For The Wild - STARHAWK on the Roots and Shoots of Earth-based Community ⧸46

00:00:00.000 The Silence

00:00:30.000 Somebody wishing for something to happen

00:00:41.060 Wishing to tell, wishing to help

00:00:44.400 Someone was listening, someone who cared

00:00:48.060 Never despaired

00:00:49.840 Someone to lean on and someone to trust

00:00:54.320 Who needs your assistance and finds your disguise

00:00:58.240 Hello, I'm Ayata Young, and I welcome you to For the Wild podcast.

00:01:08.300 Today we are speaking with Starhawk as a part of a special series of interviews

00:01:12.920 in collaboration with Living Village Culture and The Compass at Lightning in a Bottle.

00:01:18.940 Starhawk, along with many other visionaries, will be speaking at this year's Lightning in a Bottle,

00:01:23.680 and I'll have the honor of facilitating panels with these Earth warriors.

00:01:28.240 Starhawk is one of the most respected voices in modern Earth-based spirituality.

00:01:34.640 She is the author or co-author of 12 books, including The Spiral Dance,

00:01:39.200 a rebirth of the ancient religion of the Great Goddess,

00:01:43.320 which is long considered the essential text for the neo-pagan movement,

00:01:47.160 and now classic ecotopia novel The Fifth Sacred Thing.

00:01:51.660 Her works have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Danish, Dutch, Italian,

00:01:58.240 Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Greek, Japanese, and Burmese. Starhawk is one of the prominent leaders

00:02:05.780 in the revival of earth-based spirituality and goddess religion. She is a co-founder of Reclaiming,

00:02:12.220 an activist branch of modern pagan religion, and continues to work closely with the Reclaiming

00:02:17.880 community. Her archives are maintained at the Graduate Theological Union Library in Berkeley,

00:02:23.900 California. Starhawk is a veteran of progressive movements from anti-war to anti-nukes and is

00:02:29.920 deeply committed to bringing the techniques and creative power of spirituality to political

00:02:35.040 activism. She is a founder of Earth Activist Trainings, teaching permaculture design,

00:02:40.780 grounded in spirit, and with a focus on organizing and activism. Together with Charles Williams and

00:02:46.920 others, she co-teaches EAT courses in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. She also champions social

00:02:53.420 permaculture, the application of permaculture principles to social organizations, policy,

00:02:59.060 and strategy. She holds a BA in fine arts from UCLA in 1973. She received an MA in psychology

00:03:06.480 with a concentration in feminist therapy from Antioch University West in 1982. She has taught

00:03:13.300 in many Bay Area colleges and universities, including John F. Kennedy University, Antioch

00:03:18.820 West, the Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College and Wisdom

00:03:24.060 University. She is presently an adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

00:03:31.760 What an incredible life's work. Thank you so much for being on the show, Starhawk.

00:03:37.340 Oh, you're welcome.

00:03:39.020 So I would like to start this off by acknowledging the cloud of skepticism that surrounds paganism,

00:03:47.360 which dishonors the long lines of ancient European cultures that were rooted in the

00:03:54.520 sacredness of the earth and our inextricable connection to all that is life, spirit, and

00:04:02.420 elemental. And I was hoping that you could begin by taking us into this journey towards reclaiming

00:04:11.060 the ancestries of old Europe by sharing with us some tales of pagan goddess cosmology.

00:04:18.420 Perhaps a favorite creation story you have. Well, my favorite creation story comes from

00:04:25.540 the fairy tradition, which is to go back to the little people of Scotland from not just

00:04:34.220 before christianity but really even before the celtic invasion the story goes that the goddess

00:04:42.020 before anything was formed was alone out in the vast wildness of space and she got lonely and so

00:04:54.960 she divided herself in two she looked into the mirror of space and said whoa how beautiful i am

00:05:03.780 and suddenly that beauty became another being and she was so taken with her beauty she made love to

00:05:13.600 herself and that love making created an orgasmic ecstasy that vibrated and rippled out through the

00:05:22.800 universe and started to create the formation of all the things that exist but that that ripple

00:05:35.400 that wave was so strong that it actually tore the goddess's other self away from her and as it began

00:05:45.140 to circulate and move away she began to change form and become more different and become more

00:05:52.320 male and so that created a polarity of male and female but it's not a binary polarity the god

00:06:03.380 has an aspect of the blue god who's kind of androgynous and the flute playing joyful child

00:06:12.440 like love spirit and then the green god that's the god of plants and vegetation and finally the

00:06:20.480 horn god who is the god of the hunt and of the animal world but always they are circling back

00:06:29.960 to the goddess herself and so it's a cycle it's not a split really it's a movement and that

00:06:40.800 movement generates the energy that keeps the universe in motion and alive so that's the

00:06:50.220 creation myth I love, the idea that the universe is born in a great orgasm.

