The ancestors' call became a siren scream

How we were

A small settlement hunches by the edge of the sea. The huts are made of driftwood, branches of knotted pine, some stone maybe, probably hides. The people are tall and fair with faces roughened by wind, brine and the pale northern sun.

They fish in the icy sea with spears and nets. They hunt the great shaggy, horned ruminants of the harsh rocky north. The reindeer and elk devour the tough wild vegetation and possess several stomaches to digest it. The people cannot.

They sometimes eat red algae collected from the sea or seeds or berries or sprigs of green herbs. These are good for health as any village healer knows. But they fill no bellies. That is the role of the great whales driven ashore by the first rough boats or wild bore brought down at great risk in the darkest parts of the pine forest.

After some time—a long span of centuries or even millennia—they find that if caught the deer and its relatives can be kept and that they will give good nourishing milk that the people can eat and that will usually go sour in a way that is good. They find the eggs of wild birds at first and eventually they keep these at home as well.

And that is what they eat. For thousands upon thousands of years.

How we changed

The new ways of tilling soil and growing crops came late to the shores of the North Sea, the Baltic and the North Atlantic. They came because the stuff that grew out of the soil was sweet and oddly addictive and because the new ways were good for chieftains.

The little settlements moved as needed for food or protection. But growing crops required control of land and for the first time there was food that would last more than a few months, food that could be stockpiled and given out to warriors and followers.

In the settlements there were people of greater or lesser strength, but strength was measured in mind as well as body. There were strong hunters, skilled gatherers, good cooks and experienced healers. Some of those of importance were men and some were women. Some were even very old, weak in body but strong in experience. No one ruled absolutely. Surviving alone, without a clan, in that harsh land wasn’t feasible. No one could have all the necessary skills.

But when the time of tilling and planting came, there were lords who fed the warriors and at first the lord had to be among the strongest. But later a lord might be sickly and idle, but still own the land by the social contract and structure of society, still own the stores of food given in rent, still control the might of men. And it was about men then. Women’s work was degraded and devalued.

Image by Diana Robinson

Still the women gathered the plants and berries, and the forgetting of the old ways was slow. But over the generations the people of the north, though they thought of themselves as fierce and free, became surfs. Not so much slaves to this lord or that. Those were overthrown on a regular basis, but slaves to the grain and later the potatoes and sugar beets.

Then there came famine, when crops failed and that was all they had to eat anymore. In Ireland, fifteen percent of the people died of starvation and a similar number were forced to leave their homeland, when crop disasters and overlords conspired to calamity.

And today the descendants of those who lived on those northern shores are still among the relatively few people on earth who can process lactose, the sugar found in unsoured milk. They are also a bit taller. They get fat easily on the modern diet of starchy vegetables, beans, lean meat, skimmed dairy and processed grains.

But this isn’t a healthy kind of fat stored for the lean times. It is concentrated near our middles. Arms and legs remain relatively slender until the last stages of obesity, heart disease and diabetes set in. It is not the well-proportioned fat of some more southerly peoples and the sad statistics of northern Europeans are mirrored among many indigenous communities of northern latitudes as well.

Allergic to sugar

I was always one who fancied that I listened to the call of my ancestors… and ate healthy. I ate whole grains and beans and veggies. I kept meat to a portion or two a week and dairy to low-fat and limited amounts. That was how I was taught. I did have a hard time resisting the siren’s call of sweet tastes. Maybe the cells of my body remembered a time when the hard-won taste of honey was the only way to get such sweet on the tongue and it was exceedingly rare.

And ever since I grew to adulthood, I grew a bit heavier every year with most of that weight around my middle, despite being known as a “health nut” with my pot of legume soup for every occasion and a moderately active lifestyle growing a lot of veggies in my garden. So, it was a shock when I registered with a new doctor in a new country and got a diagnosis with it.

BG 190….A1C 6.9…. Numbers I had no reference for. But a disease my eye doctors had taught me to fear above all others: Diabetes.

It’s a danger to anyone’s eyes because of the way high blood sugar destroys nerves and sensitive tissues. But with my eyes as fragile as they have been since I was born, it is a screaming emergency.

“It’s well controlled,” the conventional nutritionist tells me. “You could eat less sugar or a plant-based diet. But yes, it will get worse, just more slowly. There’s no cure.”

I read their brochures, which advised me to carry jellybeans in my pocket to ward off extreme blood sugar dips and told me to expect blindness, amputations and heart attacks sooner rather than later. I was told I could put off the inevitable by dieting, even though my metabolism would inevitably slow down and require ever more restriction and hunger to maintain even an moderatey elevated weight.

For a few days, I felt truly hopeless.

I’m still considered “young” for this. Most everyone in my diabetes support group is over sixty. I’m only forty-five. I’ve heard that the descendants of people who lived through famine are more likely to get diabetes, even if they eat a healthy diet. Older family members always said I inherited my looks and build from my grandma Janet (of the Irish wing of the family). Maybe that was to blame, I do wonder.

Nightmares kept me tossing and turning two nights running, strange images of dark woods and crashing waves interspersed with jeering faces, hands holding cinnamon rolls and cheesy garlic bread and voices taunting: “Fat!” “Lazy!” “Your fault!” “Glutton!” “You deserve it!” “Everyone will be sure you just didn’t follow your diet and that’s why you’re blind!” “You’ll be totally blind soon enough!” “And you’ll die young!”

I was so tired I could barely think straight and every time I closed my eyes the shame and fear closed in. So, I did what I always do in the worst troubles. I made a big, healthy pot of beans—food to tide over hard times, food to share, hearth food.

Then I forced myself to eat almost nothing else but beans and veggies for the next four days. I got rid of all my crackers, cookies, chocolate, cereal and wholegrain bagels and kept the rice around only for my kids.

