For The Wild - Homebound： The Roots and Shoots of Earth-based Community with STARHAWK ⧸182

00:00:00.000 For the Wild podcast is brought to you in part by the Calliopeia Foundation and listeners like you.

00:00:05.720 Calliopeia supports projects interweaving spirituality, culture, and ecology.

00:00:11.160 We are grateful for their support and the support of grassroots contributions from listeners.

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00:00:30.000 howdy folks carter lou here with another homebound release homebound brings you wisdom

00:00:39.160 from the for the wild archives offering guidance and perspective to anchor us and help us to

00:00:44.640 this current moment today we're learning about the intersection of spiritual empowerment

00:00:50.860 community and activism from a truly magical human starhawk starhawk is one of the most

00:00:59.060 respected voices in modern Earth-based spirituality, and she is deeply committed to applying the

00:01:05.000 techniques and creative power of spirituality to political activism. Starhawk's approach

00:01:11.820 asks us to critically examine systems of control and domination and our responses to them,

00:01:18.640 including areas where we may be giving our power away and where sources of spiritual power

00:01:23.900 may have been forcibly removed.

00:01:26.980 While this episode with Starhawk originally aired in May 2017,

00:01:31.580 during this current global movement,

00:01:33.700 we are being called to examine areas where fear may be dominating our spirits,

00:01:38.860 and how we can reclaim our personal power during these times of uncertainty

00:01:43.120 by reclaiming a relationship to ritual, intuition, healing, and nurturing the power within,

00:01:50.840 making Starhawk's message perennially relevant.

00:01:54.820 Starhawk's message encourages us to ask ourselves,

00:01:58.280 how do we define the world?

00:02:00.660 What consciousnesses are we bringing and holding?

00:02:04.640 How can we take our power back in day-to-day life,

00:02:08.180 even while we're afraid right now?

00:02:10.620 How can we build a supportive community

00:02:13.200 and foster healing at a distance?

00:02:16.680 Thanks for listening with us again this week.

00:02:19.540 We hope you'll continue to tune in to Homebound on Fridays,

00:02:22.480 and we hope you enjoy today's show.

00:02:34.620 Hello, I'm Ayanna Young and I welcome you to For the Wild podcast.

00:02:39.920 Today we are speaking with Starhawk as a part of a special series of interviews

00:02:44.520 in collaboration with Living Village Culture and The Compass at Lightning in a Bottle.

00:02:50.660 Starhawk, along with many other visionaries, will be speaking at this year's Lightning in a Bottle,

00:02:55.280 and I'll have the honor of facilitating panels with these Earth warriors.

00:03:00.140 Starhawk is one of the most respected voices in modern Earth-based spirituality.

00:03:06.240 She is the author or co-author of 12 books, including The Spiral Dance,

00:03:10.800 a rebirth of the ancient religion of the Great Goddess,

00:03:14.940 which is long considered the essential text for the neo-pagan movement,

00:03:18.240 and now classic ecotopian novel The Fifth Sacred Thing.

00:03:23.260 Her works have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Greek, Japanese, and Burmese.

00:03:35.580 Starhawk is one of the prominent leaders in the revival of Earth-based spirituality and goddess religion.

00:03:41.560 She is a co-founder of Reclaiming, an activist branch of modern pagan religion, and continues

00:03:47.280 to work closely with the Reclaiming community.

00:03:50.260 Her archives are maintained at the Graduate Theological Union Library in Berkeley, California.

00:03:56.960 Starhawk is a veteran of progressive movements from anti-war to anti-nukes and is deeply

00:04:01.860 committed to bringing the techniques and creative power of spirituality to political activism.

00:04:08.080 She is a founder of Earth Activist Trainings, teaching permaculture design, grounded in

00:04:13.000 spirit, and with a focus on organizing and activism.

00:04:16.800 Together with Charles Williams and others, she co-teaches EAT courses in the U.S., Canada,

00:04:22.700 and Europe.

00:04:23.180 She also champions social permaculture, the application of permaculture principles to

00:04:28.560 social organizations, policy, and strategy.

00:04:31.620 She holds a B.A. in fine arts from UCLA in 1973.

00:04:35.220 She received an M.A. in psychology with a concentration in feminist therapy from Antioch University West in 1982.

00:04:44.500 She has taught in many Bay Area colleges and universities, including John F. Kennedy University, Antioch West, the Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College and Wisdom University.

00:04:56.980 She is presently an adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

00:05:02.360 What an incredible life's work. Thank you so much for being on the show, Starhawk.

00:05:08.740 Oh, you're welcome.

00:05:10.580 So I would like to start this off by acknowledging the cloud of skepticism that surrounds paganism,

00:05:19.140 which dishonors the long lines of ancient European cultures that were rooted in the sacredness of the earth

00:05:27.620 and our inextricable connection to all that is life, spirit, and elemental.

00:05:35.640 And I was hoping that you could begin by taking us into this journey

00:05:41.500 towards reclaiming the ancestries of old Europe

00:05:45.040 by sharing with us some tales of pagan goddess cosmology.

00:05:50.000 Perhaps a favorite creation story you have.

00:05:52.700 Well, my favorite creation story comes from the fairy tradition, which is to go back to the little people of Scotland from not just before Christianity, but really even before the Celtic invasion.

00:06:09.840 The story goes that the goddess, before anything was formed, was alone out in the vast wildness of space, and she got lonely, and so she divided herself in two.

