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.

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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. 

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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.

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.

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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.)

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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.

After the Happily Ever After.

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For the past couple of months, I've fallen once again into the habit of watching holiday rom-coms in the evenings. This year, I even succumbed to the lure of a subscription to the Fount of All Rom-Com Bliss, the Hallmark streaming service. (I made a rule, though, that I would never watch a movie rated less than 4.1 out of 5. This was after clicking through, at the end of one movie, to one that "others have also watched", and discovering it was terrible. Turned out it was a 3.2 or something.)

I've seen way more than enough of these to have the formula down: boy meets girl; boy/girl hates girl/boy on sight; circumstances throw them together enough times so that they decide the other isn't as annoying as first thought; boy/girl tells a lie by either omission or commission; girl/boy says to sidekick, "He/she lied to me! I can't trust him/her!"; boy/girl redeems him/herself somehow; girl/boy forgives them; they kiss; roll the credits. The implication is that they're on their way to Happily Ever After ("HEA" for short).

By the end of this year's HEA rodeo (as in "this ain't my first"), I began to wonder about the long-term viability of some of these HEAs. To me, at least some of the couples had a glaring incompatibility or two. Sometimes it was "I've changed for you!" -- when of course change is unlikely to stick unless you do it for yourself and not some extrinsic reason like keeping a partner.

Last night I watched Bells Are Ringing for the umpteenth time. The film version was released in 1960. Judy Holliday plays Ella Peterson, an operator for Susanswerphone, an answering service in New York City. (Kids: Before voicemail, there were answering machines, and before answering machines, there were answering services -- companies that employed real people as operators to answer your phone for you and take a message, then give you your messages when you called in.) Instead of just taking messages, though, Ella needs to her clients: she pretends to be Santa for a little boy who won't eat his spinach; she takes messages for a French restaurant in a French accent; and so on. But with one client, Jeffrey Moss (played by Dean Martin), she adopts the manner of a little old lady and calls herself Mom to cover for the crush she has on him. Jeffrey is a successful playwright whose partner has quit working with him, and now he has a crippling case of writer's block -- he doesn't believe he can make it on his own. When he doesn't answer his phone one day, Ella goes to his apartment and, as Melisande Scott, encourages him to start writing again. Things progress from there -- she involves herself in other clients' lives, too, and there's a subplot involving a bookie operation -- but the main plot line is that Jeffrey falls in love with Melisande, and Ella can't bring herself to admit that she has lied to him about who she is. At the end, he figures it out on his own, the bookies get arrested, Jeffrey and Ella kiss, and the credits roll. Boom, Happily Ever After.

But Jeffrey is going to have to change his lifestyle a lot to keep her. He's involved in the New York theater scene, with women throwing themselves at him and calling him dahling, and Ella is no good at that game. This is 1960, so presumably Ella would give up her job when they marry, and they would live together in...his bachelor apartment? Would she suck it up and attend the glittering parties that she hates? Or would she convince Jeffrey to give up city life, and they'd find a little farm upstate and only travel into the city for premieres or something? 

I mean, I still love the movie -- "Just In Time" has been my earworm all day -- but it just makes you wonder how long the relationship will survive. 

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This is a post about the US invasion of Venezuela, too.

There's no doubt in anyone's mind that Nicolás Maduro is a bad guy. He ran a brutal regime that sent millions of Venezuelans running for the border, and he refused to give up his power even though he was defeated in democratic elections in both 2018 and 2024. Venezuelans celebrated the news that the US had swept in under cover of night and snatched up him and his wife for trial; he'd been indicted in New York in late March 2020 on charges of running a cocaine narcoterrorism outfit. (If this is news to you, as it was to me, think about what else was happening in late March 2020.)

When asked what comes next, Trump didn't seem to have a clue. Nobody in his administration did, either. Then Trump claimed he would run the country. Maduro's vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, is acting as interim president, and the Venezuelan army backs her. US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is quoted as saying that the US is negotiating with her, although the negotiations sound a lot more like directives than dialogue. From the BBC: 

[Noem] tells Fox News the conversations "are very matter-of-fact and very clear".

"You can lead or you can get out of the way. We're not going to allow you to continue to subvert our American influence."

Of course this has very little to do with drugs; it's really about control (read: plundering) of Venezuela's oil and mineral riches. And then there are Trump's threats about making Cuba and Mexico toe his line, too. And his administration is still talking about seizing Greenland.

In short, Trump's minions have gotten their HEA. But it doesn't look like they've thought through the consequences. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says we're not at war with Venezuela -- but will the Venezuelan army allow US troops on their soil, even as "peacekeepers"? Will the rest of the hemisphere rise up to fight us off?

We've been isolated from wars on other continents for hundreds of years due to our distance from the world's hot spots. Trump clearly believes the US is the 600-lb. gorilla in the Western Hemisphere. But the distance from South America is not that great; the distance from Mexico is a day's drive for me. And Greenland? There he would be messing with Denmark and, by extension, NATO -- a club we could be kicked out of if Trump's desire for empire building materializes into more aggression. 

We've seen their HEA, but we're not at the end yet. Not by a long shot.

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