I sat at the kitchen table forcing in bites of the bland beans, fighting back tears and feeling ever more exhausted and then oddly dizzy. In fact, I found that every time I had a bowl of beans, I felt dizzy, tired and even a bit sick for several hours.

That was when they told me the beans were spiking my glucose. Beans! It is one thing to have to cut out ice cream and chocolate and bread. But beans?!?

Okay, the doctors didn’t actually tell me to cut out beans. They just nodded sympathetically. This is the disease. You can struggle and make it a little better. But you can’t win. You’ll never win until you’re dead. The dead don’t have to eat.

And every time I sat down at my altar to call to my gods and my ancestors I felt their disappointment, rather than support. I drew Tarot cards and got Death, three times in as many days. I rarely get the Death card, at least before now. Was that supposed to be literal? I felt so tired I thought I might as well just curl up and die.

But Death in the Tarot is almost never about actually dying. It’s about the urgent and unstoppable need for deep and irrevocable change, often a leap into darkness. It was the time of Samhain when Death is a presence and we draw our ancestors near. I tried to listen. I stayed watchful for signs.

Addiction can be broken

I ran across a link to a study… and another study and another. In a large controlled trial a group of obese adults was divided into two groups. One was given a low fat-diet and the other a low-carbohydrate diet. Both lost weight, but the low carbohydrate-dieters lost three times as much. And their blood glucose stabilized.

Not every study is like that. I found several big ones that claimed low-carbohydrate diets aren’t that great or come with health risks. But without fail these studies mysteriously excluded everyone with diabetes from their data and included, as “low-carb dieters,” those who eat massive amounts of fatty junk food as well as meat.

It seems that being “allergic to sugar,” which is what some doctors now call the disease, disqualifies you from being a good candidate for a diet that really does take all the sugar out, even the somewhat disguised sugar in beans and whole grains and carrots. And if you want to prove something is harmful, it is best to ensure a large proportion of those doing it wrong in your study.

My dreams changed. I saw the settlement by the sea, one, then another and another. Back that many generations each of us has thousands of ancestors. My ancestors came from all across northern Europe. I saw them by their fires, cooking and eating, and in the waves of the sea dragging a whale ashore.

I also saw my guide, whom I met two years ago during an intense week of ancestral journeying just before Covid hit. I thought I had a guide who was a fisherman with a spear because my ancestors have been such deluded colonialists in recent centuries that that was just how far one had to go back to find someone of good honor. Now I realize there may well have been another reason I got him.

OK, if that is what must be, I will listen.

I stopped eating sweets, grains, even whole grains, potatoes, beans… the lot. I made curry with coconut, yams, veggies and a little chicken and gave my kids all the rice. I ate a lot of salad and little bits of meat. I had only unsweetened applesauce and a bit of dried fruit. And after a few days that applesauce tasted so sweet I had to check three times that it was really unsweetened.

But my body crashed harder than ever before. For four days, I thought I either had the flu, breakout Covid or uncontrollable diabetes. Once I drank a few swallows of carrot juice and the dizzy, sick feeling I’d had with the beans came roaring back. I didn’t even crave sweets. The thought of sweet foods made me nauseous.

But I remembered how I used to eat a sweet or carbohydrate-heavy snack every time my energy flagged in the afternoons, like other people drink coffee. No wonder I was sick. This was withdrawal. Allergy? Maybe addiction is the better term.

Then, on the fifth day I got up out of bed, and I felt better than I’d felt in years. But I was also hungry all the time. I kept healthy snacks in my pockets and tried to eat small portions. I still chose low-fat options out of habit, even though some of my reading was telling me that wasn’t going to help.

Finally, I found studies showing that the changes I had made were still not enough. Yes, that would keep me hanging on a little longer. It had taken my BG down ten points. I’d lost five pounds in ten days. But it was hard, miserable, hungry and still a losing battle, if a slow one.

By now, I was beginning to see sense in my dreams. My body had rebelled against the sweet and starchy modern foods or had simply been beaten down by them. Looking back, I can see the chronic exhaustion and rising health crises of the past fifteen years in context. I always ate something a bit sweet to boost my energy temporarily, but it was like an addict taking a little hit of a deadly drug to stave off withdrawal.

And now I can’t handle even the smallest doses without consequences.

The internet being what it is today, I soon found out that I am far from the only one, and there are growing numbers of people realizing the incompatibility between our bodies and modern food.

I’m still not sure it is everyone’s body though. When I was in Nepal, living temporarily in small mountain villages, the people there seemed amazingly healthy—though very small and stocky in stature. They ate plates of brown rice and spiced lentils with a tiny dab of boiled greens and the occasional sliver of chicken meat or boiled egg. That was all. And they were powerhouses of energy and strength..

But after ten days of it, I was trembling and bloated. It may be that different genetic legacies call for different approaches to bodily fuel.

Rebirth of the fire

There is a spectrum of regimens out there for those who find themselves “allergic to sugar” like me—everywhere from the carnivore (nothing but meat, eggs and dairy) to keto to paleo and real low-carb diets. Three weeks ago, I started on a keto plan specifically designed to reverse diabetes and protect eyesight.

Keto is short for ketosis, a metabolic switch where the human body gives up relying on sugars (i.e. carbohydrates, all of them end up as sugar in the end) and switches over to burning fat for fuel. It’s such a fundamental biological shift, and yet it is something our bodies have adapted to do over hundreds of thousands of years. And it is likely the state most of my northern ancestors lived with most of the time.

I once scoffed at such “diets,” suspecting that they were merely fads like the fruitarian diet or being gluten-free without any medical reason. I had read and heard a hundred times that the only way to lose weight is to cut calories. “Calories in, calories out.” So, exercise helps some too. And oh yeah, eat low-fat everything, because fat is… well, fat.

