Why I'm Pagan.

Warning: This post is not comprehensive. A better title would probably be something like, "Why I gave up on Christianity." 

Anyway, here we go.

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Jemez National Forest, NM
Lynne Cantwell | July 2025

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John Beckett, a Druid priest who I've been following online for several years, is offering a new online class called, "Unpacking Your Religious Baggage So You Can Live a Magical Life". The class is two weeks in -- the second module dropped this Thursday -- so there's still time to get in on it if you're so inclined. (Or take it later. The classes are on-demand.) I wasn't going to sign up -- I didn't grow up in a specific religious tradition, and I think I've done a pretty good job of exorcising from my head whatever Western religious thought I've picked up by osmosis. But then I thought, what the heck -- maybe I'll learn something. 

I have several friends who did grow up in religious traditions but who later turned atheist, and I thought the class might help them, so I've posted a time or two about it on Facebook. On one of those posts, I got into a discussion with a friend who has been following the Rev. Karla, an ordained interfaith minister who has made a name for herself on TikTok. My friend posted a link to one of the Rev. Karla's Substack posts: "The Kindness of Atheists and the Intolerance of Christians". In it, the Rev. Karla says she has been surprised at the number of Christians-turned-atheists who have told her they're following her. Here she is, busy helping people "heal from [their] religious trauma" and "deconstruct[] from the toxic theology of [their] religious heritage" (according to her website), and she's attracting atheists who appreciate what she has to say. (Her biggest target right now appears to be the patriarchy and attacking it from within the structure of the church.) 

So I read the post. One thing she wrote caught my eye: "[I]ntolerance is not inherent to religion, but it is deeply embedded in the systems that insist their truth is the only truth." I told my friend that I agreed with the statement -- but in my opinion, it didn't go far enough. 

The Rev. Karla -- just like nearly everybody else in the Western world, including atheists -- operates from the assumption that monotheism is the only possible religious framework. The only correct religious framework. Either God exists or He doesn't. 

Let's call it the "God/no God dichotomy" for short.

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Growing up outside of organized religion (save a couple of summers of vacation Bible school, courtesy of the well-meaning parents of friends) led me to spend some time in my late teens and twenties investigating various denominations to see where I might fit. In addition to several Christian denominations, I also looked into the Baha'i faith. But eventually I rejected them all and called myself agnostic.

At the time, I had a subscription to a magazine called Free Inquiry, published by the Council for Secular Humanism. They ran a column every month (and may still) that deconstructed some discrepancy or other in the Bible. It was always great fun to read.

But it eventually occurred to me that they were always fighting the same battle. Yes, a lot of Christian theology doesn't pass the sniff test. Yes, you can be a moral and ethical person without being a member of a church. It was all very rational: science good/religion bad (or if not bad, precisely, then misguided). The God/no God dichotomy.

But I knew there was more to the world we live in than science could explain. 

And I have since known a lot of atheists who reject all spirituality. They pay lip service to the idea that science doesn't know everything, but they dismiss ESP, Tarot, and so on as preposterous -- even when they've seen the woo-woo work. They know that trees are alive, but they're only grudgingly admitting that they communicate with one another, and they refuse to believe that trees have consciousness, aka a soul -- without recognizing the irony that for centuries, the same argument has been used by the Christian church against Black, brown, and Asian people; Native Americans; and anybody else who isn't "us".  That argument is what spawned the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, by which the Catholic Church gave the conquistadors and missionaries permission -- nay, the duty -- to capture, enslave, and "civilize" members of nonwhite societies.

I'll go further: Monotheism foments patriarchy. It encourages the control of ideas, especially those that conflict with religious doctrine (much of which was written centuries ago by powerful men). It puts fear into those who are tempted to believe that the paranormal is real: miracles are okay, but any other unexplained phenomena are scary because they could be the devil's work. (I once pissed off a Russian Orthodox guy of my acquaintance by observing that what his church called miracles, Pagans call magic.)

The God/no God dichotomy is the bedrock of Western culture. It's so deeply ingrained that a lot of the time, we don't even realize it's there. Why does the horror genre work? Because the villain is often stereotypically evil. What's the framework by which society defines evil? I'll let you work that out on your own.

Many atheists define their beliefs as no-God. That's fine, as far as it goes, I guess, but it seems to me it's a position in which it's easy to get stuck. You could keep poking holes in the Bible or your prophet of choice -- or you could do the work to define your own belief system, in which the Bible and its prophets are irrelevant.

