the official tenets of their religions. The ancient Greeks didn't have anything like that. For them, moral authority came not from a religious text but from artworks, stories, and plays about their gods. 

The photo at the top of this post is of a sculpture that once adorned the Parthenon. It tells the story of how Athens got its patron: Athena, the goddess of wisdom, strategy, and crafts, and Poseidon, the god of the sea, storms, and earthquakes, vied for the job. Poseidon brought up a spring of salt water, which the citizens deemed useless -- it wasn't like they could drink it. Then Athena caused to grow an olive tree. The citizens were thrilled -- they could eat the olives, use their oil for all manner of things, and use the wood for homes and tools -- so they adopted Athena as their goddess and named their city Athens. Using John's definition of religion, residents of the city were Athenians (who they are). Athena was their patron deity (whose they are), and so they honored her (what they do). They didn't need a bible to lay all that out; instead, they had things like this sculpture on the Parthenon. 

And they had theater. Although of the 1,000 or so plays written by Greek and Roman authors, only 83 survive, 46 of them Greek. Some we know about only because another author mentions them. 

Modern Pagans don't have a bible, either. What we have is what's left of the ancients' stories and plays about whichever gods and goddesses we follow. Like the ancient Greeks, we're not obsessed with what we need to do to get to heaven; instead, we're focused on doing the best we can in this world, right now.

***

I am a Pagan polytheist and animist. I follow and honor gods and goddesses from several pantheons: Mokosh, the Slavic goddess of the earth and of weaving and spinning; Brigid, the Irish goddess of weaving, smithcraft and poetry; Lugh, the Irish god of light; Morrigan, the Irish goddess of sovereignty and war; Perun, the Slavic god of thunder and justice; Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and strategy; and Luna, the Roman goddess of the moon. 

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The only Greek god I follow is Athena. But I poured a little offering of water at each temple we visited anyway. It felt like the right thing to do. And I think the gods appreciated knowing that some folks still honor them.

***

Three observations before I wrap up: 

1) I found it interesting that Athens, the ancient city-state that prized democracy and the arts, is now a metropolis of three million people, while Sparta, the ancient city-state that prized military order, has a population of only about 20,000 people today. The modern city is built atop the old one, and what remains of ancient Sparta is not well preserved; the Bronze Age site of Messene is better developed, and extensive excavations only began there in 2007. It almost seemed to me like the Greeks don't care to emphasize Sparta's violent past.

2) While touring all these ancient sites and seeing so many big chunks of temples in pieces, I thought of all the home-improvement TV shows in which some guy screws something to something else and says, "That's not going anywhere." I could almost hear the ancient Greek stone masons, echoing down the ages, saying the same thing. (In the case of the Acropolis, it didn't help matters that the occupying Ottomans were using the place to store gunpowder; the attacking Venetians lobbed a mortar shell into the building in 1687, blowing out pillars on one side and destroying the structures inside.)

3) The Acropolis Museum in Athens is worth a stop on its own. Of course, the topic of the Elgin marbles came up during our tour. In the early 1800s, the seventh Earl of Elgin "acquired" from the occupying Ottomans a bunch of statuary from Greece, including a haul from the Parthenon. He eventually sold everything to the British government, which put it on display in the British Museum. Our guide in Athens was confident that the marbles would eventually be returned. Negotiations over an elaborate swap of the marbles for other Greek antiquities have been ongoing since 2021, but the sticking point is that the Brits say they were legally acquired, while the Greeks say they were looted. Personally, I think the Brits are stalling.

***

These moments of opinionated Greek tourism have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. C'mon, England, give that stuff back to Greece already.

Another near miss for Trump; and a shower lighting dilemma.

Gods ding it, he's done it again. I had a nice, breezy little post planned for this week, and then Trump sucked all the air out of the room again by showing up at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and maybe attracting a shooter. So I will address that first, and then I'll add a shortish version of my breezy little post at the end. 

***

I feel like the best thing I can do right now, when so little is known -- and when, let's be honest, we don't know how much to believe of what either the administration or the pundits are saying -- is to answer some of the conspiratorial questions I've seen online today.

• How did the alleged gunman (hereinafter AGM) get his weapons to DC from California? He took Amtrak. Security is just not as crazy on passenger trains as it is on flights. I don't recall ever having to step through a magnetometer before boarding an Amtrak train. (But you can bet your ass that will change now. Thanks a lot, AGM.)
• Okay, but how did the AGM get his weapons past security at the hotel? He was a hotel guest. Think back to the last time you checked into a hotel. Did you have to pass through a magnetometer at the door? No? Neither did I. If the AGM checked in sufficiently ahead of the event -- say, sometime Friday -- the security checkpoint for the dinner probably wasn't even set up yet. And he wouldn't have had to get past that until Saturday night. Plus which, guys, it's a hotel. They host a lot of big events, not to mention guests who have nothing to do with any of the scheduled events. Setting up a security perimeter at the hotel entrance would be a massive inconvenience to everybody with business there that has nothing to do with the correspondents' dinner. Now, I've seen reports that they have in fact done this in the past. If so, why didn't they do it this year? I have no idea.
• All that said, how did the shooter get so close to Trump? He didn't. The International Ballroom at the Washington Hilton is two floors below the main hotel entrance. The hotel's website has a fun interactive map that allows you to fly around their event space; click the Explore 360 Tour button on this page. It's been a few decades since I attended an event there (the Congressional Correspondents' Dinner used to be held there until it got too big), but I think I recall taking the escalator down to the ballroom. From what I've seen online, the security checkpoint was on the Terrace level, which is between the main floor and the Concourse level. Plus, y'all, the International Ballroom is huge. It seats more than 2,500 people, according to the hotel's website, and the dais is on the opposite side of the room from the doors that attendees come through. So the AGM would have had to get past the magnetometers on the Terrace level, down the escalator, past more agents who were no doubt stationed in the Concourse foyer outside the ballroom, and then past all the journalists at all the guest tables to get to the dais where Trump was seated. He was tackled outside of the magnetometers on the Terrace level. That doesn't seem that close to me.
• Was the whole thing staged? It's possible. It would have required TFGA's handlers to find a willing patsy, suggest he take Amtrak and stay at the Hilton, and do it all without bringing Trump in until the last minute so he didn't give the game away. Reportedly, it wouldn't have been the first time that Trump was kept out of the loop on an important issue.
• If it was staged, why? I doubt it would have been all about Trump's White House ballroom plans; he talks about them at the drop of a hat anyway. As a pivot from the Iran war and the Epstein files, and as an effort to bolster his historically lousy approval ratings, sure. As a commercial for his ballroom? Nah.

That's enough for now. Let's move on to my breezy little post.

***

I went ahead this week and bought ceramic tile for the shower walls! I brought it home and loaded it into my storage closet yesterday. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

I've also bought porcelain mosaic tile for the shower floor. I've been wanting to use the star-and-cross pattern on something for ages. Each of these little tile is 2"x2". (Note that this sample came chipped and cracked; I've checked the actual tiles, which were packaged much better, and they seem okay.)