But pushed to extremes (and sick enough days to actually lie on my back and do research), it turns out I will try anything to get my energy back. I had already been doing meditations and energy working every day for more than a year to regain the life force and strength I lost sometime in my thirties.

It’s been three weeks now, since I’ve limited net carbohydrates to 22 grams per day. That’s seriously not very much. Today it’s 7 grams from two small super-low-carb peanut butter/cocoa waffles made with almond flower, half a gram from a spoonful of greek yogurt on top, 2 grams from a third of an artichoke, 3.5 grams from a spinach and tomato salad, 5.5 grams from a small piece of sugar-free avocado cheesecake and 3.5 grams from a bowl of chicken broth with moderate amounts of pumpkin and coconut milk in it.

That doesn’t include all the butter, coconut oil, olive oil, hard cheese and hemp hearts I dump on whenever I reasonably can because they don’t have “carbs” in them and they do have the healthy fats my body is supposedly now burning for actual fuel. It also doesn’t mention a large portion of elk sausage my brother shot, dragged, hung, skinned, dismembered, ground, spiced and froze last year. Elk meat doesn’t have any carbs either.

People tend to give me pitying pats and murmurs when there are things like muffins, pumpkin pie and pizza around. But unlike the previous more traditional diet, I don’t feel too hungry, just “ready to eat” by the time meals come around. I often feel quite full, in fact. I don’t have to carry snacks around. I actually really like some of the food I get to eat. (The elk sausage is fantastic, as is the avocado cheesecake and spinach salad. The super-low-carb waffles still need some fine-tuning.)

But best of all, I feel better than I ever dreamed I would again. I’m losing all kinds of minor ailments I used to battle constantly, like digestive trouble, foot fungus, hangnails, canker sores and restless sleep. Most of all, I have energy. I’m only tired when I’ve been run ragged by kids, bureaucracy, cooking, cleaning and hiking, and then fall into bed at night.

By the way, my blood sugar is down in the normal range, after skipping right over the pre-diabetic range and my cholesterol is dipping back into the healthy range as well. I’ve also incidentally lost another ten pounds and look like I did about ten years ago.

The hard part isn’t feeling deprived or having to fight cravings really. I sometimes think about the foods I can’t eat and wonder if I will really never eat a piece of my mom’s delicious raw-honey baklava again… for the rest of my life. Ouch! It’s the finality that hurts, not so much wanting to have some right this minute.

I have to say that the hardest part is all the cooking. There are keto packaged foods out there, but half of them are scams and actually fairly high in carbs or terrible additives. And all of them are ridiculously expensive. The only way I’m eating waffles and cheesecake is that I studied them, scrambled for strange ingredients and mad them like kitchen science experiments, and it’s a whole different kind of cooking, not to mention shopping. Most of the necessary ingredients are either things I’ve never used before or full-fat varieties that are almost impossible to find today.

The food is also often a bit too “weird” for my kids, so I have to cook separate meals in smaller sizes. It’s all new and coupled with the onslaught of school, health care and bureaucratic demands, I’m frazzled… but in a generally good mood for the first time in a long time.

My ancestors and my gods seem to approve. I get Tarot cards for victory and fulfillment on a regular basis with a few of the stern masters of structure and rules, such as the Emperor and the King of Pentacles, thrown in to keep me on the straight and narrow. I can feel the presence of the ancients and with my regained health I can walk in the mountains again.

What does the Pagan value of hospitality mean in practice?

I know. I know. There is nothing—absolutely nothing, including respect for the earth—that we are allowed to say actually connects modern Pagans together in terms of a value or belief. BUT many European Pagan traditions do explicitly claim “hospitality” as a virtue, requirement or tenant.

Moreover, I have lived in traditional communities all over the world and have never encountered one where hospitality was not a lived value, a primary requirement of ethics and a point of honor.

In remote villages in Bangladesh, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Nepal, the Ukraine and Zimbabwe, I was told that their people live by “the law of hospitality” usually in so many words in their local languages.

Some of these communities, the villages where I lived for a time in Ecuador and Nepal, for instance, were proudly indigenous in their spiritual beliefs and they pointed to the law of hospitality as an important marker of that and something they believed distinguished them from people in non-traditional, industrial society. The other places had a thin Christian or Muslim venire with clear signs of pre-Abrahamic traditions showing through.

Creative Commons image by www napavalley com

We may not call these cultures “Pagan” today because that term is generally only applied to cultures that have asked for the label, primarily modern European Pagans who wish to practice either a reclaimed ancestral tradition or an earth-centered path. But even a rudimentary exploration of anthropology will show that these cultures and ancient European Pagan cultures have a lot in common.

In fact, one of the ways Europeans can successfully follow a pre-Christian ancestral path is to observe and learn from indigenous cultures. This doesn’t mean culturally appropriating their technologies, terms and rituals, but rather looking for the context and how indigenous communities relate spirituality to ethics and to daily life. These things don’t tend to change that much between a remote village in Ecuador and a remote village in Nepal, so it is likely that ancient Europeans were also pretty similar in these matters of ethics and practical spirituality.

That’s all to say that I’m going to make the statement here that hospitality is generally a Pagan value, whether the nitpickers like it or not.

Whew! Having established that I am even allowed to discuss hospitality as an ethical requirement, I am interested in what it means in practical terms, from interpersonal interactions to politics.

Stories tell us that among the ancient Scandinavians rules of hospitality were truly observed. A request for hospitality could not be lightly declined and it was considered a spiritual and moral failing if necessity or danger forced one to refuse. It was shameful if one didn’t have food and drink to offer and not offering what one had was unthinkable.