I am here to tell you that the God/no-God dichotomy is bullshit. Quit fighting Jehovah and move on.

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Anyway, that's why I'm Pagan.

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

All the sides of Trump's felony convictions.

 

Tribaliumivanka | Deposit Photos

In last week's post, I made note of the fact that the 45th president of the United States is now a convicted felon. 

Imagine my consternation on Thursday, when the Washington Post ran an op-ed by Carroll Bogert, president of the Marshall Project, asking the media not to use the term in referring to Donald Trump.

According to Bogert's short bio that accompanied the column, the Marshall Project is a nonprofit online news organization dedicated to covering criminal justice. Bogert believes that "journalism can make our legal system more fair, effective, transparent and humane", and the way to begin to do that is to watch our language. 

"Felon", Bogert says, is pejorative. She writes, "Surely part of the impetus behind the sudden widespread use of the word 'felon' is to take Trump down a peg, to label him as no better than a common criminal. And that is the problem." She notes that people convicted of felonies are often from the margins of society. Calling them "felons" dehumanizes them -- it reduces them to nothing but their crime -- and, among other things, it makes it more difficult for them to pick up the pieces of their lives when they have served their time.

She acknowledges that Trump does not inhabit the margins of society. He is wealthy, privileged, and powerful. And "felon" is a wonderfully clear word -- the kind that journalists usually love to use. Besides, it's the truth: if you're convicted of committing a felony, you're a felon. 

But, she maintains, people convicted of felonies are people first. She compares "felon" to the term "person with a disability", which has been slowly gaining ground on "disabled person"; the idea is that the person needs to be front and center, not the disability. In emphasizing Trump's convictions by calling him a felon, she says, we run the risk of losing the humanity that other people convicted of felonies have begun to regain.

I am of two minds about this.

It should be a no-brainer for me. I'm the person who decreed, as the managing editor at Zapnews thirty-odd years ago, that we would not use the terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice" in news copy because they were political positions, not really descriptive of the two sides' stances. (I'm pretty sure I said we should use "anti-abortion" instead of "pro-life". I don't remember what I said to use instead of "pro-choice", and I'm really hoping it wasn't "pro-abortion"; if I did, I hereby apologize.)

Moreover, as alert hearth/myth readers know, I'm an animist. I've explained how I believe it's not just human people who have personhood and deserve respect. Animals and plants have ways of communicating with us and with one another, and even physical features of our world such as mountains, rivers, and rocks may have ways of thinking and feeling that we can't understand. Just because we can't perceive their language, it doesn't mean they don't have one.

I've also talked here about how it's wrong for humans to dehumanize one another; for centuries, that's how we justified slavery and genocide.

And yet. 

And yet, it feels so delicious to dehumanize Trump. I do want to knock him down a peg. I do want to see him treated as any other criminal would be treated.* And "felon" is a clear word. A truthful word.

And given the way his first presidency degraded the nation, and given what he and those close to him intend to do if he's elected again, I could make a strong case for using almost any language to emphasize the clear and present danger he presents to the nation.

And yet.

Is it right to hurt people just to score points against Trump?

I'm feeling a little like Tevye here: "On the other hand...."

I can't promise that I'll never refer to Trump as a convicted felon again. But I promise that I'll pause and think about it. 

Even if only for a nanosecond.

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*His pre-sentencing conference is tomorrow. But just like the perp walk we never got to see, he's not going to get the full treatment this time, either. He'll be answering the probation officer's questions by video conference from Mar-a-Lago, with his attorney at his side. The official line is that having him report to the probation office, with his usual entourage of Secret Service agents and members of the media in tow, would be disruptive to the whole office and would complicate the lives of other people who are there to meet with their own probation officers.

Sentencing is set for July 11th. The Republican National Convention starts just four days later.

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

A reading list for cooler days.

 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

With the weather turning cooler here in New Mexico, my thoughts are beginning to turn toward hunkering down before a fire with a glass of something warming and a good book. And since I've been blogging quite a bit lately about things like anthromorphism and animism and how Native Americans' concept of history and religion is different from Europeans' -- not to mention this idea that there's more than one god -- I thought it might be helpful to give y'all a short reading list. Just in case you're stuck for something to do, one winter night, and decide to find out why this crazy woman keeps saying the stuff she does.

But seriously, each of these books has stuck with me over the years. As I often recommend them to others, I figured I might as well put them all in one place on the blog. So here you go: some of the books that have shaped my current thinking. I'm not posting links because y'all know how to search Amazon and/or inquire at your local library.

