I was dyeing today.

As in dyeing yarn. Don't get any weird ideas.

This weekend was the annual Harvest Festival at El Rancho de las Golondrinas, and I volunteered today at the dye shed. It's only the third or fourth time I've worked out there, and every time I do it, I don't know why I don't do it more often because it's a ton of fun.

Anyway, here are some photos from the day.

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

My usual volunteer spot is in the weaving rooms, which are pretty close to the entrance. The dye shed is requires a longer walk. 

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

But it's a pretty walk, so it's hard to complain.

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

The shed is a sort of lean-to constructed mostly of wood with a stone hearth on one side. I took this photo from inside the dye shed. We had five pots of all-natural dyes going today, the first four in enameled or stainless steel pots: 

• cochineal, a tiny bug that grows on prickly pear cacti. It takes 70,000 bugs, ground up, to make a pound of dye. It makes a brilliant red color -- but it was pricey and had to be imported from Mexico, so it was used sparingly. Today we added lime juice and got some pretty pinks out of it.
• indigo, made from the fermented leaves of the indigo plant. It makes a deep blue. We learned today that several plants around the world can be used to make indigo dye. Alas, none of them grow locally, so this dye also had to be imported.
• madder root, which does grow locally and gave us a lovely orange today. Depending on the mordant (dye fixer) used, you can also get a decent red; it was used for military uniforms for the troops who weren't officers and couldn't afford cochineal red.
• chamisa, a bush that's blooming right now around here. The flowers make a yellow dye. In fact, most growing things make yellow. You'd think they'd make green, but no -- once the chlorophyll is boiled off, only the yellow remains. We get green typically by dyeing the yarn first with chamisa or something else that makes yellow, then overdyeing it with indigo.
• a second pot of chamisa, this one in the cast iron cauldron on the right side of the photo just above. The iron in the pot interacts with the chamisa; today it gave us a very pretty moss green. So that's another way to get a green dye.

I mentioned overdyeing. That's where you dye the yarn (or fabric) with one color, then dye it again with another color. We made purple yarn today by overdyeing some of our pink with indigo. 

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

We hang the dyed yarn over the fence to dry. As you can see, the runoff from the yarn dyes the fence, too.

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

With the fires going all day to keep the dye baths hot, my clothes were redolent of smoke -- which Tigs thoroughly appreciated after I got home. 

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

Pan-Native-American spirituality is not a thing.

I could do another post about the ongoing horror show that is the Trump administration this week. But I'm inclined instead to write about something that comes up occasionally in Pagan, and especially New Age, circles.

This illustration is one example of it. We are going to discuss how very wrong it is. And then we're going to talk about some other weird ideas white people have about Native Americans, particularly their spirituality. 

Nearbirds | Deposit Photos

So what's wrong with the illustration? For starters, tipis were used only by the various Plains Indians tribes. A tipi is easy to put up and take down, making it perfect housing for people with a nomadic lifestyle. But the decorations on this one are sanitized to the point of being meaningless. Here is a photo of some actual Kiowa tipis. See the difference? 

Wikipedia | Public Domain

Bison, an elk smoking a pipe, water monsters -- you get the idea.

Let's turn now to that totem pole. Totem poles are carved by Native Americans who live in western Canada and along the Pacific coast of the US. They are made of cedar -- a tree that doesn't grow on the Great Plains -- and while they can be as short as four feet, they are sometimes as tall as 100 feet. 

Tipis are between four and eight feet tall, generally speaking. So the perspective in the illustration is off -- a real totem pole would probably tower over the tipi. But why would a tipi dweller want to haul around a totem pole? And why would a Pacific Northwest Indian want to live in a tipi when cedar trees were plentiful in their area? The traditional housing for totem-pole-carving tribes was the longhouse, made of cedar planks. Big ones housed multiple families that each had their own area inside the building.

The Ute Indians lived in both tipis and wickiups, depending on the time of year. Members of the Five Civilized Tribes in the northeastern US and eastern Canada lived in longhouses. Southeastern tribes like the Seminole lived in chickees, with thatched roofs but open sides. Pueblo Indian homes were made of adobe, and the Navajo lived in hogans, built of logs and mud. (If you ever get the chance to go inside a hogan, look up; the logs forming the roof are interlaced. Just beautiful.)

Different tribes, different climates, different types of homes. Different languages from different language families, too; here in New Mexico, we have 19 Pueblos still in existence, and depending on the pueblo, their ancestors may have spoken Tiwa, Tewa, Towa, Keresan, Zunian, or Uto-Aztecan, and they are not mutually intelligible tongues. The Navajo language is from the Athabaskan language family, as are the languages spoken by Apache tribes and a bunch of tribes in western Canada.

Given all that, why on earth would anyone think that every tribe followed the same ancient religion?

And yet I keep coming across memes on social media that start with, "O, Great Spirit" and purport to be Native American wisdom. Here's one: 

Stolen from a Facebook page

Lovely sentiments, right? 