This was also my experience of being a visitor in indigenous communities. I was invariably given more and better food than my hosts, even in situations where they were clearly suffering nutritionally. I was always careful to be quiet and reserved until I learned the requirements for guest behavior, which are so often part of hospitality rules and can vary from place to place. I always brought gifts but rarely offered to directly pay my hosts unless I could be sure this wouldn’t give offense.

In one memorable encounter, I showed up in a small village at the end of a dirt road in Nepal with a letter from my Nepali friend asking his cousin to help me hike to the even more remote village where his wife and children lived. My friend was an immigrant in the West and we had met through a network of immigrants in a country where I was also a foreigner.

We’d been through some intense things together, including an incident when I had to bandage his serious wounds because his immigration status wouldn’t allow him to go to a hospital without ending up in deportation proceedings. We were tied by strong bonds and those bonds then extended to his cousin by the rules of hospitality.

I was dismayed to see a look of shock and even horror cross the face of the cousin when I finally reached him and handed him the letter from my friend. I could tell something was wrong, but he quickly recovered and greeted me with all due respect. At first, I worried that our friendship broke some rule about relationships between women and men in their culture or some such.

But later the cousin pulled me into a private corner and laid out the problem. which put two of his most important spiritual laws in conflict—hospitality and the rules of ritual.

His toddler was sick and this was connected in traditional belief to the fact that the family had neglected rituals to purify and ward their newly constructed house. A local elder and ritual leader had been called in from a distant village to conduct the necessary rituals. The elder was to leave the next day and the rituals could not be put off. Their tradition had a hard and fast rule that anyone who would sleep in the house that night must participate in the ritual.

From the perspective of my friend’s cousin, this presented a terrible dilemma. He had met only a few western foreigners and they were all Christian missionaries who viewed traditional rituals with disgust and disrespect. He felt pretty sure that I would be the same and this had caused him great discomfort because he had to decide whether or not to postpone the ritual or refuse hospitality to me.

Given that the health and safety of his family was at stake, he had finally decided to do the latter.

Thankfully, he addressed the issue with me openly and forthrightly, and so I was able to put his fears to rest and attend a traditional ritual that few foreigners would be privileged to join. It was one of the most intense and mind-opening events of my twenties, but I have written about the ritual itself elsewhere.

One of the most important concepts I gained from that experience wasn’t in the ritual at all though. It was the relationship of hospitality to ethical and spiritual rules in that culture. Clearly hospitality was a high virtue, but not the highest priority to which all others had to give way. My host was clearly distraught by the idea of refusing hospitality but also prepared to do so in order to obey the rules of the ritual leader and protect his family.

I have thought a lot about the laws of hospitality and how they should apply to my own conduct since then.

Eleven years ago, I was on my way an orphanage to meet my three-month-old daughter for the first time and a meth addict accosted me in a parking lot and begged for money. I was carrying the food to make lunches for my husband and me on the road. I could have stopped and handed her some of the food. We could have done with a little less and the law of hospitality tells me that I should have.

But the moment was among the most intense and emotionally fraught of my life and I instinctively recoiled from her face, so ravaged by the poisons of methamphetamines. And I fled. The woman was not threatening me, only begging. She would likely have used any money I gave her for drugs or alcohol rather than for food, so far gone was her addiction. But I had food—that most essential element of hospitality—right in my hands.

It is one of the most potent regrets of my life that I failed to give hospitality in that stressful moment. I have given it at many other times, but it is the time I didn’t that I remember.

Being a harried mother, I have also kept food for my children’s dinner hidden so that I wouldn’t have to make a whole new meal when guests showed up and I served only drinks and snacks. But these were not hungry guests, just people who didn’t have young kids or an understanding of mother’s work and exhaustion. I am not an extreme or perfect follower of the law of hospitality.

Still the law of hospitality extends far beyond this personal level. Countries where hospitality is expressed as a national value take in far more refugees than others. It is a common myth in North America and Western Europe that these wealthy nations take in more refugees than other countries, but it is far from true. Under the current definition, the top ten nations in terms of numbers of refugees accepted all happen to be countries with a majority Muslim population.

A refugee is defined as a person who has been forced to flee their home due to violence or persecution. Under current definitions utter lawlessness and systemic poverty left in the wake of colonial resource stripping doesn’t even count, though the closed attitude of wealthy nations would be even more apparent if it did.

Hospitality is an often cited tenant of Muslim culture and I have seen it in action in Kazakhstan and Bangladesh. As a young traveler without a clue, I showed up unannounced in out of the way places in both countries and was initially greeted with suspicion bordering on hostility.

But as soon as locals determined that I was a lost and nearly penniless kid rather than a threat, I was swept up in the culture of hospitality, treated as an honored guest, given a seat beside the head of household and provided with everything I might need.

It is apparently need that the law of hospitality responds to, not merely the state of being an outsider. The Muslim, refugee-accepting countries are not notoriously welcoming to everyone, just to those in dire straits.

I wonder how our Pagan ancestors might have seen modern politics and how they might view something like a refugee crisis. There is a strong current of isolationism among modern Pagans, even among those who claim to honor the law of hospitality. They tell me that hospitality means we should give food to a person who is right in front of us, that we shouldn’t fight with a guest and other things that are reminiscent of romanticized historical movies.

They say our ancestors never intended it to mean taking in hungry and desperate strangers. But that isn’t actually how the law of hospitality works in places where it is still a living tradition.

Looking at the evidence, I must say that hospitality should be a broad Pagan value. And hospitality means accepting and helping refugees and thus being Pagan should necessitate that we are in favor of policies that help refugees, whether they are fleeing violence, persecution or starvation.