00:06:29.860 she looked into the mirror of space and said whoa how beautiful i am and suddenly that beauty

00:06:37.960 became another being and she was so taken with her beauty she made love to herself

00:06:45.800 and that love making created an orgasmic ecstasy that vibrated and rippled out through the universe

00:06:54.760 and started to create the formation of all the things that exist.

00:07:04.760 But that ripple, that wave was so strong

00:07:08.980 that it actually tore the goddess's other self away from her.

00:07:15.000 And as it began to circulate and move away,

00:07:19.860 she began to change form and become more different and become more male.

00:07:24.760 And so that created a polarity of male and female, but it's not a binary polarity.

00:07:34.220 The god has an aspect of the blue god who's kind of androgynous and the flute-playing, joyful, childlike, love spirit.

00:07:46.500 And then the green god, that's the god of plants and vegetation.

00:07:49.900 and finally the horn god who is the god of the hunt and of the animal world but always

00:07:58.840 they are circling back to the goddess herself and so it's a cycle it's not a split really

00:08:10.040 it's a movement and that movement generates the energy that keeps the universe in motion

00:08:18.520 and alive.

00:08:21.320 So that's the creation myth I love,

00:08:23.460 the idea that the universe is born in a great orgasm.

00:08:29.300 Thank you for sharing that.

00:08:32.120 You know, recently I've spoken to Lila June,

00:08:35.080 who's a daughter of Diné, Cheyenne, and European lineages

00:08:38.780 and a student of global cycles of violence

00:08:42.660 and the destruction of many cyclical relationships

00:08:46.640 between human beings and nature.

00:08:48.520 And when she speaks of the journey towards decolonization and reclaiming one's indigeneity, Lila reminds us that the same violent and oppressive forces that precipitated the Native American genocide also waged war on the original earth-centered cultures of Europe.

00:09:06.340 So I'm wondering if you could talk about this clashing of paradigms that occurred in old Europe and the relationship between the rise of the Christian church and the dissemination of European indigenous women.

00:09:22.420 you know i met lila june when i was at standing rock and i had the wonderful privilege of being

00:09:30.100 in a sweat that she poured and when i got there you know it was beautiful it was at dawn

00:09:36.100 uh it was cold but we were all out there getting ready and preparing for the sweat and i looked

00:09:42.340 over and she was wearing a t-shirt that said buddhika buddhika was an ancient queen of britain

00:09:50.460 who waged rebellion against the Romans after her daughters were raped

00:09:56.580 and came very close to overthrowing Roman rule in Britain.

00:10:01.260 So I found that really amazing. 0.75

00:10:03.440 And then in the course of The Sweat,

00:10:06.040 Lila June was talking about the witch persecutions and their impact.

00:10:11.340 And I had been meditating on that and on that question,

00:10:15.620 And how do people who have European heritage connect to our own indigenous roots?

00:10:22.480 Because everybody, if you go back far enough, has indigenous roots.

00:10:27.920 You know, everybody comes from people who lived closely with the land

00:10:32.820 and lived in harmony with the land.

00:10:35.220 Otherwise, we wouldn't exist.

00:10:37.680 We wouldn't have survived.

00:10:40.540 So it doesn't mean that you get to walk in and claim like we're indigenous.

00:10:44.560 in certain spaces but it does mean that we have a way path into that kind of understanding and

00:10:52.600 sensibility through our own ancestry if we choose to look for it and i had been meditating on that

00:11:01.440 and really got a message that european people need to come to terms with the witch burnings

00:11:08.300 in order to heal what happened was if you go very very far back i'm talking like

00:11:16.000 7 000 bce in europe you find cultures that were focused again on the mother that held women

00:11:27.320 in high honor that were centered around growing things and planting and where the imagery

00:11:35.480 of their religious life was all about fertility, about regeneration.

00:11:42.900 It was images of things like plants and female bodies and animals and life

00:11:50.820 and a rich, symbolic language that went along with that.

00:11:56.300 Those were cultures that were peaceable.

00:11:58.920 There's not a lot of evidence for warfare or violence.

00:12:02.320 and they are cultures that were relatively egalitarian.

00:12:06.560 There's not huge differences in grave goods

00:12:09.940 or huge monuments for some people

00:12:13.320 and nothing for other people.

00:12:16.240 Then there were invasions 0.67

00:12:18.580 of peoples who came off Central Asia 1.00

00:12:24.420 who were sky god worshippers, 0.99

00:12:27.600 who were horse cultures,

00:12:29.660 who were a very different kind of social organization.

00:12:34.720 And you can look at European mythology,

00:12:37.880 you can look at things like the Greek gods and goddesses,

00:12:40.660 and you can really see in there this record of an older mythology

00:12:47.220 that, again, is centered around the mother

00:12:51.120 and around the power of the earth and around life and regeneration,

00:12:56.700 overlaid by a newer mythology that's centered around chieftains and warfare

00:13:03.540 and heroes that are heroes of war and violent.

00:13:10.800 And you'll have things like goddesses, someone like Aphrodite,

00:13:17.200 who originally was the great goddess in her own right, 0.99

00:13:21.160 becomes the love goddess and gets married off to a god. 0.84

00:13:24.640 Or Hira was another form of the great goddess, become sort of the queen of Zeus, the prime god.

00:13:35.440 And if you read the message, she's never actually all that happy about it.