Animism: Respecting the Living World, by Graham Harvey. Harvey has studied the way Native peoples throughout the world relate to beings that most Westerners think are devoid of life. I quoted from this book on my post about sentient balls of moss back in 2020.

The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind, and the Self in Nature, by Emma Restall Orr. I also mentioned this book in that blog post about glacial mice. Orr is a Druid and a philosopher; the text is denser than Harvey's, but her ideas about animism are intriguing, particularly when she talks about how trees must communicate, although clearly they have a different language than humans do. 

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard. Speaking of trees communicating, Simard has discovered how they do it: via a network of fungi in the soil. She started on this journey of discovery when she began to wonder why seedlings planted to replace clear-cut forests often don't make it. The answer: old trees supply nutrients and other types of support to young and ailing trees, and when the old trees are gone, that support -- that wisdom -- is gone, too.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She writes beautifully, arguing that scientific knowledge could -- and should -- be enriched by indigenous wisdom. 

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. These two authors put paid to a whole host of ideas about human progress that were basically invented by Western Europeans to convince themselves that they -- we -- represent the pinnacle of civilization. For one thing, that timeline about how humans progressed in a straight line from hunter-gatherers to farmers? It's bogus. Totally made up. It's as true as the idea that "savage Indians" couldn't have been smart enough or advanced enough to build cities like Cahokia or Teotihuacan, or massive earthwords like those in Ohio, so they must have been constructed by aliens, or maybe one of the lost tribes of Israel.

The Mound Builders, by Robert Silverberg. Those Hopewell culture structures have recently been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which puts them on par for cultural importance with Stonehenge, the Acropolis, and the Great Wall of China. (This pleases me inordinately, as my Transcendence series features some scenes at the Newark Great Circle Earthworks.) Silverberg usually writes sci-fi, but this book is nonfiction. It doesn't get into the archaeoastronomy that's built into the mounds; instead, the author writes about how European settlers "discovered" them and how Western science finally got around to investigating who built them and why. 

God is Red: A Native View of Religion, by Vine Deloria, Jr. I read this book years ago. It's billed as the seminal work on Native American religious views and their relation to Christianity. I think it was the first time that I was introduced to the idea that Christianity, as a source of the belief in human exceptionalism, is responsible for so many of our culture's ills, including genocide and environmental damage. Deloria wrote the book in the early '70s. With climate change whacking us upside the head, it might be time for a re-read.

A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism, by John Michael Greer. If you're wondering why polytheism makes sense to educated people like me, read this book. It delves into the philosophical underpinnings of the belief system and demonstrates why polytheism is as rational a way of seeing the world as is monotheism -- or atheism, for that matter. I've heard that Greer has unfortunately turned Trumpy in recent years, but this book was first published long before, in 2005, and remains an excellent introduction to polytheistic thought.

So there you go -- eight books to get you through the winter. Enjoy. And if you read any of them, let me know what you think.

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These moments of bloggy reading recommendations have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

Celebrating anthropomorphism.

The things you get to talking about with friends on Facebook. Or maybe it's just me.

This week, somehow I ended up in a several-days-long Facebook chat with friends from Kevin's Watch about religion -- which to be honest, isn't that unusual with this crowd -- but then I steered the discussion into animism. 

Niceldeas | Deposit Photos

I was primed for it: I'm taking an online class right now on Pagan metaphysics, and one of the modules is on animism. Here's what we've been taught: Animism starts with the idea that whatever it is that animates humans also animates everything else -- our pets, of course, and other animals, but also plants, rocks, rivers, mountains, our earth, other planets -- everything. But it goes further than that. It suggests that all these things aren't just alive; they are also persons -- persons with whom we can form a relationship.

I discovered some time ago that I'm an animist, partly through my Pagan studies, but also by delving into so many Native American myths. Many tribes have a different attitude from that of Western civilization when it comes to the land. We have historically seen the earth and its resources as Jehovah's gift to us, to use for our benefit -- even to exploit. By contrast, Native Americans generally see the Earth as our mother, and the animals and plants that live here with us as people in their own right, whose qualities are wisdom that we could do well to emulate. These Natives believe we are here not to exploit Earth and her resources but to be good stewards of them. Which is one of the attitudes that made Europeans think, when they first got here, that the Native Americans they met were uneducated and naive -- in other words, ripe for exploitation. (I hope I've gotten some of this across in my novels.)