Conversely, it does not mean that we have to be in favor of accepting every immigrant or that we are supposed to play doormat or not defend our homes, tribe or nation from a threat. While indigenous communities I visited seemed to be less suspicious than Muslim communities, this may well have to do with politics more than with the underlying cultures.

Certainly, it is not always easy to determine whether a person is a traveler minding their own business, a desperate refugee or someone bent on exploitation, distraction or even violence. Our Pagan ancestors had the same problem. This did not mean they didn’t consider hospitality to be a requirement of an honorable person. It just meant and still means that we have to use our intuition and consider it to bring dishonor if we guess wrong and refuse hospitality to a friend or to someone in need.

Honoring names and their stories

I find the rituals and traditions around names in different cultures fascinating. I have two countries and as a result two very different cultures concerning names.

In the Czech Republic, where I live and where my children were named, there is a deeply ingrained tradition governing first names. Each day of the calendar year is associated with a different first name and thus each person has a “name day.”

In the days before Facebook, it was assumed that most of your friends and acquaintances wouldn’t know your birthday, so people gave you small gifts on your name day instead. Birthdays were primarily a family affair or something for small children.

Creative Commons image via Pixabay

It sounds nice. But there is always a catch to seemingly quaint cultural rituals. In order to keep this system functional, there is a very limited number of names one can give to one’s child. You see, over time many of the names on the calendar went out of style (Bonifac, for instance) but a day (May 14, in that case) still belongs to that name because of historical honor and tradition. In actual fact there are scarcely two dozen reasonably possible modern names in the calendar for each gender.

And if you think kids have to endure names like Suzy G. and Suzy H. in classrooms in the English speaking world, you should see the Czech classrooms where six little girls are named Eliška and five little boys are named Honza.

In the United States on the other hand, the current trend is toward the most creative names possible. Often a celebrity will name their child some mixed up combo that sounds catchy and the next few years will see hordes of little Kiaras and Blazes emerging from maternity wards.

When I was a kid it was mostly only hippies who engaged in this creative art of naming children. Each sub-culture had their standbys, often no more diverse than the Czechs. And one could tell a lot about a person’s background by their name, and that most definitely included us flowery-named hippie kids.

But now half the kids in America have names that would have indicated hippie parents a generation ago and some kids have truly bizarre names, such as little Abcde, who had an unfortunate encounter with airline personnel last year.

I’ll admit that I err on the side of freedom and creativity in the Great Name Debate. Sure, I got teased for my name as a kid. (Hint: I was called “air-head” a lot.) But that was definitely the least of my bullying worries, even though my name was distinctly strange for the conservative, small-town milieu of the 1980s. My name was not the biggest problem by a long shot. My clothes, my disability, my family, my homemade lunch, my glasses, my opinions, my big mouth, my grades… in short, everything else was a much bigger problem.

So, I proffer my own criteria for a good baby name—it should have a story.

That simple. It is great if that story is that you are named after Great Aunt Elizabeth who traveled the world and helped people. It’s fine if you are named John, because a whole string of your ancestors were. It’s also fine if you’re named Michael because none of your ancestors were and your parents were rebellious and loved a hard rock singer named Mike-something. But a name should have a story—good, bad or ugly,

Stories are important. And if that story hurts, you should be allowed to choose a new name and a new story.

My given name is Arie Anna Meadowlark. No kidding. Arie was for an old lady in the Foxfire books which my parents liked. Anna was my undercover, fool-the-muggles (i.e. non-hippies, no we didn’t really have muggles back then but might as well have) name. And Meadowlark was my mandatory family nature name, reflecting the mountain meadows around the place where I was born.

I love this. I don’t go around touting Meadowlark as my name in all contexts, and I have spent my entire life either correcting people’s pronunciation of “Arie” or more recently explaining abashedly that I answer to about six different variants with no hard feelings. Complicated names can be a bit irritating, but the fact of having a story makes up for it.

Creative Commons image via Pixabay

Do I like the story my parents laid on me this way? Well, I’ve never actually read the Foxfire books. I never really used Anna as my name on job applications as envisioned by my parents. And Meadowlark doesn’t fit on the vast majority of bureaucratic forms the world over, leaving me with many complicated discussions in far flung offices with grumpy officials. But yeah, I like that my name has a story and I don’t mind the one I got.

My children’s names have stories. They each mean something. And moreover they each had to be fought for because in the Czech system neither of them fit neatly enough into the calendar. I had to appeal, pay heavy fees and go head to head with the national linguist and name czar of the Czech Republic to get only mildly creative names that sound both vaguely Czech and moderately American, while being meaningful to their Romani heritage.

In case I didn’t have enough name troubles, now that I am setting out on another trans-Atlantic voyage with my children after three years on one continent, I find myself assembling the papers to prove that they are in fact my children, given that we don’t have the same last name.

Why not?

I am very much still married to their father. But back when I was 24 and making the decision about what to put on my marriage certificate, I was two things a lot more than I was a wife. I was a feminist and a journalist.

The feminist in me was outraged by the injustice that women are supposed to change their names and carry around documentation proving they have a right to their birth certificate and educational qualifications for the rest of their lives while men don’t have to. I also thought my family history and pride was every bit as important as his.

I magnanimously offered him my last name, which frankly would have been a more practical option, since Blažková (the ový ending is mandatory for women in Czech) is not an easy last name to be saddled with in the English speaking world, whereas Farnam would have been fine for a man in Czechia or America. But of course, he refused.

In the end, it was my journalism and writing career that made changing my name most difficult. Certainly, plenty of writers use pen names but it is more of a hassle than most people think. I did not want to change my name just as I was earning “a name for myself” as an international stringer. And I didn’t even want to clue colleagues in to the fact that I was married or even a woman on some long-distance jobs. There were (and still are) reasons, especially in a profession like international journalism to keep these details to one’s self.