Lynne Cantwell 2026

So anyway, yeah, the wall tile is dark, so the shower is going to be dark -- like a cave, almost, once the shower curtain is closed. Not that I ever want to be on trend, but maybe I am. (Go here and scroll down to number 5.) But it means lighting is a concern. A lot of people have can lights put in so that their shower is daylight bright. (Others do a sun tunnel, but guaranteed that my upstairs neighbor would not be amused.) But I want to preserve the moodiness.

The only light in the shower right now is this battery-operated light, plus whatever filters in above the shower curtain. It would be fun to have a starry sky, and you can get kits that allow you to make one by sticking fiber-optic lines through a suspended ceiling; alas, they require a projector concealed somewhere that's not wet. Another solution I've seen is to have an LED light strip installed at the top of the tile. That looks like my best option, but it would require hiring an electrician. So I may just stick with my battery-powered light.

If y'all have any other suggestions, let me know. I've yet to begin shopping for a contractor, so I have lots of time.

***

Heads up that I'll be out of pocket for the next two weeks. See y'all back here on May 17th.

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These moments of bifurcated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

In which Clarence Thomas has it in for progressivism.

"Hmm," I thought a few minutes ago. "It's Sunday. I owe everybody a blog post. What should I write about? I could write about Pagans and Earth Day if I'd gone to the event I was aiming for yesterday, but instead I slept in...

"Maybe I could rant about the annoying trend of long, long Facebook posts that people are resorting to because Facebook will throttle the reach of any post with an off-Facebook link in it. Except I think a lot of folks saw my Facebook post about it yesterday. Why beat a dead horse?

"Wait. When was the last time I did a current events post?" <checks post history> "Holy cats, not since March 1st? And that was only a glancing blow! And there's so much there to talk about -- the Iran war that Trump has declared he won too many times to count, Trump's whining about his ballroom, Trump and Vance picking a fight with the pope over Catholic doctrine, of all things...

"I know! I'll write about Clarence Thomas!"

*** 

Why yes, those scales are tilted to the right.
quarta | Deposit Photos

You may have missed it, what with all the usual noise coming from the general direction of the White House. But this week, Justice Thomas gave an address at the University of Texas at Austin Law School. He started out talking about the Declaration of Independence, this being the 250th anniversary of its signing and all. But then he went off on this weird diatribe about how progressivism is going to doom the United States to failure. No, really. The New Republic quoted him: 

Clarence Thomas alone is devoted to the Declaration's principles in Washington, says Clarence Thomas, and the problem is only getting worse. "As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure," the justice warned. "At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.

"Since Wilson's presidency, progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life," Thomas continued. "It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever."

Wilson is not the most famous president to be associated with progressivism; that would be Teddy Roosevelt. But Wilson was an academic, which automatically makes him a target of those who love the poorly educated. Wilson oversaw the creation of the Federal Reserve system, the Federal Trade Commission, stronger antitrust laws, and a ban on child labor -- none of which made him popular with the rich. 

Wilson was president during the nation's first Gilded Age, when rich industrialists were remaking the country to suit themselves. (As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich observes, we are in the nation's second Gilded Age today. It wasn't a good thing for the working class then, and it isn't today, either.)

Thomas went on to draw a line from progressive policies in Germany, which Wilson supposedly based American progressivism on, to -- wait for it -- the rise of Hitler. It gets wackier from there; I recommend the New Republic article I linked to above, if you're interested. 

What interested me more than Justice Thomas's rewriting of history was that at the beginning of his speech, he greeted one of the attendees: Harlan Crow. Yup, that Harlan Crow: the GOP megadonor who has showered Thomas and his wife with vacations and gifts, including buying from Thomas in 2014 the house where Thomas's mother lived in Savannah, GA, and spending tens of thousands of dollars to renovate the property -- a transaction that Thomas somehow forgot to list on his mandatory financial disclosure form.

People are prone to telling themselves all sorts of myths to justify their actions and to maintain their lifestyles. In that respect, the rich are no different.

***

These moments of self-serving blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Tax the rich, already!

In which I go for Baroque.

Sorry. I had to.

I know some of y'all already thought I was weird because I like opera. It gets worse: I love early music, from the very earliest monophonic stuff like Gregorian chant to the Baroque composers Bach and Handel. And yesterday I got a chance to expand my experience in that playground by attending a concert here in Santa Fe featuring songs from Spanish Baroque composers. 

First, let's set the time frame. If you've ever heard anything by Bach or any part of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, you're already familiar with the biggest musical names of the period. The Baroque period ran from 1600 to 1760, give or take, or about the time when North America was being settled by Europeans. The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, to give you another benchmark. Here in New Mexico, settlers had begun to come up the Camino Real from Mexico City and make a new life for themselves on the Spanish (later Mexican) frontier; the Pueblo Revolt, when the local Native Americans had enough of Spanish rule and kicked them all the way back to El Paso, happened in 1680, smack dab in the middle of this period.

Back in Spain, Diego Velázquez painted this in Madrid in 1656: 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

The painting is called Las Meninas o La familia de Felipe IV. ("Meninas" are ladies-in-waiting.) It's a little tattered around the edges because it's actually a 3D "postcard" that I picked up when I was at the Prado in Madrid: you flip it over, fold it along the creases, and look through the little portholes to get the 3D effect. The little blond girl at the center is the Infanta Margaret Theresa, who was five years old at the time. The artist depicts himself at his easel on the left; the mirror on the back wall shows the images of the Infanta's parents, King Philip IV and his queen, Mariana of Austria; and in the doorway on the right stands the queen's chamberlain, to whom the artist may have been related. In short, it's a fun painting with a lot going on.

Which is a pretty good description of Baroque music, too. Just listen to one of Bach's fugues. (Start the video at 2:47 if you want to skip the tocatta at the start.)

Anyway, this concert featured songs by a bunch of composers I'd never heard of before. One of them is Sebastian de Murcia. This piece wasn't on yesterday's program, but it gives you a flavor for the sound, anyway. (The instrument being played in the video is a Baroque guitar. It's smaller and fancier than a modern acoustic guitar and has nine strings instead of six. I found a guy on YouTube who gives more information on the Baroque guitar. If you're as nerdy as I am about ancient music, you may find it as fascinating as I did.)

If we were playing the "which historical era would you want to live in" game, the Baroque would be pretty high on my list. Anyone want to join me?

***

These moments of ornate blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Think magic is impossible? Maybe we've just been taught to believe that.

Happy whichever spring holiday you celebrate! The redbud tree is not as showy as I'd hoped it would be -- just a few blossoms are adorning its trunk. But it had a tough maiden year in my garden, and I'm hoping for more blooms next year. At least it's leafing out. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

Other flowers are doing better, including these volunteer violets (the little johnny-jump-up kind, not the African kind). Volunteers are my favorite flowers.