00:13:42.040 So that was one transition that happened very early on.

00:13:48.880 You know, you can still trace it in things like culture and fairy tales,

00:13:52.640 and you can still trace remnants of that earlier sensibility.

00:13:59.180 In most of Europe, you know, a lot of that very old culture remained.

00:14:06.480 There were healing traditions.

00:14:08.840 There were rituals and rites of connection with the earth.

00:14:12.560 There were seasonal celebrations.

00:14:15.160 There were customs that put you, again, in touch with the earth.

00:14:21.680 Maybe it was something like making a harvest doll out of the last sheaf of wheat.

00:14:28.000 Or maybe it was something like going out in the middle of winter and wassailing the trees,

00:14:35.080 singing to the apple trees and offering them pails of apple cider as a gratitude offering.

00:14:43.780 There were thousands and thousands of different rituals.

00:14:47.700 And some of them actually still survive in different forms in Europe.

00:14:53.060 You know, you can still see Morris dancing in England

00:14:56.040 or something like the hobby horse in Padstow that comes out on the 1st of May.

00:15:04.320 A lot of times people have forgotten their original meaning,

00:15:07.760 but many of the rituals and customs still exist.

00:15:12.540 Here in Germany in May, every town has a maple.

00:15:15.820 You know, in Switzerland, there's still processions and carnivals and mass figures, and they're wonderful, amazing, and maybe to us somewhat strange rituals and rites that go on.

00:15:33.120 But in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the church was under this tremendous pressure

00:15:40.400 because of economic changes going on in Europe, shifts in power balances,

00:15:46.440 what happened was it was kind of like, just like today, we see this war on terrorism

00:15:52.460 as an excuse for implementing all kinds of other law restrictions

00:15:57.960 and consolidating and keeping people from often confronting some of the real dangers

00:16:04.160 because they're fixated on these potential dangers of terrorism.

00:16:11.180 Well, the church used witches in the same way.

00:16:14.760 The idea was if the peasants were afraid of witches,

00:16:19.080 then they'd be looking for the witches and looking for the suspecting their neighbors

00:16:27.380 and attacking their neighbors rather than uniting and rebelling against the overlords

00:16:34.200 and against some of the oppressive practices of the church at the time.

00:16:40.340 And so they unleashed the persecution against witches,

00:16:44.280 and they really created a whole ideology for it,

00:16:48.060 the idea that these ancient customs and traditions were really the worship of the devil

00:16:53.900 And that women got together secretly and went out and, you know, had intercourse with Satan and did all kinds of evil things.

00:17:05.060 They unleashed a horrible wave of persecution in Europe that took the lives of tens of thousands of women and men over a period of several hundred years from the late 1400s until the early 1600s. 0.75

00:17:23.900 In America, the Salem witch trials at the end of the 1600s were kind of like the very tail end of that.

00:17:32.280 But more than the actual numbers of people killed, it was what it did to the psyche of Europe.

00:17:40.700 It made the old healing traditions and the herbalism and the women who practiced it seem suspect.

00:17:49.340 Forms of knowledge that didn't come from male authority

00:17:52.820 and the approved authorities were suspect and dangerous.

00:17:58.140 It made anything that had to do with intuition,

00:18:01.320 with a view of the world that saw life infusing matter

00:18:07.640 and infusing the natural world,

00:18:10.380 it made that all suspect and dangerous. 1.00

00:18:13.060 It made women who held property or who had power or who stood up and had independent thoughts and stood up for themselves and became prominent, it made those women targets.

00:18:31.780 And it made, I think, deep inside our psyche as women is a fear that actually I think is an old archetypal collective unconscious fear

00:18:44.780 that comes from those times of being visible, being seen, stepping forward, making yourself vulnerable.

00:18:53.080 ball so you know there are many many ways in which when we try to get back to our own indigenous

00:19:02.820 roots it's like we hit this block that makes all of that seem scary and dangerous or ridiculous

00:19:14.640 and, you know, not approved of.

00:19:19.800 And I think it makes it hard for us to go back through that path

00:19:24.220 to our own roots when we have European heritage. 0.88

00:19:30.060 It makes it seem much easier to take somebody else's heritage,

00:19:35.360 but then that often becomes kind of a form of cultural appropriation.

00:19:41.140 So I think it's important for us to know that history.

00:19:43.500 if we know that history then we don't have to be ruled by it and we can allow that fear to pass

00:19:50.720 through and say okay behind that fear there may be enormous treasures of wisdom and understanding

00:19:59.040 and ways of connection to the natural world and to one another and to that deep sense of

00:20:08.640 compassion and creativity and regeneration

00:20:12.480 that infuses the universe

00:20:15.480 and that we like to call goddess.

00:20:38.640 Center for Outasia

00:20:47.800 Crane

00:20:49.580 Center for Outου

00:20:51.640 Center

00:20:53.640 Center for Outシ Physics

00:20:59.640 Center for Out Belt

00:21:01.860 Center for Outdo 0.80

00:21:04.760 Center for Outdo

00:21:06.500 Consortium

00:21:08.580 I wouldn't

00:21:38.580 my goodness what a beautiful journey that you just took us through this history and

00:21:54.080 and how fear is keeping people from looking back or keeping women from reclaiming this indigeneity

00:22:04.280 it's just fascinating to explore the roots of the suppression of the feminine and how

00:22:10.780 malevolent depictions of women have trickled through history and you know I actually looked

00:22:17.500 up the word witch in the dictionary and it just receives this dark connotation the dictionary

00:22:23.720 literally says a woman thought to have evil magic powers an ugly or unpleasant old woman

00:22:32.160 or a girl or woman capable of enchanting or bewitching a man so it's really sad of course

00:22:37.920 to see this disconnection and the separation to women's roots indigenous roots European roots and

00:22:46.260 what's so beautiful is many western women at this point have begun to reclaim the title of which

00:22:51.380 as healers or life givers and earth tenders and protectors and I'm wondering if you could

00:22:59.420 speak to the power of reclaiming the identity of woman and witch in this modern context?