So, I kept my name, which means that when I go through customs with my kids, we’ll each have different last names from the American perspective, because Czech male and female last names are different, so not even my kids entirely share a last name. My son is a Blažek and my daughter is a Blažková.

And again, I don’t entirely mind. There are some prickly practical issues with all of this naming confusion. But they also give us a story. If a person who did not know us looked at our names, there would be many mysteries but also some things that would give clues about who we truly are—a cross-cultural, bilingual, nature-loving family. And that is how it should be. Our names give clues to our souls.

Plenty of people today change their names, either officially or unofficially to take on a particular image. I find that this happens a lot in Pagan circles and in activism. Pagans take on spiritual or magical names which are all designed to be mystical, powerful and glorious. In the end, they fall into highly predictable patterns and give any experienced person some insight into which tradition the owner of the name might belong to and what their interests are.

The same goes with activist or artist names. They tell a chosen story, something we want to portray about ourselves. Just as my family’s names hint at things crucial to our identities, the names chosen for a particular path offer clues to the soul.

Although I am very active both as a Pagan and as an activist, I have never even really been tempted to choose a magical, spiritual or activist name. I’ve been asked why not on quite a few occasions. Maybe it is that I feel my name already has a story. It already has power through that story.

If people either don’t know or don’t care for the story their given name tells, then that might be a good reason to choose a new one. Like the affirmations of new age psychology (which does work surprisingly well on most people, like it or not) a new name with a new story can really change a person’s life.

I won’t ever make fun of anyone’s name. I don’t care how corny or contrived it may sound. If you chose it, you had reasons. If you didn’t choose it, you certainly shouldn’t be mocked for it.

I know many people will point out some extraordinarily silly examples of modern names to try to tempt me to laughter. My conviction still stands. Those strange names particularly have a story, even if it is just a story about immature and unprepared parents. Stories matter and their people matter. I honor names, their stories and their people.

Not all giants are ancient

There is something in Pagan cyberspace that has been niggling at me for awhile like one of those little parasitic worms that got under my kid’s skin a couple of summers ago after she went dipping in a scummy pond.

That is the fad of dissing hippies.

OK, I’m ready to duck already .But this has got to be said. Gerald Gardener may or may not have started a modern witchcraft tradition and a lot of other big names contributed to the nice wave of Pagan-friendly public sentiment and popular trendiness we now enjoy, but without the counterculture movement, the New Age, and yes, the hippies, we would not be experiencing a western world in which Pagan spirituality and culture are both widespread and generally well-accepted.

Image via Pixabay

Without the cultural developments of these movements that are so widely ridiculed among Pagans, Wicca would most likely have remained a tiny fringe interest of a few wealthy eccentrics. Traditional witchcraft would have stayed where it was for centuries, losing ground and scrambling to preserve shreds of knowledge. And non-Hindu, non-indigenous Paganism would have remained in the history books.

Don’t get me wrong. I am as irritated by “fluffy bunny” New Age platitudes as any hard polytheist.. Yes, we intersect with the New Age sometimes and it can cause a bit of friction and some eye-rolling on both sides. But let’s face it. Other movements have impacts on the social environment we live in and even on us.

The New Age not only sheltered a lot of early Pagan, Wiccan and witchcraft books and tools in bookstores for several decades. It is only in the past twenty years that a meaningful line could be drawn between modern Paganism and the New Age.

I will grant that New Age spirituality has little directly in common with modern Paganism outside of a few visual trappings. But many people came to Paganism through contact with New Age authors, stores, publications and events.

Beyond the New Age movement, the wider counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s had an even deeper impact on society, opening up the possibility of acceptance and widespread information on small and growing spiritual movements of all kinds, including ours.

That brings me to my own background. My parents and most of the adults I grew up around were on the rural, financially poor fringes of both the counterculture and the New Age. They didn’t have the connections, wealth or geographic positioning to be part of early Wicca and other more recognized Neopagan groups. Instead they were what are today (usually disparagingly) called hippies.

Specifically, my father and mother arrived on a rocky piece of land in Northeastern Oregon shortly before I was born with little more than a broken down old truck to their name. There was a weathered one-room school house on the property, which they shared with another family—until it burned to the ground one November night, while they were out, due to a faulty DYI woodstove.

My folks were left in the snow with my two-year-old brother and my mom pregnant with me. My dad built our first house—often referred to as a “shack” by outsiders—around and over the old truck, which no longer ran. That’s where I grew up, learning to grow food, pay attention to natural cycles and call the quarters on important occasions.

We weren’t Pagan in the ways most widely recognized today, but we were in the ways that actually matter. And we were not alone.

As I traveled around the world as a journalist, I met countless adult children of the hippies—some better adjusted than others. Some adopted their parents’ values and some rejected them outright. But they all share a new kind of cultural assumption of fluidity and diversity—whether they like it or not—that has fostered the modern Pagan and witchcraft movements.

Why do I care if Pagans make fun of hippie names or other symbols? Can’t I just take a joke? Lighten up?

It bothers me. Maybe it is because it is part of my own roots. Maybe I’m not pure enough in my rejection of all things New Age. But there is something here Pagans should pay attention to. These too are our ancestors. They are the ones on whose shoulders we stand. Not all giants are ancient or even very tall. They sometimes just muddled through harsher times so that we can have what we have today.

Think on it the next time you laugh at a hippie name or a fluffy bunny chant.

A circle of ancestors: Truths from deep in the well

Dark comes fast amid the trees, turning the colors of drying blood, red to brown. It's that time of the year, when thoughts turn to the past and to ancestors.