Getting back to the conversation this week: It then took a turn into a discussion of how we're not supposed to anthropomorphize things. Say you hear one of your cats using the litter box, and then notice that one of your other cats is also paying attention -- and is actually lying in wait to pounce on the poor boy when he gets out of the box. He does, and she does, and he freaks out and dashes down the basement stairs, and she saunters away, her practical joke played. Oh, all right -- it was Pumpkin in the litter box and Squeaker who was the jokester. And the whole thing was hilarious. 

But when I recounted this some years ago, I was admonished by someone for anthropomorphizing Squeaker's behavior. I thought the concept was ridiculous at the time, and I still think so. But this week, in remembering this series of events, I came to a realization: Humans, in our hubris, have it backwards. It's not that we attribute human emotions to animals -- it's that every living thing has the same emotions. We know when our pets are happy to see us and when they're jealous of the attention another pet is getting. We know when a wild animal is angry or afraid. We are learning that trees take care of one another, feeding resources through a mycorrhizal network underground to an ailing neighbor tree. We recognize these emotions because we have them, too.

But we can't admit that to ourselves. If we did, it would make humans, Jehovah's chosen ones, equal to every other species on the planet, including the rivers and trees and mountains and the planet herself.

As an animist, I believe we are all equal. We are all persons. And every person deserves respect.

So I've decided that anthropomorphism isn't an actual thing. It's certainly not anything we should avoid doing. In fact, I think we should do it more often. Let's celebrate our similarities so that we're less likely to treat the Earth, and every person on her, as "less than human".

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

Trees can talk.

 

Pikist.com | Here's hoping it's a Creative Commons work...

Every now and then, I come across something online that I find absolutely charming. (Apart from news about the National Zoo's new baby panda, I mean.)

This week it was a story in the New York Times Magazine called "The Social Life of Forests." It's a profile of Suzanne Simard, a botanist who specializes in forestry. Simard has discovered that trees and other plants in a forest communicate through fungi called mychorrizas. The fungi bond with the plants' roots and help the plants extract water and nutrients from the soil. In exchange, they receive some of the byproducts of the plants' photosynthesis.

But Simard has evidence the interaction is about more than just food swapping. The fungi also pass hormones and alarm signals from plant to plant -- even between different species. She has found that a so-called mother tree might nurture hundreds younger trees. Trees in the network that know they're dying will pass their nutrients along to other trees. And trees severed from the network have a worse chance of survival.

In short, a forest isn't just a simple collection of trees and other plants. It's a community. Maybe even a family. 

It's always interesting to see what people take from this kind of thing. Simard's colleagues, who were virtually all male, originally thought she was just a goofy girl -- until she proved her theories. After that, the materialists started complaining that she was attributing altruism to trees, which was impossible because everybody knows every species on Earth operates in survival-of-the-fittest mode. 

Besides all that, her findings open up an uncomfortable line of inquiry: What if plants are sentient?

I wrote about that very topic earlier this year. In that post, I quoted a Druidic philosopher named Emma Restall Orr. Here's what I wrote: 

[Orr] observes that a tree recognizes the resources available to it -- sunlight or shade, water, other trees nearby -- and adapts itself to them. It recognizes the seasons and understands what it is meant to do in each one. Just because we humans don't recognize all that activity as the sort of conscious thought we're used to, it doesn't mean it's not happening. And just because we don't understand the language of trees, it doesn't mean they don't have one.

I can't tell you how delighted I was to read this article about Simard this week. Trees do have language. They communicate with one another through mychorrizas. It's science!

Now, what you take from all this will depend on your own philosophical leanings. Some folks might see the hand of God, while others might see Lucifer spreading lies. After all, America was built on the theory of Manifest Destiny -- that God made humans the highest of his mortal creations, and gave us this Earth not to steward, but to exploit. And we are really good at exploitation. If we can make ourselves believe that a resource doesn't share our humanity, we will use it up to the last drop -- even if that resource is a Black person. Or a Native American person. Or a Tree person.

A materialist will have a lot of trouble with the idea of trees as persons. But science has proven that they talk to one another. They have a language -- we just can't understand it.

Possibly my all-time favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episode is called "Darmok." In it, Captain Picard and his crew meet a Tamarian starship. The Tamarian language is inscrutable -- the individual words can be translated, but the phrases they contain don't convey any meaning. The captain of this ship beams Picard down to a nearby planet and joins him there. Together, they must defeat a dangerous creature, and to do that, they have to learn to understand one another. Picard, bless him, figures out that Tamarians speak exclusively in metaphors -- that, for example, "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" refers to a Tamarian tale about two heroes who become friends by facing adversity together. Tamarian civilization is sufficiently isolated that nobody who isn't a Tamarian would know the story, which of course means no other species could ever understand them.