Lynne Cantwell 2026

My daffodils are done for the year, and so are my grape hyacinths. I'm debating whether to put real money into plants this spring; I still don't know whether my deck will be dismantled this year to fix the bad framing job the roofers did in rebuilding it, and if that happens, I'll basically lose whatever's planted in the beds. Might just stick with volunteers this year.

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Anyway, for most Christians, today is Easter, a sacred day on their liturgical calendar. One of my Christian friends shared a post on Facebook about how Jesus would be treated if he showed up in America today. The original poster basically said that it wouldn't end well, because so many purported Christians would object to the things he actually is said to have believed and done. I think that's true. Regular Americans today who try to embody Jesus's teachings -- healing the sick, ordering the moneychangers out of the temple, exchanging swords for plowshares, and so on -- are often not treated well, to put it mildly. And Christian nationalists have zero use for the idea of welcoming strangers and treating them as actual human beings.

I'm not Christian, as I've said, and while I see where the original poster is coming from -- and even agree with him -- I see an even more basic problem: We, as a society, have lost our belief in magic.

If any holy person or prophet of any religion arrived in today's world, I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that we wouldn't believe them. Wouldn't believe they were who they said they were. Would call them a crackpot. Would call the cops on them. Would have them committed as mentally ill.

But what if they proved who they said they were by performing miracles? It might get them committed faster. Or we'd dismiss it as a trick, or Photoshop, or A.I. Because by and large, we've had our belief in miracles -- in magic -- beaten out of us. Magic and/or miracles might have happened in olden times, but not any more. Certainly not today.

The Church has only itself to blame. It bought adherents at a cost, and one of the things it did to win believers was to decapitate magic. It did that by declaring anything not officially sanctioned by the Church the work of the devil.

People are moving away from the Church these days, but that doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion. Because the Church trained us to mistrust our own senses, and that mistrust has become ingrained in Western culture. Oh, we don't say magic is of the devil anymore, or rather most of us don't, but we still feel uneasy when we see it working. Now we're more likely to say that a thing is impossible. Or it's a trick. Or there has to be an explanation; we just haven't figured it out yet.

Think of all the movies that have turned on this plot point. Here's one: God returns, right? Maybe as George Burns. And nobody believes him except a grocery store manager played by John Denver, and the guy's life gets a whole lot more complicated as a result.

You laugh. I mean, I sure did when I saw the movie. But I laughed partly because God's reception was so plausible. 

I'm not saying we should all give every scammer and con artist we run across the benefit of the doubt. I'm saying maybe materialism doesn't have the answer to everything. 

***

To be clear, I do believe in science. But I also think there are some things that are real, but science dismisses them out of hand.

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These moments of bloggy magic have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy spring!

Why it's important to get tile samples.

It's spring (it must be -- I finally remembered to swap the winter front door wreath with the spring one), and this old woman's fancy has turned to finishing the bathroom remodel.

Some people celebrate warmer weather by buying seeds and bedding plants; I celebrate by dreaming about ripping out my combo bathtub/shower and replacing it with just a shower. Alert hearth/myth readers will recall that I finished remodeling half of the bathroom (two-thirds, if you count the laundry closet makeover) last September. When I posted about it back then, I included copious photos; if you scroll down in that post to the pic of the vessel sink, you can see the tub/shower alcove in the mirror. The tiles are a tired beige. The grab bars are positioned weirdly and look like they belong in a nursing home. I'm pretty sure the tub had an apron front, but somebody covered it with a four-inch-deep extension in a tile that doesn't quite match the original tile color and that blocks the laundry door from opening all the way. Presumably the extension's purpose was to provide a wider seat for someone getting in and out of the tub. But then somebody later added glass shower doors, and the bottom track for the doors ruined the wider seat.

In a perfect world, I'd have a newly-tiled shower with a minimal threshold, a bench, and a nicho for shampoo and stuff. (In a perfectly perfect world, I'd make it a steam shower, but there is literally nowhere to put the steam unit.And then there's the installation cost and maintance and haha nope.) 

I could have one of those prefab acrylic things installed over the old shower tile. But I want a bench, and I can't add one until the tub is gone. And how, I ask you, would prefab acrylic shower walls look in the same room as my fabulous bespoke vanity? They would look stupid. It would look like I'd given up. And I am not giving up!

So I'm entertaining myself by haunting websites and ordering tile samples. The samples do pile up, but they're cheap as vices go, and supposedly you can do crafty things with them. And they are essential for planning a remodeling project over time. 

Take, for example, my kitchen countertops. When I first started looking online, I fell head-over-heels in love with a solid-surface product from Formica called Bottle Glass Quartz. (It's not actual quartz. That's just the name.)

Lynne Cantwell 2026

But no one would even sell me a sample, let alone make me kitchen countertops out of it. Okay, that's not strictly true; one local place said they would make me kitchen counters, but the price would have been astronomical. I realize now that most dealers were hesitant because they'd have to order a whole slab, and who else would want such busy countertops in a so-not-neutral? They'd be stuck with the remnant forever. So I sucked it up and ordered a different solid surface pattern from Lowe's.

Then last week, I was looking on websites for tile samples, and lo and behold, one place not only carried Formica Bottle Glass Quartz, but they had samples! I'm no longer in the market for countertops, but I ordered a sample for old times' sake.

Boy, did I dodge a bullet. Here's the sample of the love of my life, along with one of the Terrazzo Sea Glass I settled for: 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

The stuff I was dying to get would have been too gray and too dark for my windowless kitchen. The pattern I settled for brightens up the room and goes great with my oak cabinets.

The moral of the story: Don't fall in love with tile - or a countertop - until you see the sample.

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To be clear, I think grab bars in a shower are a splendid idea; I just don't like the nursing-home vibe of the ones in there now. So I ordered nicer ones this weekend.

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I did, in fact, find the perfect tile for my shower walls in this latest batch of samples. Somewhat unbelievably, the color matches my bespoke vanity. However, this is about the eighth perfect shower tile I've found over the years, which is another reason I just need to get the project done already.

And then I can figure out what to do with all those tile samples...

***

* Nicho is the Spanish word for niche, and a common term around these parts, especially for folks who lean Southwesterny in their decor. 

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These moments of bloggy design fatigue have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy spring!

Who owns Pedernal?

I took some time off work this past week -- a staycation that mostly involved cleaning the house, which I hadn't done in far too long. But I also visited the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum to tour an exhbit that I've been meaning to get to since last fall: Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country. The museum worked with several Pueblo artists, whose ancestors have been here in New Mexico for thousands of years, to provide works that intersect with O'Keeffe's work.

The painting that the museum has been featuring in its advertising for the exhibit is one by Michael Namingha (Ohkay Owingeh, Hopi) that riffs on one of O'Keeffe's pelvis paintings. O'Keeffe used the hole in pelvis bones as a frame, usually to view the sky (I have a poster of one where she painted the moon framed in this way). But she also painted one where the bone is red and the sky is yellow. Namingha takes this colorway for his Disaster #8, converts it to values from the Air Quality Index, and uses it to depict a mushroom cloud rising above the 2022 Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire.