00:23:09.960 Yes. I mean, I think, as you've been saying, the word witch has sort of a dual connotation.

00:23:16.200 One is the dangerous, evil, ugly, old hag, and the other is the young, beautiful, 0.98

00:23:23.040 but dangerously seductive woman for a lot of us who consider ourselves witches it's been important 0.99

00:23:31.040 to reclaim the word because reclaiming the word means bringing forth that history and facing it

00:23:38.160 and no longer having it be a kind of shadow in the unconscious but rather being able to understand

00:23:45.180 it consciously and consciously say hey we're willing to claim our power as women and we are

00:23:52.600 willing to stand forth and not be afraid, and to say that there are many sources of

00:23:58.760 knowledge and wisdom, and not all of them come from the male authorities or the academy,

00:24:05.460 that our intuition and our deep sense of knowing and our spirituality are also valid forms

00:24:14.660 of knowledge.

00:24:16.800 Thank you.

00:24:17.880 and I would love to talk more about the importance of ritual in reclaiming an earth-centered

00:24:25.540 worldview and you had mentioned rituals and I'm wondering how can these rituals help us engage

00:24:32.900 and grow into deeper relationships with the land and ourselves and one another and then furthermore

00:24:41.140 how do they help us engender creative power in political and earth activism?

00:24:50.180 Well, a ritual is something that you do that lends a particular deep kind of importance to what you do it about.

00:24:59.240 If you do rituals that celebrate the cycles of the season, it's a way of saying,

00:25:03.960 you know what, the turning of the season means something, it's important, it's something to pay attention to.

00:25:10.320 It has resonances in our own changes, in our own growth and development.

00:25:15.880 If you do rituals to celebrate your life passages,

00:25:19.220 again, it's saying, like, this is something important.

00:25:21.880 This is something that needs to be marked.

00:25:25.980 You imagine if somebody dies and there's no ceremony,

00:25:30.140 there's no funeral, there's no memorial,

00:25:33.240 how empty, how unfinished that would feel.

00:25:37.320 And the same thing if someone is born.

00:25:39.380 You want to celebrate. You want to honor that.

00:25:42.220 You want to do something to say, hey, this marks a really important change

00:25:47.380 and a really important occasion.

00:25:50.140 So when you do a ritual, it's a way of often taking emotional, psychic, abstract ideas

00:25:59.720 and turning them into concrete actions

00:26:03.980 so that it speaks to many dimensions of yourself,

00:26:10.240 not just the intellectual self, but also the emotional self,

00:26:15.120 the sensual self, the embodied self, what we call your younger self.

00:26:21.880 So if you're doing a ritual, for example, to celebrate the spring,

00:26:29.720 then you'd think about what are those symbols?

00:26:34.100 What are the things that symbolize or embody those forces of renewal and regeneration?

00:26:41.220 And that's why so many of the spring rituals involve things like eggs.

00:26:47.680 Also, if you live close to the earth and you raise chickens,

00:26:52.680 you know that in the spring they start laying eggs again.

00:26:55.320 and it's great after the winter when they haven't been laying so many.

00:27:01.000 You might have things like spring buds or spring flowers

00:27:04.060 or green for the color of growth and the new shoots coming out of the earth

00:27:09.480 or seeds, you know, and do something around planting seeds

00:27:13.580 and think about what are you planting in the garden

00:27:16.540 but also what seeds are you planting for yourself for the coming year.

00:27:21.580 So in some ways ritual is kind of like poetry.

00:27:24.240 in that it's taking abstract ideas

00:27:27.920 and turning them into concrete, sensual images

00:27:31.800 that you then enact

00:27:34.040 and that brings about a change.

00:27:39.440 So when we think about political action,

00:27:43.660 the definition I've always liked for magic

00:27:45.840 is the art of changing consciousness at will.

00:27:49.500 That's Dionne Fortune's definition. 0.75

00:27:51.520 and she was an occultist in the early part of the 1900s.

00:27:58.020 But I think that's also a good definition for political action,

00:28:04.060 that it's not just about changing who holds power

00:28:08.260 or changing a particular policy.

00:28:11.420 It's about changing the consciousness.

00:28:14.140 It's not even just about stopping something like the Code Access Pipeline.

00:28:19.380 It's about changing the consciousness that allows that pipeline

00:28:23.140 to even be conceived of or built in the first place.

00:28:27.080 And to do that, we need all kinds of activism, including ritual,

00:28:34.400 including symbolic acts that we take specifically to shift that consciousness.

00:28:43.380 So again, my guest Standing Rock, it was very beautiful to be in a space

00:28:47.200 that was consciously held as a spiritual space

00:28:50.620 and where people really said over and over again,

00:28:53.680 everything we do is an act of prayer.