As a Pagan and an animist, I have to conclude that to humans, the language of trees -- like that of the Tamarians -- is inscrutable, but is nevertheless a form of communication. That's a big step toward viewing them as sentient beings. And that's something we ought to think about when we look at a forest.

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These moments of sentient blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Please stay home this holiday season, so your loved ones have a better chance of surviving until next year. 

An argument for sentient balls of moss.

Neerav Bhatt | CC 2.0 | Flickr

Last weekend, I shared a story on Facebook about a phenomenon called glacier mice. They're balls of moss -- often the only green things on a white expanse of glacier. And as researchers Sophie Gilbert and Tim Bartholomaus from the University of Idaho discovered, they move around. Synchronized, more or less. With no visible connection or means of propulsion. They don't scurry, mind you -- it's very slow movement. But they do move, and they move pretty much in concert with one another. 

I posted NPR's story about this discovery with the caption, "Maybe they're sentient." I knew folks would get a kick out of it. But really -- what if they're sentient?

What we're talking about here is animism, which the Oxford Dictionary online defines this way:

1. The attribution of a soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena.
2. The belief in a supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe.

With our glacier mice, what we're after is the first definition. And as a Pagan, soul is a more Christian term than I'm comfortable with, so let's replace soul with spirit. 

A lot of cultures around the world attribute spirit to a whole host of non-human things. In Animism: Respecting the Living World, author Graham Harvey recounts a conversation from the 1930s between anthropologist Irving Hallowell and an Ojibwe elder in Manitoba. Hallowell asked the older man,

"Are all the stones we see about us here alive?" Hallowell continues, "He reflected a long while and then replied, 'No! But some are."

The question came up, Harvey explains, because in Ojibwe and some other Algonquian languages, the word for rock is treated the same way you'd treat the word for a living person, with plural endings and such that are usually reserved for humans. Why is that? Because some rocks have been observed to move. On their own. With no visible means of propulsion.

That story reminded me that in Czech, there are different plural forms for animate masculine nouns and inanimate masculine nouns. Most animals, if the word for them is masculine, get the inanimate treatment -- but not dogs. Dogs get the animate masculine plural form. I expect anyone who has ever had a canine companion can understand why Czechs would think of them as people. (The word for cat in Czech, in case you're wondering, is a feminine noun, and the language doesn't differentiate between animate and inanimate in either the feminine or the neuter case. Which probably says something unpleasant about ancient Czechs, but I digress.)

Okay, dogs are animate. So are cats, dolphins, crows -- lots of animals. I think we can agree that they exhibit the ability to think, to plan, and to communicate. Just because we can't always understand what they're trying to say to us (an idea that has birthed ten thousand memes), it doesn't mean they're incapable of communicating. And they're probably better at communicating with their own species than they are with us. Right? So animals have agency -- they can act independently and make choices of their own free will.

What about bugs? Are they animate? Of course -- probably more animate than we'd like for them to be. Do they have agency? I think so, within certain parameters. A bee might be programmed to make honey for its queen, but the queen doesn't dictate which flower it visits today. A spider has sufficient free will to pick a lousy place for its web. Ants have a whole social hierarchy -- they send out scouts to look for food sources. And when they find one, they go back to their anthill and communicate the information to their fellow ants. But how do they get the word out? They can't talk.

Or maybe they can, but it's in a language we humans can't understand.

I'm reminded of Tolkien's Ents. They lived a long time and talked very slowly, and their own language was nearly impossible for humans to speak. Granted, Ents are fictional. But it wasn't that long ago that we figured out whales can talk to one another, and we don't understand their language, either (except in Star Trek IV, and even then it took some doing).

In The Wakeful World, philosopher Emma Restall Orr discusses the real-life trees that grow on Earth. She observes that a tree recognizes the resources available to it -- sunlight or shade, water, other trees nearby -- and adapts itself to them. It recognizes the seasons and understands what it is meant to do in each one. Just because we humans don't recognize all that activity as the sort of conscious thought we're used to, it doesn't mean it's not happening. And just because we don't understand the language of trees, it doesn't mean they don't have one.

Maybe rocks have a language of their own, too. Maybe it's so slow and moves so deeply that humans can never perceive it. If so, that's not the rocks' fault -- it's our fault for assuming that any language we can't perceive doesn't exist, and that any mode of thinking that isn't exactly like ours doesn't count.