It's striking, and it speaks to climate change. But a more prevalent message was the Pueblo artists' reactions to O'Keeffe's love of Cerro Pedernal, the mesa she painted almost 30 times over her years in New Mexico. Here's a work from Marita Swazo Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo) that doesn't look like much: a pot, broken pottery pieces, and some brown dirt: 

Photo: Lynne Cantwell 2026

It's called Did Georgia Pray? The exhibit card explains the significance of the work:

Photo: Lynne Cantwell 2026

Hopefully you can click on the photo to make it big enough to read. The artist talks about how she produces her work in a sacred manner, praying for the land at each step of the way. She wonders whether O'Keeffe did the same. And about Pedernal, she says: 

Georgia once said, "It's my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it."

But this is Tewa Nangeh -- our land! We do not own it. We pray for it. 

So, I ask again: Did Georgia pray?

Did O'Keeffe hold the land sacred, or was she a clueless white person? Some of the artists in the exhibit make the point that O'Keeffe almost never paints people; as a sort of proto-Modernist, shapes and contrasts were her jam. But these Puebloans wonder whether leaving people out of her art diminishes the importance of their people and themselves -- to the point of erasure.

It's not like white folks haven't been trying for more than a century to erase Indigenous folks from the West.

It gave me a lot to think about.

*** 

Speaking of prayers, though, my favorite piece is this one by Elisa Naranjo Morse (Kha'p'o Owingeh, aka Santa Clara Pueblo), called A Prayer Making Its Way. 

Photo: Lynne Cantwell 2026

That's a badger, one of the six directional guardians of Pueblo spirituality. I hesitate to say much more because I couldn't find info specific to Kha'p'o Owingeh spirituality on the internet (and that's probably by design). I did find a fair amount of info on the Zuni guardian animals because that pueblo sells figurines of them as artworks, and it's possible that Kha'p'o Owingeh beliefs are similar. 

With that disclaimer out of the way: For the Zuni, there are six sacred directions: east, south, west, north, the earth deep below us and the sky above us. The badger is their guardian of the south; he is known as a healer, but can also be tenacious and aggressive.

I liked this one for the colors. But now that I'm looking at it again, I see that Badger is carrying the prayers of his people away from a disaster. I'm sure it's no accident that this is hanging close to Namingha's Air Quality Index-coded mushroom cloud and right across from Hinds's pottery.

That I didn't understand all that to start with might put me in the same clueless-white-person category as O'Keeffe. But I hope not.

The exhibit runs through November 1, 2026.

***

Some of y'all may be wondering about Zuni Pueblo's guardian animals. Here you go, from a shop here in Santa Fe that sells fetishes:

• East is the white wolf;
• South is the badger, as I said above; 
• West is the blue bear;
• North is the mountain lion;
• under the Earth is the black mole; and
• the sky above is the eagle.

And the people of the pueblo are at the center.

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These moments of thought-provoking blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Re "dying art forms".

I knew there was a reason that I wasn't crazy about Timothée Chalamet. And that was before he caused a stir by making disparaging remarks about opera and ballet.

It turns out I've seen Chalamet in a bunch of movies: Little Women in 2019, the first part of Dune in 2021, the ill-advised (the film itself, not the role for Chalamet) Wonka in 2023, and A Complete Unknown (the Bob Dylan biopic) in 2024. I liked him as Laurie in Little Women. I thought he was okay in Wonka despite the dismal film concept (nobody needed Willy Wonka's origin story). And I didn't like him much as Dylan, although that may have been because I find the real Dylan annoying. As for Dune, Chalamet was decent, but I didn't like the film overall; I thought it moved too slowly and was overly impressed with itself. (I admit I was never a fan of the novels and only watched the first movie for the sandworms, which pissed me off by showing up really late in the proceedings. Haven't seen the second one yet. Might not ever.)

Anyway, in short, Chalamet is a big star. And he has caused a ruckus by claiming in an interview that "no one cares about" opera and ballet. It's not the first time he's dissed the classical arts; back in 2019, he was quoted as calling opera and ballet dying art forms. I'm not linking to his comments because they're easy enough to find with a web search; they've been reported widely, as has the blowback he's received from other famous people.

I am not famous, and I'm not even sure I want to criticize him. Everybody's entitled to an opinion (even if it's wrong, heh). Plus he's only 30. I don't mean to imply that he's too young to know what he's talking about -- he has ballet performers in his family, after all. But this situation puts me in mind of a conversation I overheard probably 30 years ago in which some tweens were dissing the Beatles, saying their music was terrible. I was tempted to explain to them that their favorite music wouldn't exist without the Beatles breaking new ground in the '60s. And I'm somewhat tempted to explain to Chalamet that his own art form wouldn't exist if the classical arts hadn't paved the way.

But those kids wouldn't have cared, and Chalamet wouldn't care. So I'll just say this: I like opera. I even like it well enough to get the t-shirt. 

Left to right: 2023, 2025, and 2021.
Lynne Cantwell 2026

As I have said before, the Santa Fe Opera is here in town, and it seems like it would be a shame to miss seeing world-class performances because some people think opera is a dying art or whatever. I try to see a show every year; this year it'll be The Magic Flute.

I like classical music, too, which I'm sure Chalamet would also have dissed had he thought of it. I went to hear the Assad Brothers, who are Brazilian classical guitarists, when they were at the Lensic here in town a couple of weeks ago. (Scroll down at the link to the video to hear them perform.)

I'm not a huge fan of dance in general, but I appreciate the training and discipline that goes into the art, and I would sit through a ballet without complaining.

But as I said above, everybody's entitled to an opinion. I'm sure some folks would be aghast at me complaining about Dune (fans tend to be gobsmacked when I tell them Frank Herbert struck me as a misogynist*) or saying that I think Bob Dylan is annoying.

The thing is, the classical arts have been reported to be at death's door pretty much all of my adult life. Furthermore, radio was supposed to die when television came in. CDs were going to kill off live music, not to mention vinyl records. COVID endangered the continued existence of movie theaters.

The arts are expensive. But every artistic discipline seems to be amazingly fluid, and their deaths have been, time and again, greatly exaggerated. No matter what Timothée Chalamet says.

***

We might discuss A.I. another time.

***

* "But what makes you think Frank Herbert was a misogynist, Lynne? What about the Bene Gesserit?" So yeah, about them: They are certainly powerful, and they exert tremendous influence on both politics and society. But they are also manipulative, and they operate in the shadows. Do they wield overt power? No. Are any of them sympathetic characters? Also no. Could one of them become, say, emperor? Not a chance -- the Bene Gesserit's place is behind the throne. 

The first Dune novel appeared in 1965. The Bene Gesserit might have seemed an enlightened view of womanhood back then, but c'mon. You can't continue to argue that today. You couldn't even argue it when I first read Dune in the '80s.