Which tribe is it from?

You can't tell, can you?

I am going to hazard a guess and say that some white person wrote it and is trying to pass it off as Native. 

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Most Native Americans today are Christian; their ancestors, like those of us with European pagan ancestors, were converted by Christian invaders at swordpoint. They may still practice their traditions, but thanks to Christian missionaries determined to "civilize the savages", a whole lot of their languages and cultural practices are being lost.

There's a scene from a Sherman Alexie novel that keeps coming back to me. I think it might have been in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The main character of the novel, Junior, is a teenager who lives on the dirt-poor Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington. The scene is one in which several white women show up on the reservation and say they want to become Indians because Native beliefs are so pure and so on. Junior (assuming I've got the right book) and his friends let the women tag along with them for the day, and they even party together. But once everybody is high, the teens turn on the women, telling them how dumb their romanticized view of Native life is -- and then they send the women packing.

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I get the desire to make life simpler by adopting the beliefs of people who had a closer relationship with the land and all that. But please don't fall for the idea that all Native Americans believed the same stuff and followed the same god. A lot of tribes (most, I think) were polytheistic before the coming of the white man. This idea of a "Great Spirit" was likely introduced by the missionaries and adopted by the Indians -- sometimes right along with their original pantheon, to the missionaries' chagrin. The Natives were simply doing the same kind of syncretism that the Romans did, adopting the worship of other cultures' gods as they met them along the way, but in the Natives' case, the practice didn't play well with monotheism.

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Do me a favor, would you? If you see something posted online that claims to be a "Native American" spiritual something-or-other, ask the poster which tribe it's from. If they can't tell you... well, there's your answer.

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

Authoritarianism is here.

Yurumi | Deposit Photos

Tomorrow is Mabon, the autumnal equinox. It's supposed to be a day of balance, when the light and the darkness are equal.

America feels anything but balanced right now.

I won't belabor the details of Charlie Kirk's murder and subsequent lionization by the right; you've no doubt heard more than you want to about it. What I want to focus on is how Kirk's death is being used as an excuse by the Trump regime to crack down on dissent. First it was Stephen Colbert; this week, it was Jimmy Kimmel. Both comedians have criticized Trump for laughs in their nightly monologues.

I've been reminding folks for months now that TV networks aren't licensed by the FCC, so they have no license to be yanked, no matter how much Trump complains about them. But the regime has figured out an end run, and I'm kind of mad at myself for not considering the possibility. See, Kimmel's show went away because Nexstar, a company that owns the largest number of local stations in the country, wants FCC approval to buy Tegna, a company that owns the stations that were spun off from Gannett when it split its broadcast and print divisions in 2015. To boost its chances for approval of the deal, Nexstar told Disney, which owns the ABC network, that because of Kimmel's remarks about the Kirk shooting, it would pre-empt his show for a night. Another major (and very conservative) station group owner, Sinclair, announced it would do the same thing. So Disney put Kimmel's show on indefinite suspension.

Nexstar says its decision to pre-empt the show had nothing to do with its pending deal with Tegna. But come on.

The folks who are saying this is a blatant violation of the First Amendment are right. The First Amendment literally guarantees us all the right to criticize the government without fear of retribution. 

And yes, that covers comics. It especially covers comics. There's a long, long history of people poking fun at the powerful. You've heard of court jesters, right? They weren't there just to be fools. And in ancient Ireland, the chief job of a bard at court was to literally sing the praises of the monarch and tell him where he screwed up. Being the target of a bardic satire could ruin your reputation -- and spell the end of your reign of power. Better to laugh it off and plan to do better, moving forward.

Trump, of course, has no sense of humor. It's been said that his hatred of Barack Obama goes back to the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2011, when Obama roasted Trump for claiming that Obama was born in Kenya. 

I'd never seen that video until just now. It's pretty brutal. A different person would just laugh it off, but you can tell Trump doesn't think it's funny at all. 

Obama was prescient about one thing, though, and it starts at the 4:45 mark. Needs more gilding, but other than that, it's spot on.

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The point is that the Trump administration is trampling all of our democratic norms, and with these attacks on the First Amendment, it's a short step from silencing famous people who criticize the administration to silencing everyone. Is it too late to stop them?

This week, Jon Stewart interviewed Maria Ressa on The Daily Show. (You can watch the interview here.)  Ressa is a Filipino American journalist who was arrested dozens of times by the regime of Rodrigo Duterte, starting when Duterte was elected president of the Phillipines in 2016. She quoted a recent study that found 72 percent of the world's countries are now under authoritarian rule. And yet, she is optimistic, noting that Duterte was arrested in March of this year to face charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

She warns that it takes very little time to lose your rights, and much longer to get them back. 

The Wheel turns. We may not have hit bottom yet. But the sooner we stop the descent, the sooner we can start the long climb back up again.

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 These moments of unbalanced blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe! But don't let yourself by silenced in advance.

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!