{"id":25268,"date":"2026-04-27T20:22:44","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T20:22:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/?p=25268"},"modified":"2026-05-09T05:22:40","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T05:22:40","slug":"argsctmf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/2026\/04\/27\/argsctmf\/","title":{"rendered":"A rearview glimpse – seeking clarity to move forward"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Hansel and Gretel<\/h3><\/div>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Some stories only reveal their true shape when you return to them with older eyes. Hansel and Gretel is one of those stories for me.<\/span><\/p>

As a child, I inherited the faith\u2011polished version: the witch as hellfire, the oven as punishment, the whole thing a morality play about obedience. But the older bones tell something different \u2014 something older than Christianity, older than the famine, older than the moralizing.<\/span><\/p>

The witch figure likely traces back to Baba Yaga, a Slavic archetype who predates the church by centuries. Not a simple villain, but a threshold guardian \u2014 keeper of boundaries, tester of character, the one who decides whether you pass or perish. She is ambiguity embodied: dangerous, necessary, and never merely evil.<\/span><\/p>

Even some Ostara traditions carry her shadow. Families would extinguish the hearth, introduce children to the cold oven as a gesture of respect toward the ancestors, then rekindle the fire from scratch.<\/span><\/p>

A ritual of continuity. A quiet initiation. A symbolic meeting with one\u2019s kindred dead.<\/span><\/p>

But myths bend under the weight of history.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Famine<\/h3><\/div>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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In the early 14th century, Europe staggered through the Great Famine \u2014 years when rain drowned the fields, crops failed in succession, livestock died where they stood, and entire villages starved. Parents abandoned children because they could not feed them. Chroniclers wrote of hunger so deep it warped the mind. A generation grew up with famine as a living ghost.<\/span><\/p>

In that landscape of scarcity, the old Ostara rite twisted into something darker. A symbolic introduction to the ancestors became a literal disappearance of children. Families weren\u2019t guiding the young toward memory \u2014 they were losing them to hunger.<\/span><\/p>

The story shifted to explain the unexplainable:<\/span><\/p>

Why children vanished. Why parents made impossible choices. Why hunger turned ordinary people into shadows of themselves.<\/span><\/p>

The witch became famine itself. The oven became the maw of starvation. The forest became the place where families dissolved under the weight of scarcity.<\/span><\/p>

A myth built to metabolize collective grief.<\/span><\/p>

And once the famine had carved its mark into the tale, the church machinery stepped in. What had been an ancestral gesture \u2014 intimate, domestic, tied to hearth and lineage \u2014 was retooled into something mechanized, aligned with the engines of men. Fear became a resource. Myth became a lever. The story was sanded down, moralized, and repurposed into a cautionary script about sin, obedience, and the dangers of wandering off the sanctioned path.<\/span><\/p>

A rite of belonging became a threat. A symbolic gesture became a warning label. An old story about continuity became a tool for control.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Modern Christianity feels increasingly like a house built on interpretive drift. The distance between origin and outcome widens, and the scaffolding creaks.<\/span><\/p>

Spirituality needs spirits and mortals \u2014 not machinery. Even Dave Matthews gestures at this in Seek Up<\/em>: the divine doesn\u2019t cling to the piles we build; it watches as our obsessions stack into nothing. Meaning slips when we try to domesticate it.<\/span><\/p>

And now, in our own time, we\u2019re arguing over steeples in Fairview, Texas \u2014 lawyers insisting they\u2019re \u201crequired,\u201d as if the sacred depends on rooflines and silhouettes. As if the divine is a zoning ordinance.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Aristotle's Golden Mean<\/h3><\/div>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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And it\u2019s not just religion. It\u2019s culture. It\u2019s philosophy. It\u2019s everywhere meaning gets borrowed, bent, misapplied beyond its purpose, and repeated without memory.<\/span><\/p>

People misquote Aristotle the same way they misread Dave Matthews \u2014 flattening nuance into slogans, sanding complexity into something that fits on a bumper sticker. A song about existential ache gets treated like a party anthem. A philosophical caution becomes \u201cmoderation in all things.\u201d The original intent dissolves, replaced by whatever the crowd needs it to be.<\/span><\/p>

Aristotle\u2019s Golden Mean \u2014 virtue as the balance between excess and deficiency \u2014 has been shadowing me since I was fourteen or fifteen. Then again in a philosophy class at USU. Then again years later, sitting with a rabbi at Yeshiva University who gently clarified that \u201cmoderation in all things\u201d isn\u2019t Torah, isn\u2019t Talmud, isn\u2019t even Chabad. It\u2019s closer to Icarus than Sinai.<\/span><\/p>

Dogma often wears the mask of wisdom. Culture often wears the mask of doctrine. And people repeat both with the confidence of revelation.<\/span><\/p>

The older I get, the more I see how transactional our idea of happiness has become \u2014 how often it demands something, expects something, wants a return. Joy, by contrast, is elemental. It arrives unbidden. It intersects. It doesn\u2019t negotiate.<\/span><\/p>

Today I saw my almost\u2011five\u2011year\u2011old\u2019s joy at his birthday party \u2014 bright, unfiltered, unbargained\u2011for. Later, I saw the joy of a child I barely knew during a playdate \u2014 a small, serendipitous moment that could\u2019ve gone to Liz but landed with me instead.<\/span><\/p>

In a world full of noise\u2011mongers and performative certainty, those moments cut through like clean air. They remind me that my Jungian \u201cnurturer\u201d archetype isn\u2019t a burden; it\u2019s a compass. Pushing through my own discomfort to nurture my kids is worth more than any earthly commodity.<\/span><\/p>

And maybe that\u2019s the thread running through folklore, famine, philosophy, and parenting:<\/span><\/p>

Meaning is not inherited \u2014 it is rekindled. Meaning is not preserved \u2014 it is practiced. Meaning is not guaranteed \u2014 it is recognized.<\/span><\/p>

The Ostara hearth. Baba Yaga\u2019s threshold. Aristotle\u2019s middle path. A child\u2019s laughter on an ordinary afternoon.<\/span><\/p>

Celestial thinking, for me, isn\u2019t about fate or cosmic scorekeeping. It\u2019s about noticing joy when it appears, and being grateful when I get to meet it.<\/span><\/p>

Dogma is shallow. Joy \u2014 when it shows up \u2014 is honest. I\u2019m learning to keep my eyes open for it.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hansel and Gretel Some stories only reveal their true shape when you return to them with older eyes. Hansel and Gretel is one of those stories for me. As a child, I inherited the faith\u2011polished version: the witch as hellfire, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25159,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","_eb_attr":"","pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","rs_blank_template":"","rs_page_bg_color":"","slide_template_v7":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[814,817],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ads","category-prnci"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25268"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25365,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25268\/revisions\/25365"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}