But this is -- all together now -- just my opinion.

***

These moments of opinionated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

Time for food stuff and things.

PantherMediaSeller | Deposit Photos

It's the day after the time change here in the US; Americans lost an hour of sleep overnight. Our European friends are being sensible (as they are in so many other ways these days) and waiting until the end of the month, but the US government has seen fit to start this nonsense three weeks earlier than them. (Mama Google says DST always starts on the second Sunday in March here, but I am skeptical. It seems like there used to be only a week between us changing our clocks and folks across the pond doing the same.)

Then again, if Standard Time starts earlier and earlier and ends later and later, maybe eventually it'll just go away entirely, and we'll have Daylight Time all year long. Not that I'm a particular fan of Daylight Time. I just wish we'd pick one.

Anyway, I am muzzy-headed today. And as usual when I'm muzzy-headed, my thoughts turn to food.

*** 

Work has been slow since session ended, so people have been bringing in occasional treats, some of which I've never heard of. One thing a friend made is a Japanese fruit cake. Has anyone ever heard of such a thing? It is not Japanese, nor does it contain much fruit. It is apparently a Southern dessert that folks would make for Christmas: alternating layers of spice cake and yellow cake, with a filling, as opposed to a frosting, containing lemon juice, coconut, and puh-lenty of sugar. Raisins are also involved. It was insanely sweet. The co-worker she made it for proclaimed it was just like her mama used to make. Here's a recipe, although not the one my friend used; try it if you dare.

The other thing that turned up at the office was billed as shrimp cocktail. We were told that the staffer making it was cooking it in the break room. Puzzled, I envisioned her boiling up the shrimp on a hot plate, but no; it turned out to be Mexican shrimp cocktail, which I had never heard of but was delicious. Think gazpacho -- a chilled tomato-based vegetable soup -- with cooked shrimp mixed in. Here's a recipe I found online. I am 100 percent making this myself this summer.

***

I did not run across this one at work. Instead, it turned up in the recipe section of Apple News recently. It's called Buttery Irish Cabbage. 

I have never been a cabbage fan, unless it's shredded and mixed with coleslaw dressing. (When I was a kid, I didn't even want the dressing; Mom would grind the cabbage and carrots into tiny shreds for the coleslaw, and I'd eat that plain.) I will also eat cabbage in Chinese food, although there needs to be enough soy sauce and other veggies involved that the cabbage is more or less an afterthought. 

But I have occasionally wondered if my problem isn't that my mother would boil the cabbage 'til it was limp and flavorless. I haven't wondered about it enough to make it some other way. But this recipe that I saw this week intrigued me. I figured that given enough butter and garlic, anything could be made edible -- even cabbage. I made it for supper tonight. Turns out I was right.

I don't know if I love it enough to throw it into a regular rotation. But I'll likely make it again at some point, probably for St. Patrick's Day -- which is, OMG, next week. Where has the year gone?

***

The glucose tracking device I mentioned last week came unstuck and fell off my arm last night. I'm not too fussed -- it was due for replacement tomorrow anyway, and a new one is on the way and should be here tomorrow -- but I will try to secure the new one better so it will last the full two weeks. The process is definitely helping me focus on eating low carb.

But now I know the answer to the question that was lurking in the back of my mind about how hard it would be to uninstall the device: Not hard at all!

***

These moments of muzzy-headed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

Epstein fury and some backsliding.

Damn that guy taking up space in the White House anyway. I was all set to write a mea culpa blog post about how working this session screwed up my low-carb eating plan, and then I woke up yesterday morning, as we all did, to the news that Trump's latest gambit to draw headlines away from the Epstein files is to team up with Bibi Netanyahu to bomb Iran -- which country's nuclear capability we supposedly obliterated in June of last year, or so said Trump at the time.

The warmongers in Washington named the attack Operation Epic Fury, but it took no time at all for the memesters to change it to Operation Epstein Fury.

Already some US service members have lost their lives in retaliatory bombing, and Trump has said more are likely to die. Isn't this the same guy who said that if he was re-elected, he wasn't going to start any wars? His supporters believed him. And now, here we are.

I am so tired of this timeline.

***

Anyway, I'm not going to let him derail my plans for this post. My original topic is not good news, either, but I'll put in a little palate cleanser at the end. 

***

So yeah, the last week or two of this year's legislative session was hard. I whined about how hard it was here a couple of weeks back. What I didn't mention in that post was how the stress and anxiety, coupled with freely available, carb-heavy food, pinged my bad eating habits of yesteryear. I'd been amping up the snacking anyway, but this session put me back where I was toward the end of my time in DC.

Well, not completely back to those days. This year, I wasn't leaving work in the middle of the afternoon to head over to some shop to stock up on candy and a bag of chips, then polish off all of it at my desk before quitting time. But it was bad.

This past Monday, I had my regular appointment with my endocrinologist. Before session, my A1c was 6.5; on Monday, it was 8.9. Optimal for diabetics is less than 7.0. So yeah -- not good.

She told me to go back to a strict low-carb diet -- protein and veggies only. She outfitted me with a continuous glucose monitor that doesn't require a prescription and had me download an app that would let her see how I was doing. And then she asked me if I wanted to try Ozempic. I sighed and said okay.

Not my pen. This is a stock photo.
Artmim | Deposit Photos

I sighed because it felt like going backwards. When I left DC, I was not only taking Ozempic, I was also on a drug called Invokana that basically filters out all the extra sugar in your blood and sends it out through your kidneys. Neither one was too pricey when I was on the law firm's Cadillac insurance plan, but once I retired, hoo boy. It was those eye-watering prescription prices that made me try low-carbing in the first place. And low carbing worked -- until it didn't.

But it worked far longer than it might otherwise have. A fairly recent study found that most people regain the weight they lost, as well as losing all the other benefits they gained from being on a GLP-1, within two years of stopping the drug. I didn't lose weight when I was on Ozempic before because I was binge eating. But it took me five years to lose the benefits of taking it.

One thing it did help with, I believe, was quieting the food noise in my head. After I moved out here, I remember telling someone that I didn't have a craving for sweets anymore. Now I think that was because of the Ozempic. If it quiets the food noise again, it would be worth the eye-watering prescription price, at least until I can get back on the low-carb track.

I do like the continuous monitor. It's kind of fun, watching the numbers go up and down. I will likely feel different if I backslide again and the graph starts going the wrong way. But I'm pretty sure my numbers will be much better when I see my doctor next. I'll keep y'all posted.

***

Okay, here's the palate cleanser. We've had really nice weather here, with highs in the upper 60s. Tigs and I spent some time out on the porch this afternoon, and he alerted me when some birds showed up at the feeder. (I hope you guys can watch this -- I'm never sure about Apple's video format.) 

***

These desperate moments of blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.

RIP, the profession of journalism.

