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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

***

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.

A twofer: The low-carb food pyramid and that ICE video.

I've said it before: some weeks there's nothing to write about, and some weeks there's too much. Like this week. I was all set to opine on the new USDA food pyramid, but then Renee Good was murdered by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. So I'm going to do both -- the food pyramid first, and then the other thing.

***

Screenshot from the USDA website

Never in a million years did I think I would ever agree with the guy with the dead brain worm who's running the US Department of Health and Human Services, under which the US Department of Agriculture sits. But weird shit keeps happening in 2026. So here we are.

I think the new food pyramid is actually okay.

In the 14-plus years I've been blogging (it'll be 15 this August), I've written about weight loss, uh, a whole bunch of times. (There's a search box over on the right; plug in "diet" if you want to find them all.) Most recently, I started eating low carb to get my blood glucose numbers under control. It worked great -- until I went back to work full-time. It became much harder to keep to a low-carb diet, making everything from scratch, when I resumed sitting on my butt for nine hours a day. I still have the treadmill I wrote about a few years back, but (full disclosure) it's currently gathering dust. So I've gained back weight that I lost right after I retired and went low-carb.

But I still believe in low-carb eating: protein at every meal, fruits and veggies but not the starchy ones, full-fat dairy, a limit on whole grains, and no sugar, refined carbs, or junk food. And that's what the new pyramid promotes. 

People are howling about The Fat, particularly that full-fat dairy is now okay. I get that it upends a few decades of nutritional guidance. But there has been scientific evidence over the past few years that the low-fat-dairy advice is mostly circumstantial. That is, nutritionists thought that since fat has more calories than, say, carbs, and that fat is what clogs people's arteries and gives them heart disease, then the answer was to eat less fat. But it turns out that simplistic assumption is wrong. High-fat dairy has been found to improve blood pressure in some studies.

And I believe, just as an anecdotal observation, that it was the advice of nutritionists to eat less fat and consume more carbs back in the '80s that have made obesity and type 2 diabetes become public health concerns.

It wouldn't be the first time that nutrition science has given us bum advice. Remember when eggs were deemed bad for us because of the cholesterol in them? Debunked. Remember when we were told to switch to margarine because of the fat in butter? Also debunked (it turns out the trans fats in margarine are worse than the regular fat in butter).

People are also howling about the advice that added sugar should be kept away from kids until they're eleven years old. Parents are saying it's impossible: "There's sugar in everything!" Well, yes, and it's because food manufacturers have been lacing their products with cheap additives like sugar and salt for decades to make them taste good, and nobody has made them stop. I recognize that it's hard for people who live in food deserts to get fresh fruits and veggies. But cheap food additives and food deserts are things we can fix. (Interestingly, Fox News host Laura Ingraham has admitted that Michelle Obama was right about food deserts. I guess if the advice is coming from a Republican, it's okay?)

Anyway, I find myself applauding the USDA's new food pyramid, and I hope my fellow folks on the left calm down enough to see the wisdom in it. (I can't believe I'm putting Bobby Brainworm and wisdom in the same sentence. This is a really weird year.)

***

Okay, on to the tougher thing to talk about: The murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis this week. Murder is a loaded word, but I believe it's justified in this case.

So many words have been written about this incident already that I'm not going to add much. But I wanted to address the video released by Vice President J.D. Vance this week that the shooter himself, Jonathan Gold, shot with his phone. I haven't watched any of the videos, nor do I intend to; I used to get paid to see tough stuff when I was a journalist, and nobody's paying me to do that anymore. But I read historian Heather Cox Richardson's description of the video on her Substack yesterday. 

I've seen some social media commenters questioning why Vance and other right-wing nutjobs thought the video would help their side. I know exactly why. It's because it shows that a woman -- not Renee, but her wife -- mouthed off to a white man in a position of authority, and she wouldn't stop. So he killed Renee.

That's it. That's their whole justification for the shooting. Woman mouths off and won't stop? Shoot her. Kill her. She deserves it.

Every abuser, ever, has used the same defense. 

I hate this timeline.

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These moments of bloggy insanity have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. #AbolishICE.