I put up an ancestor altar for Samhain / the Day of All Souls. There is one significant new addition to my beloved dead this year, a sweet voice I can still hear in my memory. But also over the past year, I have learned a few tidbits about how at least one of my ancestors was involved in a KKK group in Oregon. And some of the best photographs I have are from a more recent ancestor who was known to be both sexist and racist, along with having some better qualities. 

What does honoring the ancestors mean? Does it mean that you can take credit and say thank you if you don't know anything negative about your ancestors? Does it mean you ignore the ancestors you feel ashamed of and celebrate only those who did good things, like my great aunt who saved many lives as a humanitarian worker in the Philippines?

The past few weeks have been particularly hard on my family with a lot of community pressure and internal struggle for balance. There are times when I rethink the old belief that the universe gives us only as much hardship as our spirits can bear. It seems like the universe has been cutting it awfully close these days.

And sometimes I wonder. Maybe my philosophy is wrong. Maybe this is just bad karma from my prejudiced ancestors. 

Should I honor my ancestors?

I think of the well at our old family homestead. Once when I was fifteen, I was lowered into it to help with repairs because my slim body was a better fit for the narrow well than my father's broad-shouldered frame.

My father told me not to look up because sand and dirt could fall into my eyes as he lowered me on a rope 60 feet into the earth. I obediently kept my eyes down. With the headlamp I was wearing I got a good look at the rows upon rows of hand lain rough field stone that was used to reinforce the walls of the well. 

To this day that is one of the most respect-inspiring sights I've ever seen. I knew the rocky, clay soil of our remote Eastern Oregon ridge intimately. I had helped grow food in it since early childhood. I'd built forts and hideouts in its rugged outcrops. I had also dug for camas root in the meadows with precious little success, bruising both hands and tools on the many rough gray rocks in the clay. With my significant vision impairment, I had learned to move carefully among the jagged boulders on the windswept top of the ridge. This was not a land that lent itself to digging. 

And yet someone dug a 60 foot shaft by hand in the age before machinery and lined it with neat rows of perfectly fitted field stones. These were not the ancestors of my blood but they were in every fundamental way the ancestors of my our hearth. 

The winter my mother was pregnant with me, my family shared a tiny cabin with another family. Four adults and three small children in what was once a one-room schoolhouse. In November, they were out one night when the cabin burned to the ground, due to a faulty wood stove. My father moved my pregnant mother and two-year-old brother a quarter mile up the hollow to the moderately flat spot where this well stood. 

At the time there was nothing else there. Just the well, left by nameless settlers amid the snow and mud. My father parked an old, broken-down truck next to the well and spent the winter building a new cabin around it. I was born in the loft of that cabin, built over the roof of the old truck the next April.

This is my history and the significance of that well to me. Without a well, the dry Eastern Oregon ridges are unlivable. I knew people who had to haul water, and even as a small child, I remember having a deep gratitude for that well.

And yet...

My parents may have purchased that land fair and square, but there were--as it turned out--other traces of human habitation on it. My brother found Native American artifacts in an embankment in one of the camas meadows. And there is a circle of ancient mounds on the ridge that is too regular to be natural. 

The settlers who built the well or those who came before them--someone--stole this land, and while the road there still isn't paved, they made it possible for us to live there. 

This is what I think of every Samhain. My awe and respect for the lives endured by the ancestors of our land, hearth and family, as well as great sorrow and pain for the wrongs that can be remembered if one is willing to look. 

While I was down at the bottom of that well at the age of fifteen, I laid some insulation cloth as my father instructed. Then just before giving the proscribed tug on the rope to signal, so that I would be pulled up, I cautiously turned my head and looked up. 

I have rarely felt such raw terror in my life. At first I thought something was wrong with my vision, not out of the question given my eye condition. The top of the well was gone or else it was night and the full moon had risen. But I couldn't possibly have been down there that long, I thought frantically.

Then the truth crashed in on my consciousness. That distant round moon of light WAS the opening of the well. I had not thought about how far down 60 feet is or how closed in and vulnerable a soft human body would be that far under the earth in a shaft so narrow that I had to turn around carefully. Now that I saw the distant opening, the realization was terrifying. 

I felt my throat constrict and I fought a wave of panic that threatened to send me into senseless screaming and thrashing. My father had told me to be still and not make any loud noises. He was afraid I might dislodge stones in the well and be injured. Getting out of that well calmly was probably the first truly brave thing I ever did. 

That well was our lifeline and also an artifact of one of the worst genocides in human history. I was the great granddaughter of immigrants and settlers. I then left that land and went far across the ocean to another country, where I am a first generation immigrant and now a new citizen. I married a man who can trace the names of his ancestors back 600 years on the same little farm in the swampy land of South Bohemia. And our children are adopted from decimated families who were among a handful of Romani (Gypsies) who survived both slavery and the Holocaust in central Europe. 

Samhain is far from simple around here. 

In the end, I cannot make justice or peace for history. I can only set out the photographs, the names and the symbols of those people who came before, those who gave us life, sustenance, hope and a chance to make our own mark. 

The land of my childhood sustained me and gave me a body with health and resilience for which I am often grateful.  As a child I learned to call the quarters in the Native American way and I studied the Teutonic runes. Blood says I have no claim to the former and history has tainted the latter. There is truth in that. 

There is also truth in gratitude, in respect and in remembering. I will not claim stolen heritage. And yet, I cannot shake the feeling of kindness and peace that comes from the earth at the old homestead. I feel sorrow for the people forced to leave that land, but I do not sense that they hate me. I feel a circle of presence at Samhain, all the ancestors of my childhood--of family, of land and of hearth--and all the ancestors of my present, those of my husband, so well documented, and those of my children, unknown except for the painful history that we know rolled over them in one way or another. 