The worst part of taking a week off from blogging last weekend is that I had a great topic for a post but no oomph to write it. So I'm gonna write it this week, even though it's old news by now. Then I'll put a little bit of new news at the end.

gunaonedesign | Deposit Photos

The day the news broke early this month that the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, had sent his minions to decimate the remaining staff, leaving one of the nation's greatest newspapers a hollowed-out shell, I had a conversation online about it with a good friend. It started me thinking about the history of journalism, and specifically how very short a time it has been a respectable profession. Because it was respectable, for a hundred years or so. Now it's devolving into what it was before the muckrakers helped turn it into the Fourth Estate.

When the movie version of All the President's Men was released in the spring of 1976, I was in my freshman year of college. I'd pretty recently (after spending a semester discovering that I did not have what it took to be a professional musician) declared journalism as my major, and the movie sure made it seem like it had been the right decision. Discovering the grain of a big story, pursuing the facts to the truth, bringing down bad actors in the highest of high places -- that was the sort of thing I could see myself doing, or at least the sort of thing I wanted to be associated with. Now, with 50 years of hindsight, it's clear to me that Watergate was pretty much journalism's pinnacle. And it's been coasting downhill ever since. 

My memory of the journalism history course I took that semester is hazy, but I recall that while the press played a role in the Founding Fathers spreading their views throughout the colonies, journalism ethics weren't yet a thing. Benjamin Franklin was a publisher and sorta-kinda reporter, but he wasn't always honest about when he was fictionalizing details; he reported his own famous experiment involving a kite and a key in the third person, as if somebody else had done it. That sort of thing would never fly today (pardon the pun). 

The profession of journalism began to hit its stride in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when muckraking reporters dug into corruption in political and corporate institutions of the time. A couple of famous muckrakers come to mind: Nellie Bly, who had herself committed to an insane asylum in New York City to find out how deplorable the conditions there were; and Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Jungle exposed corruption in the meatpacking industry in Chicago. The work of these and other reporters, though often melodramatic, caused enough of a stir that laws were passed to relieve some of the worst conditions.

Alongside these crusaders ran an attempt to set an informal code of ethics for journalists. Among the standards was that journalists should be objective. Everybody's got an opinion, but a journalist's should not be readily discernible from his or her work; a reporter should be fair to all sides. Also, a reporter should never make the story about him or her (which is why Ben Franklin would have gotten into trouble if he'd been writing 150 years later).

That all worked fine, more or less, until the moneyed classes realized they could buy up the papers (and the radio stations and TV stations) and exert pressure on the journalists who worked there to bury stories that would hurt business. Journalistic independence has been eroding ever since.

In a column in Slate published on February 5th, Alex Kirshner talked about Bezos' gutting of the Post as almost inevitable. He says the cause of the Post's death is "that one of the richest people in human history staged a controlled burn to turn it into ash. Bezos wanted the Post to die, because a vigorous, well-resourced Washington Post does not suit his vision for the world or his own bottom line." Kirshner makes the point that the paper's net worth is little more than a rounding error in Bezos' vast wealth, and reporting that angers the Trump administration can have a big impact on Bezos' other companies, particularly when we're talking about federal contracts for Amazon and Blue Origin: "Bezos' external economic interests turned him into a virus that ate the Post from the inside."

We can see a similar thing happening at CBS, the former home of famed journalists Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, where the new owner's attempts to placate Trump prompted Anderson Cooper to resign from his 60 Minutes gig just this week.

Journalism has been descending toward infotainment for decades, but real reporting has always coexisted with the fluffy stuff. I assumed it always would. Now I begin to think it won't. 

RIP, the profession of journalism, 1900-2026. It's been a good run. 

***

This weekend, Trump made a cockamamie post on his social media outlet that the US was sending a "hospital boat" to Greenland to provide medical care to Greenlanders. I could not make heads or tails of his rambling until I did a little research. It looks like what set him off was a humanitarian incident in which a sailor aboard a US Navy submarine took ill while the boat was off the coast of Greenland and was airlifted to a hospital in Nuuk for treatment. Greenland reportedly has six hospitals for its population of fewer than 60,000 people and, like the rest of the civilized world, has free, universal healthcare. So the prime minister of Greenland says they don't need our help. Besides, both of our hospital ships, the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort, are in drydock for repairs, so neither one of them will be steaming toward Greenland any time soon.

Trump also mentioned the governor of Louisiana, who I guess he promoted to "special envoy" to Greenland back in December to help negotiate whatever Trump thinks he can get out of Greenland's government, which is not going to be ownership of the island. Or a Nobel Peace Prize, either.

The whole thing is a fantasy from Trump's fevered brain. But what pissed me off -- and what every US sailor should also be pissed off about -- is that the commander-in-chief of our military does not know the difference between a ship and a boat. I know the difference because a) I was married to a sailor, and b) I covered the Sixth Fleet when I worked as a reporter in Norfolk, VA. A boat is small enough to fit on a ship. A submarine is a boat; our floating hospitals are ships.

If he's too far gone to understand that, what business does he have running the country?

***

These moments of bloggy sadness and disgust have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Of course the "hospital boat" thing is a distraction from the Epstein files. Here's hoping the fallout from that investigation brings the whole facade tumbling down sooner rather than later.

Taking a week off.

I fully intended to blog every Sunday during this session. And I have -- so far. But then this weekend happened. I was originally scheduled to work eleven hours over two days, seven hours yesterday and four today. But it turned into 14 hours over the two days, 7.5 yesterday and 6.5 today, following a Friday on which our department handled 51 rush documents.

Or so I was told. I maintained the total was closer to 857 rushes.

Anyway, in short, this final weekend of session has kicked my ass. 

This graphic is from a YouTube video that started making the rounds in 2003. The dialogue naturally came up this week at work.

You can watch the whole cartoon here. 

It turns out that the guy who made that video in 2003 made a sequel in 2018. There's an article about it here where you can watch the new(ish) video. Sadly, it's still relevant. Maybe even more so now.

Anyway, yes, I am le tired, and I will have a nap -- after noon on Thursday. But next weekend, I'll be back here, doing my regular thing. See y'all then.

***

These moments of less-than-animated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there!

To sleep (an extra 15 minutes at least).

I know most of y'all are watching the big sportsball thing tonight. Since I don't care about either team (if I followed football at all, I'd root for the Broncos) or the commercials, I'm going to do a little personal whining tonight.

We are a titch over halfway through this year's legislative session here in New Mexico (it's a 30-day session and ends on the 19th at noon). This year I've drawn the short straw and have been working the 7:30 am-4:30 pm shift during the week (the hours are a little different on the weekends). This is when my alarm has been going off: 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

All I can say is: Ugh (yawn).

***

I have been a night owl for as long as I can remember. All those novels I churned out? Most of the time, I was writing them into the wee hours. (My mother said when I was a tiny child, I would wake up with the birds, but I think she was lying.) 