00:28:55.980 If we march to the gate or we march up to the place where they're drilling

00:29:02.180 or we take a foot to the sacred land, all of that is a prayer.

00:29:07.420 It's a ceremony.

00:29:08.180 A ceremony isn't just what you do in the sweat lodge or meditating under a tree.

00:29:14.640 It can be marching on the street.

00:29:16.380 It can be writing a letter to your congressperson.

00:29:21.740 It can be anything you do with that focused intention.

00:29:25.580 That reminded me of a quote from a working definition of reclaiming, and it's quoted,

00:29:32.360 we know that to name these things as sacred is an inherently political act.

00:29:38.600 For what is sacred must not be exploited or despoiled.

00:29:42.540 We also know that action in the world, in the service of the sacred, is one of the core expressions of our spirituality, and I think that what you were describing this ritual and prayer in collaboration with action is full and holistic, and one without the other is incomplete.

00:30:06.760 And I think talking about the decay of cultural ceremony has accompanied the rise of hegemony and capitalism.

00:30:18.360 You know, most of us grow up deprived of traditions that ground us in the earth and our communities and our unique gifts.

00:30:29.040 And resultant is a disconnected fog that blankets our society.

00:30:34.360 And the young people of today are left stumbling for purpose, yearning, perhaps even unconsciously, for guidance from their elders.

00:30:44.920 And as the future appears grim with climate and biological collapse, what are your thoughts on how initiation ceremonies help ground and give purpose to people at pivotal moments in their lives?

00:31:00.220 and what have we collectively lost as a culture by shedding such customs?

00:31:06.720 I think initiation ceremonies for young people are very important.

00:31:12.460 They're part of how a culturist society helps young people make that transition

00:31:18.080 from child to adult or from adolescent to adult.

00:31:23.180 And again, they're a way of marking it, of saying,

00:31:25.580 hey, these changes your body is going through, they're important.

00:31:29.760 And you're important.

00:31:31.180 You are an important member of the community,

00:31:35.580 and the community is here to help you go through this change

00:31:40.860 and be welcomed as part of us.

00:31:44.160 So in our community, reclaiming, which we've mentioned a couple times,

00:31:47.960 is our tradition of the craft, of witchcraft, our goddess tradition

00:31:54.340 and that is very much involved also in political activism and personal healing

00:32:02.040 and in earth healing as part of our spiritual tradition.

00:32:07.900 We do coming-of-age ceremonies for young women to celebrate their first menstruation

00:32:16.040 because we feel it's important that this is recognized as something that's beautiful and natural

00:32:23.320 and not something to be ashamed of.

00:32:27.100 So we'll do something like take the girl and her mother out to the hills or the beach

00:32:34.040 and tie their hands together and they run together as far as the mother can run. 0.94

00:32:39.740 And when she gets tired, we cut them apart and let the daughter run on alone. 0.52

00:32:44.800 And then we go back to someone's house 0.81

00:32:47.520 And we spend an afternoon telling stories about our own first menstruation, giving her gifts.

00:32:56.880 And then in the end, there's a big feast of red foods that the men prepare.

00:33:03.060 And she's welcomed by the men and also people who are of fluid gender

00:33:08.040 because we feel it's important that young girls know

00:33:15.440 that this is something the whole community can celebrate.

00:33:19.060 Again, it's not something shameful or something embarrassing.

00:33:22.480 It's something to be celebrated.

00:33:26.960 And we do a similar ritual for the young men

00:33:29.120 where, again, they go through a challenge

00:33:32.720 and the men take them off and instruct them in mysteries

00:33:37.160 and then they come back and are welcomed by the community

00:33:41.660 and by men and women both.

00:33:45.020 I think every traditional culture has some kind of rite of passage.

00:33:50.520 And I think without that, young people create their own,

00:33:54.660 and often their own will involve something like drugs or alcohol

00:33:58.620 or some other kind of risk-taking.

00:34:00.720 because I think intuitively we know we need that challenge.

00:34:07.200 We need to face something difficult and overcome it

00:34:11.520 or face a danger and get through it

00:34:16.720 in order to develop that sense of self and confidence and strength

00:34:21.180 that you need to have in dealing with the adult world.

00:34:25.400 So if culture doesn't provide that,

00:34:27.600 And I think young people try to find that for themselves and oftentimes get into some bad situations as a result.

00:34:57.600 We've been through so many changes

00:35:04.960 Seen our fortunes on the ground

00:35:08.740 Catch my eye and I could show you

00:35:16.800 Where I've been quick until now

00:35:19.760 Almost done but getting on somehow

00:35:23.380 We'll let it back together

00:35:36.260 Listen to me catch the meaning

00:35:39.440 Of the words that slip away

00:35:43.480 We are weary only doubting

00:35:51.320 Thank you for that analysis and also for sharing the stories of the initiation for

00:35:59.760 young women. I got chills when you were speaking about the young woman and her mother running down

00:36:06.260 the beach. That was beautiful. And while thinking about cultural ceremony and how we make relation

00:36:14.300 to our world the dominant paradigm is so afraid of dying the medical system is framed in a way of

00:36:22.360 beating death or killing that disease or you know extending life in unnatural ways and

00:36:27.940 we are in turn profoundly disassociated from death and you know we don't touch our dead we

00:36:35.600 no longer bury the bodies of our loved ones directly in the earth that nourish them and

00:36:42.040 many of us have hollow, if any, customs to honor ancestors. So this severance with our relationship

00:36:50.280 to death has left us out of touch with the circle of life, and it's impacting the way we heal from

00:36:56.860 loss and connect to our existences. So I'm wondering, how does the pagan view of death

00:37:06.600 differ from that of the dominant paradigm?