The more I think about it, the more I disagree with the definition of animism that I quoted at the top of this post. Even changing soul to spirit doesn't fix it. Animism doesn't have anything to do with whether a chunk of God or spirit resides in each human or rock or tree -- or glacial mouse -- but with whether each of these things deserves to be recognized as a sentient being. Or, if that's too big a leap for you, whether each of these things might be a sentient being -- and then, erring on the side of caution, treating them as if they are.

Once you get to that point, environmentalism becomes a whole new ballgame.

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These moments of sentient blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Wash your hands! Wear a mask!

Thises and thats, or: allergies suck.

You'll have to forgive me if this post seems a little disjointed.  I've been fighting spring allergies all week, and the allergies have been winning.  My bed is awash in partly-used tissues; I would wake up coughing after a couple of hours' sleep, grab a tissue and sort of blow my nose, then fall back to sleep for a couple more hours with the tissue still in my hand.  Of course, I'd lose my grip on the tissue as soon as I fell asleep, and then the tissue would get lost in the bedclothes.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  I can't wait to do laundry -- I'm sure I'll find five or ten more tissues betwixt sheet and blankets.

It's been quite a number of years since spring has whacked me so badly.  I gather that this year's chilly weather held everything back, and then we had several days of hot weather, which encouraged all the trees to fire off their pollen sacs at once.  That would have been Thursday and Friday, the 18th and 19th, which coincidentally is when my nose started running like a faucet.  It's supposed to get better for the next couple of days.  And we got a little rain today, which should have washed the air clean.  In theory.  It may be a while before my sinuses catch up with that theory.

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So now that the first draft of Annealed is done, I thought it might be good to finish the research.  Look, it's not my fault, okay?  I was waiting for the magic of interlibrary loan to bring me the books I need.  I'm trying to find out something about Australian Aboriginal spiritual practices because an Aboriginal makes a sort of cameo appearance in Annealed, together with practitioners of some other traditional religions around the world.

Interlibrary loan provided just one of the books I requested:  Dreamkeepers by Harvey Arden.  But as it happens, the book we're reading for my Pagan book group just now -- Animism: Respecting the Living World by Graham Harvey -- has a short chapter on Aboriginal culture, as well.

I expect that just about everybody knows about the Dreaming, the time out of time when the Aboriginal world was created.  And a lot of people are probably aware that for Aboriginals, the Dreaming isn't a once-upon-a-time thing, but is still happening now.  What I didn't realize was the extent to which Aboriginal tribes self-identified with their home regions.  In North America, events like the Trail of Tears -- the forced march of the Cherokee people from the southeastern United States to Oklahoma -- were terrible and should never have happened.  But some of the tribes themselves were nomads.  The Sioux, for example, may have started out in the upper Midwest, and moved to the Plains after repeated conflicts with other tribes.

In Australia, I'm learning, things are different.  Each Aboriginal tribe or nation had its own region, and to them, those lands are alive.  Really alive.  A story about a Dreaming being who fell asleep, lending a particular shape to a line of hills, isn't just a myth to explain how the hills got that shape; the hills are that shape because Dreaming being never left.  So Aboriginals feel they have a responsibility to care for their tribal lands.  They have stories to hand down to new generations, cave paintings and other features of the landscape to maintain, and so on.  But the white settlers couldn't wrap their brains around this idea.  To them, the land is just the land, a thing to exploit.  So they brought the Aboriginals onto their ranches as workers, and then later (when the government decreed that ranchers treat Aboriginals like human beings) kicked them out and sent them to live in camps and shanty towns away from their native lands.  So for the Aboriginals, not only can they not take care of their tribal lands properly, but they can't teach their children how to be a proper member of the tribe, either.

The books I've been reading are at least a decade old, and so I'm hopeful things have changed in the interim.  Not very hopeful, mind you, but hopeful.

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Besides learning a little bit about Aboriginals in Australia, I've also been reading -- for the first time ever -- The Eye in the Pyramid, the first book in the Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.  It was first published in 1975, the year I graduated from high school, and boy, is it ever a trip.

And I played around with Audacity yesterday and came up with a 30-second radio ad that will air on the Indie Exchange's Blog Talk Radio shows next month.  I'm going to try to figure out how to upload it onto the blog so you can listen to it, if you like, and see whether I sound as bad as I've been feeling this week.  If it works, it'll be on the Radio Appearances tab.

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These moments of disjointed blogginess are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.