Of course, as a productive member of society (aka a cog in the machine of commerce), I have worked all kinds of crazy shifts, necessitating a sleep schedule all over the clock. For example, the most desirable shift in radio is morning drive time, which means you have to be on the air, sounding coherent, at 6:00 am. And that means you have to be there earlier than that to call the cop shops for any news overnight and write your first newscast. For my first job in radio, I was still living with my parents, driving 35 miles each way to the radio station. I started working there in January. In northern Indiana. Sometimes I followed the snowplows down US 35, and sometimes they followed me.

The weirdest shift I ever had was probably when I wrote for the morning show for the Fox TV affiliate in DC; I had to be in at midnight and left work around 8:00 am or 9:00 am (which was No Fun with Small Children -- try finding a babysitter to come and sleep at your house, just in case the place starts burning down or something).

My favorite shift was always 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. I could sleep in 'til 8 or 8:30, get in a full workday, and have a life after I got off work.

Then I made the move to the legal world. The big law firm had a pretty sweet policy for staff: You could name your own start time (within a certain window), as long as the lawyers you supported were cool with it. The big-picture reason was to help with DC's legendary traffic congestion, but it was helpful for staff, too. When the girls were in school, I started earlier; when they went away to college, I switched to 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. When we lived in Potomac Yard, I could sleep 'til 7:00 am, have breakfast at home, and still get to work on time.

Then I retired, and my schedule was my own... until I started working for the legislature.

During the interim, we work 8:00 am to 5:00 pm; the 6:15 am alarm for that is bad enough when my body clock is telling me to stay up past midnight. But for this session, I'm working the dreaded 7:30 am shift.

For weeks, maybe months, I've been dozing off in the afternoons and falling asleep in front of the TV in the evenings. I thought maybe it was sleep apnea or something worse. Then one evening recently, I crashed. Just could not keep my eyes open any longer. Went to bed at 8-ish and slept almost ten hours. The next day I wasn't sleepy at all.

I wasn't sick. I was sleep-deprived.

Well, fuck.

So now I'm making a concerted effort to get in bed before 10, so that when the 5:45 am alarm goes off, it's not too painful to get up right away. And I guess when session is over, I'll have to give up my post-midnight lifestyle. Damn it.

Someday I will be retired again. I am looking forward to it.

***

These moments of early-to-bed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Less than two weeks to go...

It's Brigid's Day; and how kids learn racism.

Several years' worth of Brigid's crosses. 
Lynne Cantwell | 2025

Blessed Imbolc! Today is the first day of spring in Ireland, and it's one of those Pagan sabbats where Americans wonder why folks in the UK are rushing the seasons. Because it's still definitely winter here, no matter what that Pennsylvania groundhog will say tomorrow; my daughters still haven't finished digging their car out from under the freakish ice storm that DC experienced last week. But the daylight hours are perceptibly lengthening, and within a few weeks, spring will be here for us, too.

Imbolc is the day to celebrate Brigid, the Irish goddess of poetry, healing and smithcraft. (It's also a day to honor the Christian saint of the same name, but I'm talking about Paganism here.) I saw a post on Facebook over the past couple of days in which the author tried to argue that Brigid was also a goddess of conflict. Don't bother asking Google's A.I. -- you'll get the usual conflation of Brigid the Irish goddess with both St. Brigid and Brigantia, a goddess of Celtic Britain who's also linked to Boudica, a queen of Icenic tribe who managed to hold off the Romans for a while in CE 61 or so. Maybe that's where the idea originates of a link between Brigid and conflict.

But Brigid is not the Morrigan. Hers is instead the gentler art of conflict resolution -- of poetry and healing, and of lamenting the dead (she's credited with inventing keening). If She carries a hammer, it's because She uses it at Her forge. Making weaponry is not the same as wielding it. And iron can be shaped into more than just swords.

That's my experience of it, anyway.

***

I guess you could say that conflict is a theme of both halves of this post.

Earlier today, I read a remembrance by someone who's about my age. She said that when she was in elementary school, she made friends with another girl and invited her home one day -- and her mother ordered the friend to leave, then beat the crap out of the daughter because the friend was Black and she'd brought her into their house and don't ever do that again.

Which reminded me of a similar incident in my own childhood. Although mine was, thankfully, less violent.

This would have been in the mid to late '60s. Our neighborhood was white, but there were some houses along the railroad tracks where some Black families lived. Of course we all went to school together (and our neighborhood got shifted from one elementary school to another, depending on which school needed more Black kids that year, but I digress). I knew the kids by sight -- we all rode the same bus, after all -- although I didn't hang around with them. 

One day, one of the little Black girls ventured into our neighborhood. We ended up playing together in my yard, and at one point we decided to go inside. And my mother threw a fit. She told the girl to leave and told me I was never to bring any Black kids home again, ever.

Well, she didn't use the word "Black". This was the '60s, after all.

Anyway, the girl was nice, and I didn't understand what the color of her skin had to do with anything. I was too young then to give voice to my thoughts, and of course I was a good girl and obeyed my parents. But my belief that we are all human, and therefore worthy of respect, may have been born that day.

The hell of it is that my father had built our house with help from my uncle John, who was a carpenter, and Mr. Farmer, a Black man who lived in one of those houses along the railroad tracks.

A Black man was good enough to build our house, but a little Black girl couldn't be allowed inside to play? How crazy is that?

***

Later on, when my own kids went to school and learned about Black History Month, they practically yelled at me: "Why didn't you tell us any of this?"

What, that Black folks were different from white folks? It never occurred to me. When I was a kid, I'd learned that "different" meant bad. I thought the idea was to treat everybody the same, because we are all the same. We're all human beings. 

That's what equality means to me still. I want to learn about our differences, sure, but I want to celebrate them. I want to honor everyone's stories and all the heroes from every culture. I want us all to be proud of each other.

Pie in the sky? Maybe so. But we can't get there if we don't dream it first.

***

These moments of bloggy conflict resolution have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Blessed Imbolc and happy Black History Month, too.

All of this happened before, but does it have to happen again?

Bear with me. This does have to do with what's going on in the United States right now.

PantherMediaSeller | Deposit Photos

I ran across an article this week on Aeon.co called, "The Shape of Time". The tag line is: "In the 19th century, the linear idea of time became dominant, forever changing how those in the West experience the world". The author, Emily Thomas, is a philosophy professor at Durham University in the UK. She says that in the ancient word, philosophers like Plato regarded time as cyclical, just like the periodical positions of celestial bodies, and that concept persisted for centuries: "As ancient Greek philosophy spread through Europe, these ideas of time spread too. For instance, Greek and Roman Stoics connected time with their doctrine of 'Eternal Recurrence': the universe undergoes infinite cycles, ending and restarting in fire." To be sure, the concept of linear time also existed. But sometime in the 1800s, partly thanks to Darwin's theory of evolution, the idea that time was linear took over Western thought, so that now, timelines are pretty much all we see.