00:37:10.700 And how do you think this relationship with death shapes the way we live?

00:37:15.680 I think in paganism we see death as being part of life.

00:37:20.480 It's not something to be feared,

00:37:23.260 although it's certainly not something you rush towards.

00:37:26.340 But it's a natural part of life.

00:37:28.860 It's something we will all experience.

00:37:32.240 And without it, there is no life.

00:37:34.760 There could be, you know, if we didn't die and make way for another generation,

00:37:39.960 there would be no way that we could all live here on this earth.

00:37:45.660 So, and many pagan traditions believe in some form of rebirth,

00:37:53.140 that when you die, your spirit continues on and you come back again in another form at another time.

00:38:02.040 So we have ceremonies, you know, when someone is dying,

00:38:06.640 we tend to gather and be with them and tell them stories about how they've impacted our lives,

00:38:15.580 sing to them, meditate, pray with them, kind of sing them over into the other world.

00:38:22.640 And we have memorials, of course, for people who've died where we can remember them

00:38:27.080 and tell stories about them and comfort the people who are left behind.

00:38:33.720 But death can be a beautiful thing.

00:38:37.380 Again, it's a natural thing that's part of the whole cycle of life.

00:38:43.660 It's not an ending.

00:38:45.440 It is an opening into some other dimension.

00:38:50.760 We also have rituals like our Samhain ritual on Halloween every year

00:38:55.520 where we honor our beloved dead, mourn them,

00:38:59.540 and where we like to think the dead can come back and visit you for a night.

00:39:04.380 That's the original origin of a lot of those Halloween customs,

00:39:07.820 like candles and pumpkins were lights to help your ancestors

00:39:13.960 find their way back to your house and come back for a visit.

00:39:18.280 It kind of all comes back to community

00:39:22.000 and having people around you to celebrate and to engage in these rituals and customs and

00:39:31.780 in recent decades you know we've seen waves of people attempt to create alternative communities

00:39:38.900 in resistance to the capitalist system such as homesteading communes etc yet the idea of

00:39:46.720 a flourishing community is often romanticized and it's underestimating the hard work it takes

00:39:54.480 to create one. And in the wake of an individualistic paradigm, people struggle to truly

00:40:02.120 build collaborative and regenerative relationships to one another. I was just reading one of your

00:40:08.980 more recent books, The Empowerment Manual, A Guide for Collaborative Groups, and it dives into this.

00:40:15.460 So I'm wondering if you could tell us some of the common struggles you've witnessed.

00:40:20.680 Do you believe that these challenges stem from our current cultural conditioning, or

00:40:26.960 are there inherent flaws in human beings?

00:40:32.800 Yeah, I wrote the Empowerment Manual because I'd been working in different kinds of groups

00:40:39.840 for many decades, and I kept seeing them all run into the same kinds of problems,

00:40:46.280 mostly involving how do you deal with conflict.

00:40:50.240 And particularly groups that define themselves as non-hierarchical,

00:40:55.040 as not having a top-down structure,

00:40:58.460 I think need some other tools for dealing with conflict

00:41:02.360 because we grew up in families where, you know,

00:41:06.200 A mom can kind of come in and say, hey, you kids, shut up, stop fighting.

00:41:11.020 Be good to your brother.

00:41:12.360 He's younger than you.

00:41:14.420 And when we're in our collectives or our permaculture guilds or whatever

00:41:19.960 and everybody's an equal, there's nobody who has the authority to come in and say,

00:41:24.040 hey, you kids, stop that.

00:41:26.340 Behave yourself.

00:41:27.220 So we need other tools for getting people to behave respectfully

00:41:35.540 and think well of one another

00:41:39.260 and be willing to face the uncomfortable process

00:41:44.260 of actually dealing with our conflicts directly.

00:41:50.200 So in the empowerment manual,

00:41:52.240 I talk about different tools for communication

00:41:55.940 and for allocating power in groups

00:42:00.420 and for mediating and resolving conflicts.

00:42:06.320 And my hope is that it helps.

00:42:08.140 I feel like if our groups function more effectively,

00:42:12.180 then everything we do is more effective.

00:42:15.840 Could you share with us some of these tools

00:42:18.820 to navigate or reconcile conflict?

00:42:22.340 Well, one of my favorites comes out of the world,

00:42:25.060 actually a business management group headed by a guy named Peter Senge where they talk

00:42:32.000 about the learning organization.

00:42:34.680 He talks about backing down the ladder of inference, that something happens, you know,

00:42:40.660 an event happens.

00:42:43.060 You know, I walk into a party, I see my neighbor, I go to the table to sit down and talk to

00:42:47.680 her and she gets up and goes away.

00:42:50.340 You know, that's the event.

00:42:51.780 That's what a video camera would record.

00:42:55.060 well, that generates feelings in me.

00:42:57.880 Maybe I feel hurt or surprised or shocked or rejected,

00:43:02.280 and that feeling tends to make me start thinking of data to support it.

00:43:11.760 So I'm thinking back on all the times that neighbor has said something disrespectful

00:43:17.300 or gotten mad at me, whatever,

00:43:20.840 and I start trying to find a reason for her behavior.