No, I do not feel an idealized warmth from all the ancestors, a circle of support and blessing. I do feel intense currents of sorrow, pain, shame and anger, interspersed with love and hope. But they are all there. They are not absent.

They are all in the circle at this time of year, no matter what baggage they may carry. And I feel called to honor them, not just on this one day but also by living in a way that gives honor for the gifts they each gave me. When the burdens seem too great, I want to always remember this. I humbly accept this life. I acknowledge what came before.

Remembering a matriarch

“Eh, girl, you’ll never find it that way,” the voice in my memory is as clear as if she’s standing right behind me.

In the days after Ostara, my beloved, chain-smoking mother-in-law died… essentially from the flu. I shake my head in sorrow yet again and set my teeth. It’s 2016, but we might as well be living in 1918 for all the good the antibiotics did.

Creative Commons image by xlibber of Flickr.com

She wasn’t that old, only 72. She washed windows earlier on the day she went into a coma from the sudden onset of opportunistic pneumonia, though she was already sick. She was the picture of a rugged farm matriarch. She always said she’d stop when she was dead, and she was right. 

She ruled her kitchen with an iron fist. She cooked all the meals and this is the first time I’ve ever been allowed to rattle around her kitchen, the first major holiday we’ve spent in her home without her. It’s the eve of Beltane and I’m trying to cook spaghetti for a house full of Czech uncles and cousins. 

I know she used to keep a lot of kitchen utensils in the front hall closet because her kitchen looks perfect and thus it has a sorry lack of storage space. I can’t find the strainer… or the cheese grater anywhere. And there are some in the family who are gleefully waiting for me to fail simply to prove one point or another.

It doesn’t help that I’m legally blind. Marie knew that well enough but she never made much of it. “Eh, girl, you go on and get the wood. I’ll get lunch.”

I poke through shelves full of the parts of her many mysterious kitchen appliances. She never showed me where anything was because she didn’t let anyone else fuss with her kitchen, least of all me. I was good with entertaining hordes of little cousins and hauling wood and collecting medicinal herbs. We both agreed I wasn’t that good in the kitchen. 

 She didn’t live to see me turn forty, but only by a few days. That never stopped her from calling me “girl,” not in any derogatory way. To her it was simply a statement of the difference in our generation. “Eh, girl, you’ve got so much energy. Have fun while you’re young.”

Creative Commons image by mylifeclicks1023 of Flickr.com

I can hear the men tramping on the veranda. And I don’t have anything to strain the noodles with. “Damn it, Marie, you could at least give me some ouija board sort of sign, couldn’t you?” This is a very patriarchal culture and there will be overt criticism if I don’t have lunch together properly. 

“Eh, girl.” I can hear her hoarse, ironic laugh too now. “It doesn’t work like that. I’m sorry to leave you like this.”

I’m suddenly filled with remorse, as if she were really there and I was cruelly criticizing her for not leaving her kitchen in better order. “I’m sorry, Marie. You did plenty,” I think fiercely. “You did so much for us and you left us well set up. We’ll manage. You did your part.”

The men and children spill into the hallway and the next thirty minutes are chaos. Yes, I get hassled for not having it ready. Then I get criticized for getting crumbs of cheese on the floor from using a makeshift cheese grater. We never did find the real one. 

Later I sit with the other women who have married into the family by the Beltane bonfire, watching the men of the village, including all of our husbands, raising a 50-foot maypole by hand. It’s hazardous. The damn thing could fall on them. It’s a full grown pine log after all. 

But I’m still very glad this village has hung onto the old traditions. Few places have their history so well rooted. My husband’s family farm dates back six hundred years. The long stone farmhouse itself is four-hundred years old, the walls as thick as those of a small castle. Marie used to tell me stories she had learned from the village chronicles about her husband’s family, not so much about her own. She took on many of the ideas of this patriarchal society, where a mother’s history is less important.

But they wanted to put her ashes in the Catholic church yard in the next village, with her husband’s ancestors. My husband refused and stood alone against the other men over it. She had told him she wanted her ashes buried in an urn in a beautiful place between two ponds under a great oak tree at the back of the farm, not in the yard of a church she’d never put any stock in. 

I watch the flames of the Beltane fire lick at the ragged skirts on the figure of a wood and straw “witch” the villagers made. This is also tradition. Beltane is not called Beltane here but “witch burning night.” Some say it is the crone of winter that they burn and that it is not an anti-Pagan tradition. Most of the villagers are no more Catholic than Marie was. But still the sight sends a shiver up my spine, a sharp contrast to the warm Beltane evening full of live music and revelry. 

Creative Commons image by Stewart Black

“Eh, girl, you and your earth-mother theories. Are you going to forget to pick the plantain on the hill before the mowing starts?” 

I was worried because she wouldn’t be here to remind me which herbs were ready when I visited the village. I am good with medicinal herbs if I know they’re there. But initially finding them is hard when you’re almost blind. But it seems like my memories of her will help some.

It is a wonderful Beltane all around. I’m not actually the only woman who cooks and though there is some criticism, I come through pretty well. I eat too many goodies and feel a bit guilty with that instinctive shame this society has taught me.

“Eh, girl, eat!” The most iconic statement from Marie yet. “When the fat are thin, the thin will be cold in the ground.”

She was roughly barrel-shaped herself but more muscle than anything. The same flu that killed her did make me get thinner than I’d been in quite a while. But not being thin hadn’t helped her. The cigarettes played a role. Everyone knows that but few say it.

The things we let society do to us. 

I lie down in one of the many beds late at night and whisper goodnight to the ancestors in the walls made of field stones. 

Then I think of all the cooking to deal with in the morning. “I’ll keep the hearth warm, Marie. I’m not the matriarch you were and don’t want to be, but at least on Beltane, I’ll make sure your people are fed.”