Prof. Thomas says, "By the late 19th century, representing time as a line was not just widespread – it was natural. Like today, it would have been hard to imagine how else we could represent time. And this affected how people understood the world." I would add that it still does today. We are fixated on the idea of past-present-future, that history always progresses -- that civilization always progresses.

But any honest look at history shows us that is not so. I've been following historian Heather Cox Richardson for several years now on Facebook. She writes daily posts about current events and ties them back to events in US history that, if they're not exactly equal, they rhyme. Her basic thesis, I believe, is that much of what's wrong with America dates back to our unresolved issues regarding slavery. I'd trace them even farther back, to the Western idea that "civilization" means only white, Christian culture, and anything else is barbarous and either: a) in need of taming; or b) ours for the taking.

Underlying Prof. Thomas's article is the very Western assumption that linear thought is good and right: forever changing how those in the West experience the world implies that we can never go back. Forward is the only way to go. 

But the idea of time being cyclical persists in some, uh, circles -- including Pagan thought. I've talked here before about the Pagan Wheel of the Year and posited that time is actually more of a spiral. We get to the same place in the year, year after year, but this year is a little different than it was last year. To be fair, this year is a lot different than it was last year, when Trump was just beginning to dismantle the federal government, and jackbooted thugs weren't murdering white Americans in the putative search for "violent, criminal illegal aliens" to deport.

And the hell of it is that we have been here before. Slavery, Manifest Destiny, the Indian wars, concentration camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, the Communist witchhunts in the 1950s -- and that's just the American experience. It's all the same shit, different day.

***

One quote kept banging at my brain while getting ready to write this post, but I couldn't remember the exact wording. It was something like, "All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again." The bell it was ringing in my head was from the 2004 reboot of the sci-fi TV show Battlestar Galactica, so I asked Mama Google to find it. Turns out that exact quote is from the 1953 Disney movie, Peter Pan. But Battlestar Galactica did use it in its final episode:

For us, too, the question remains: Does all of this have to happen again? Baltar, the pessimist, thinks it will, on and on, forever. Time for him is linear. But Number Six, who's a Cylon, is more hopeful. "Let a complex system repeat itself long enough," she says, "and eventually something surprising might occur."

Can we get out of this current mess the same way we have in the past? I have no answers. But I'm rooting for the solution to be something surprising.

***

These moments of spiraling blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. So say we all.

Cultural appropriation and the spirits of the land.

I don't want this to be a political blog -- or a food blog or a dieting blog or a Pagan blog, although I've blogged about all those topics over the years. hearth/myth started out as a blog about writing, specifically about writing my books (and, y'know, trying to sell a few). I'm not doing much writing these days, so my posts about writing have been few and far between. But today's post is a little bit about writing, and about Paganism, too.

I'm going to try to keep the political stuff to every other week or so. There's a fresh outrage every day (a recent example: I'm concerned that we're going to end up at war with our NATO comrades over Greenland, all so that Trump and his superrich cronies can lock up the wealth in natural resources that will reveal itself as the Arctic ice recedes due to climate change), and I simply can't cover them all. 

Anyway. This week's post is about writing and Paganism and cultural appropriation. 

JosefKlopacka | Deposit Photos

I can't remember whether I've mentioned it here on the blog, but I've been attending a Pagan group once a month for almost a year now. I don't want to go into too many details about who's running it, etc., because I'm going to air some misgivings I've had about the founders since pretty much the first meeting, and I don't want to trash them. Paganism is a big tent, and everybody has a place under it.

Anyway, I've quit the group. I have several reasons, and it took me way too long to put my finger on one of them.

I've mentioned to the group's founders in passing that I'm an author. They are also authors, although they don't write fiction. But I could never get a conversation going with them about the writing process or publishing or anything else, which struck me as odd. Usually, when two or more authors get together, they inevitably start talking shop. Never happened with these folks. But then, over the holidays, it dawned on me that while they haven't come right out and said it, a couple of times they have mentioned cultural appropriation while not quite looking my way. And maybe I'm wrong, and if so, I apologize for jumping to conclusions, but it made me wonder whether they'd actually looked me up on Amazon and read a book or two and, well.

It's not the first time I've had cultural appropriation aimed at me for what I write. I'm a white woman, after all, and a lot of my books feature Native American characters and Native American deities. I did a whole bunch of research into myths, traditions, and tribes in the process of writing The Pipe Woman Chronicles, but it was all arm's-length research. I don't have any lived experience as a Native American because I'm not one (other than that family legend that has yet to pan out). 

But nobody with any authority on the subject has ever approached me and said, look, what you're saying is all wrong and you need to take these books off the market. The criticism has always come from politically correct folks who believe that you shouldn't write about a minority group or another culture -- or anybody, really -- if you're not a member of that group or culture.

I mean, tell that to men who write female characters. Or women who write male characters. Hardly any humans have been in space, but that hasn't stopped authors from writing science fiction. Tolkien never went to Middle-Earth, but it didn't stop him from writing The Lord of the Rings. Storytellers use their imaginations. 

Anyway, I'm sympathetic to those who are concerned about cultural appropriation, but I decided years ago that I was okay with what I was writing. My characters, to me, are people first, before any society-derived labels are loaded onto them; I imagine their humanity, and that's how I write about them.

Now, a bunch of my characters aren't people, precisely; they're gods and goddesses. I'm a polytheist, and while a lot of Pagans, including this group's founders, believe that all goddesses all over the world are aspects of a single Goddess, and all gods all over the world are aspects of the same Horned God, I don't. That's not how I experience them -- and now we are talking about my lived experience. Heck, I wrote Morrigan into a series of novels, and then She approached me. And enlisted me into her army.

If you think that last sentence makes me sound crazy, I don't know what to tell you. It's a thing that happened to me. And Morrigan didn't complain about me writing about Her, either. In fact, none of the gods and goddesses I've written into my books have ever shown up on my ethereal doorstep, seeking vengeance. 

You would think They would if They were mad, right?

That segues, more or less, into this: The group's founders have been living here in New Mexico for many, many years. One of them said something at one point about how they hadn't heard anything from the spirits on their land -- except, "well, there was that one time...". 

I was quietly incredulous. You got a message from a local spirit and didn't respond? That, to me, is crazy. I got the sense that they didn't want to start a relationship with gods or spirits who weren't, y'know, theirs. But you have to be on good terms with the land spirits, wherever you live. If one of Them approaches you with a message, it seems to me like it would be a good idea to listen -- and even say hello from time to time. That's not cultural appropriation; that's being neighborly.

Anyway, bottom line: The group is not my cup of tea. I'm going to get through this year's legislative session and then look for another Pagan group. Or start one myself. All I really want to find is folks to observe the Sabbats with.

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I mentioned my day job a second ago. This year, we have a 30-day session; our department started working seven days a week last Monday, and we'll be done February 19th at noon. I am hoping to keep blogging every Sunday night throughout, but we'll see how it goes.

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These moments of slightly politically incorrect blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Take care of yourselves. We need everyone at their best for what's to come.