00:43:23.900 you know and maybe that reason i come up with is um she's mad at me about this certain thing or

00:43:32.120 she hates me or she doesn't like me for this reason or that reason and then that reinforces

00:43:38.580 the feeling and it can finally lead to you know an action on my part you know i might be telling

00:43:48.980 myself a story about

00:43:51.060 you know

00:43:52.960 she's a terrible person 0.99

00:43:54.660 like all those other 1.00

00:43:56.220 mean girls in high school that never liked

00:43:58.980 me and I'm 1.00

00:44:00.500 just going to have to do something

00:44:02.980 about this because it's so

00:44:04.760 uncomfortable I can't stand not doing

00:44:06.860 anything. I'm going to go

00:44:08.900 up and just like say

00:44:10.580 I won't say it because

00:44:12.840 it's a podcast

00:44:13.640 I'm going to say something nasty right to

00:44:18.780 her face you know and then i do that and that creates another event uh whereas if i can back 1.00

00:44:24.800 down that ladder and sort of say okay here's what happened she got up and walked away 0.69

00:44:30.580 i actually don't know why she did that rather than whipping myself up into this whole cycle 1.00

00:44:40.080 of emotional frenzy maybe i could back down and ask hey suzy at that party last night 0.94

00:44:51.200 i came over to sit down to talk to you and you got up and walked away what's going on

00:44:56.860 i might even disclose some of my discomfort or my you know assumptions and check them out

00:45:06.000 and see if they're true.

00:45:07.780 You know, I wondered if you were angry at me about something.

00:45:11.860 Would you be willing to talk to me about it?

00:45:15.900 And, you know, to listen to what I hear.

00:45:19.560 And I might hear, yeah, I am angry at you about this and that.

00:45:23.860 Or I might hear, no, I'm angry, but not at you.

00:45:28.400 Or I might hear, I ate something terrible

00:45:31.920 and just had to rush to the bathroom.

00:45:33.840 I don't know what it is until I actually ask and check it out.

00:45:40.980 And I think if we become more skillful at doing that,

00:45:44.860 then we can actually certainly avoid escalating conflicts

00:45:50.080 and sometimes resolve conflicts much more simply.

00:45:55.000 It's when we whip ourselves into our assumptions

00:45:57.640 about what other people are thinking and feeling and doing

00:46:01.780 and why they're doing things.

00:46:03.840 that we get entrenched often in some really negative patterns in groups and organizations.

00:46:12.260 That makes so much sense.

00:46:13.840 And, you know, another thing when I'm contemplating the success of communities or relationships,

00:46:21.780 my thoughts turn to the elements of power, responsibility, accountability, trust,

00:46:31.460 which are kind of hard to define and difficult to uphold, but essential to examine.

00:46:40.000 So I'm wondering, how does one balance power and responsibility within leadership roles?

00:46:48.940 Well, in the Empowerment Manual, I talk about what I call the talisman of healthy groups,

00:46:54.220 which is like a magic circle with power and responsibility being one axis

00:47:01.600 and accountability, communication, and trust being the other axis.

00:47:09.040 And I think we balance power and responsibility

00:47:11.400 when people gain power in a group by taking on responsibility and fulfilling it.

00:47:19.860 And when people take on a responsibility, the group empowers them.

00:47:25.160 The group gives them the authority, the license to use power to do what it is they need to do.

00:47:33.000 If those two things are in balance, then a group is much healthier

00:47:38.100 and has a much healthier chance of surviving and thriving.

00:47:48.960 I want nobody to run my life.

00:48:05.300 Nobody.

00:48:18.960 Thank you.

00:48:48.960 As we envision this forthcoming cultural shift, a spectrum of options for governance structures

00:49:03.300 arise. You know, we have anarchism and socialism, which often surface as healthier alternatives to

00:49:09.740 our current state. Do either of these frameworks resonate with you? And what can we learn from them

00:49:16.520 in your opinion um sometimes i've identified both as an anarchist and a socialist right

00:49:24.480 uh in that what i like about anarchism is the idea of decentralization

00:49:29.860 and of each person being you know their own authority and of mutual care mutual responsibility

00:49:42.000 But I actually believe we need government at this point in history, if only to protect ourselves from the greed and rapaciousness of corporations and capitalism.

00:49:56.140 What I like about socialism is it says, hey, we get together and we collectively care for one another.

00:50:04.140 We pool our resources so that everybody has something.

00:50:09.700 And I think that we very much need to do that in many ways.

00:50:13.160 There are many ways in which, you know, we do, right,

00:50:17.680 from things like, you know, providing education

00:50:21.420 and things like roads and public health and all of that.

00:50:27.940 And I think we actually need to do more of that,

00:50:32.920 that we should be providing things like health care for everybody,

00:50:37.520 not just tied to work and not even just tied to Obamacare,

00:50:42.280 but something like what other civilized countries have,

00:50:46.720 a single-payer system where everyone's entitled to health care.

00:50:50.740 We need to be providing education for everyone.

00:50:55.000 It shouldn't be something you go into debt for half your life

00:50:58.500 in order to get an education.

00:51:01.260 And society should say, hey, it benefits all of us

00:51:04.420 to have an educated population.

00:51:08.000 So we need to be willing to provide that for the next generation.

00:51:12.160 So for me, I think a healthy government is one that is committed to protecting those things

00:51:21.960 that actually sustain life and defending them and putting resources toward them.

00:51:26.800 So protecting the environment, protecting our health, educating the next generation, protecting our safety, not just with military defense, kind of a last resort, but there are so many other ways that we need to protect our safety.

00:51:50.500 and I think that we need to do that collectively

00:51:55.640 with something like fire department

00:51:59.240 we need to do things collectively

00:52:03.860 that are too big to do individually

00:52:06.100 and I think we need that collective power

00:52:10.260 again to protect us from the greed

00:52:14.560 of the unbridled forces of capitalism

00:52:19.200 so my last question for you is around activism and the new age and i know that essential to many

00:52:28.460 new age thinkers is the power of transforming your consciousness in order to bring about change

00:52:34.800 and there is a potency to that but i think there lies a fine balance between maintaining a positive

00:52:41.900 consciousness and opening up to the grief of the world to mourn the death of species and to

00:52:50.080 empathize with suffering is to show respect and to feel that pain is to fiercely love and that

00:52:58.280 letting the grief into your heart isn't the end but only the beginning of a path towards action

00:53:04.460 now i've read that your work in permaculture and earth activist training among many other endeavors

00:53:11.420 embodies this merging of personal transformation and tangible action.

00:53:17.320 So I'm curious if you could share any ideas

00:53:20.300 how the consciousness movement and the New Age can ally with resistance activism.

00:53:29.080 Yeah, I think the thing about changing your consciousness

00:53:32.420 is you don't change consciousness in a vacuum.

00:53:35.840 You know, we're not living somewhere in outer space

00:53:38.400 where there's pure consciousness and nothing else.

00:53:41.420 Your consciousness is always interacting with everything else going on around you.

00:53:46.180 And part of how you transform your consciousness is by engaging with what's going on around you

00:53:51.660 and by acting with integrity.

00:53:54.980 So if you have a belief that says nature is sacred 1.00

00:53:59.320 and you see idiots destroying all around, you can't just sit back on your behind. 1.00

00:54:06.980 You have to take action and try to both prevent the harm and generate the good. 1.00

00:54:16.200 If you believe that human beings are sacred vessels of spirit and light,

00:54:22.820 then you can't sit back around when police are shooting young black men or women just because of their color.

00:54:34.940 You need to be active and working for justice.

00:54:38.800 And in taking that action, there are thousands and thousands of opportunities

00:54:43.540 to have experiences that allow you to engage and also transform your consciousness.

00:54:51.500 Because, again, transformation isn't something that just happens

00:54:54.640 when you're sitting up on the mountain meditating.

00:54:58.200 Real transformation happens with every act you take, every step you take,

00:55:03.200 everything you do in your daily life

00:55:05.660 everything you engage with

00:55:07.240 is part of your transformative

00:55:09.760 journey

00:55:10.420 well thank you

00:55:13.800 so much Starhawk for taking the time

00:55:15.800 to speak with us today

00:55:16.980 and I should probably say

00:55:19.640 to people

00:55:20.360 I do teach permaculture design courses

00:55:23.740 with a grounding in spirit

00:55:25.320 and a focus on organizing and activism

00:55:28.020 you can find them

00:55:29.880 at my website starhawk.org

00:55:32.140 or earthactivisttraining.org.

00:55:35.520 We have one coming up in the summer in the Midwest

00:55:42.400 and in January in Northern California

00:55:46.560 and also a couple in Europe this summer.

00:55:50.740 I also am a writer, and my book, The Fifth Sacred Thing,

00:55:55.420 which kind of envisions the future rooted in balance and permaculture,

00:56:02.780 And Justice, it's now actually all as an audio book

00:56:08.020 that people can get on Amazon or Audible or iTunes.

00:56:14.260 And it's the sequel, City of Refuge.

00:56:17.920 It just came out last year, and that's also available online

00:56:24.200 and through my website at starhawk.org and many other places.

00:56:28.260 thank you for listening to starhawk on for the wild podcast i'm ayanna young this episode was

00:56:37.460 produced in collaboration with living village culture and the compass at lightning in a bottle

00:56:42.640 starhawk along with myself and many other visionaries will be speaking this year at the

00:56:48.620 festival so please join us and don't miss mentoring the movement panel with starhawk

00:56:54.620 paul stamets penny livingston and james stark moderated by me at the compass at lib and get

00:57:02.540 activated the music you heard today was abigail washburn with the lost lamb then magna carta

00:57:10.180 putting it back together followed by power by the irresistible force our theme music is silence

00:57:18.780 Return by Bo and Like a River by Kate Wolf. The show is produced and edited by myself and March

00:57:25.260 Young, and our research director is Madison Migulski. Please visit forthewild.world and

00:57:31.700 check out our other projects and donate if you can. Next week, I'll be facilitating a webinar

00:57:36.800 with Joanna Macy on keeping sane and active amid mass psychosis. Register on forthewild.world

00:57:43.860 or tune in on Facebook Live on For the Wild's page

00:57:48.000 and leave comments and share.

00:57:50.500 It will be May 18th at 6.30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.

00:57:55.360 Also, the Native Species Nursery will commence next week

00:57:58.460 with pond building and earthworks.

00:58:00.860 Stay tuned on social media and watch the meadow be transformed.

00:58:13.860 Thank you.

For The Wild - May 15, 2020

Homebound： The Roots and Shoots of Earth-based Community with STARHAWK ⧸182

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