00:06:57.700 Thank you for sharing that. You know, recently I've spoken to Lila June, who's a daughter of

00:07:04.800 Denae, Cheyenne, and European lineages, and a student of global cycles of violence and the

00:07:11.440 destruction of many cyclical relationships between human beings and nature. And when she speaks of

00:07:18.920 the journey towards decolonization and reclaiming one's indigeneity, Lila reminds us that the same

00:07:26.260 violent and oppressive forces that precipitated the Native American genocide also waged war on

00:07:32.320 the original earth-centered cultures of Europe. So I'm wondering if you could talk about this

00:07:38.700 clashing of paradigms that occurred in old Europe and the relationship between the rise of the

00:07:45.760 Christian church and the dissemination of European indigenous women? You know I met Lila June when I

00:07:53.800 was at Standing Rock and I had the wonderful privilege of being in a sweat that she poured

00:08:00.340 and when I got there you know it was beautiful it was at dawn it was cold but we were all out

00:08:08.220 there getting ready and preparing for the sweat and I looked over and she was wearing a t-shirt

00:08:12.800 that said buddhika buddhika was an ancient queen of britain who waged rebellion against the romans

00:08:23.100 after her daughters were raped and came very close to overthrowing roman rule in britain so i found

00:08:30.280 that really amazing and then in the course of the sweat lila june was talking about the witch

00:08:36.500 persecutions and their impact and i had been meditating on that and on that question how do

00:08:44.480 people who have european heritage connect to our own indigenous roots because everybody if you go

00:08:53.080 back far enough has indigenous roots you know everybody comes from people who lived closely

00:09:00.300 with the land and lived in harmony with the land otherwise we wouldn't exist we wouldn't have

00:09:06.940 survived so it doesn't mean that get to walk in and claim like we're indigenous in certain spaces

00:09:15.500 but it does mean that we have a way path into that kind of understanding and sensibility

00:09:21.780 through our own ancestry if we choose to look for it and i had been meditating on that and

00:09:30.060 really got a message that European people need to come to terms with the witch burnings in order

00:09:37.640 to heal what happened was if you go very very far back I'm talking like 7000 BCE in Europe

00:09:48.820 you find cultures that were focused again on the mother that held women in high honor

00:09:57.260 that were centered around growing things and planting

00:10:02.000 and where the imagery of their religious life

00:10:06.380 was all about fertility, about regeneration.

00:10:11.320 It was images of things like plants and female bodies

00:10:15.240 and animals and life

00:10:19.220 and a rich, symbolic language that went along with that.

00:10:24.120 Those were cultures that were peaceable.

00:10:27.900 There's not a lot of evidence for warfare or violence.

00:10:31.660 And they are cultures that were relatively egalitarian.

00:10:34.940 There's not huge differences in grave goods or, you know, huge monuments for some people and nothing for other people.

00:10:43.880 Then there were invasions of peoples who came off Central Asia, who were sky god worshippers, who were horse cultures, who were a very different kind of social organization.

00:11:02.140 and you can look at european mythology you know you can look at things like the greek gods and

00:11:08.440 goddesses and you can really see in there this record of an older mythology that again is centered

00:11:17.920 around the mother and around the power of the earth and around life and regeneration

00:11:25.100 overlaid by a newer mythology that's centered around chieftains and warfare

00:11:31.940 and heroes that are heroes of war and violent.

00:11:39.500 And you'll have things like goddesses, someone like Aphrodite,

00:11:45.280 who originally was the great goddess in her own right, 0.99

00:11:49.580 becomes the love goddess and gets married off to a god. 0.84

00:11:53.040 Or Hira was another form of the great goddess, become sort of the queen of Zeus, the prime god.

00:12:03.840 And if you read the message, she's never actually all that happy about it.

00:12:10.460 So that was one transition that happened very early on.

00:12:17.340 You know, you can still trace it in things like culture and fairy tales,

00:12:21.040 and you can still trace remnants of that earlier sensibility.

00:12:27.580 In most of Europe, you know, a lot of that very old culture remained.

00:12:34.880 There were healing traditions.

00:12:37.240 There were rituals and rites of connection with the earth.

00:12:41.040 There were seasonal celebrations.

00:12:43.640 There were customs that put you, again, in touch with the earth.

00:12:50.080 Maybe it was something like making a harvest doll out of the last sheaf of wheat.

00:12:56.400 Or maybe it was something like going out in the middle of winter and wassailing the trees,

00:13:03.480 singing to the apple trees and offering them pails of apple cider as a gratitude offering.

00:13:12.180 I mean, there were thousands and thousands of different rituals.

00:13:16.100 Some of them actually still survive in different forms in Europe.

00:13:21.480 You know, you can still see Morris dancing in England

00:13:24.440 or something like the hobby horse in Padstow that comes out on the 1st of May.

00:13:32.720 A lot of times people have forgotten their original meaning,

00:13:36.160 but many of the rituals and customs still exist.

00:13:40.940 Here in Germany in May, every town has a maple.

00:13:44.220 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.

00:14:01.520 But in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the church was under this tremendous pressure because of economic changes going on in Europe, shifts in power balances, what happened was it was kind of like, just like today, we see this war on terrorism as an excuse for implementing all kinds of other law restrictions and consolidating or and keeping people from often confronting some of the

00:14:31.520 the real dangers because they're fixated on, you know, these potential dangers of terrorism.

00:14:39.400 Well, the church used witches in the same way.

00:14:43.160 The idea was if the peasants were afraid of witches, then they'd be, you know, looking

00:14:51.340 for the witches and looking for the, you know, suspecting their neighbors and attacking

00:14:56.920 their neighbors rather than uniting and rebelling against the overlords and against some of

00:15:04.540 the oppressive practices of the church at the time.

00:15:08.740 And so they unleashed the persecution against witches, and they really created a whole ideology

00:15:15.620 for it, the idea that these ancient customs and traditions were really the worship of

00:15:21.860 the devil and that women got together secretly and went out and you know had intercourse with

00:15:30.060 satan and did all kinds of evil things they unleashed a horrible wave of persecution

00:15:36.840 in europe that took the lives of tens of thousands women and men over a period of several hundred

00:15:46.040 years from the late 1400s until the early 1600s. In America, the Salem witch trials at the end of

00:15:55.260 the 1600s were kind of like the very tail end of that. But more than the actual numbers of people

00:16:03.400 killed, it was what it did to the psyche of Europe. It made the old healing traditions and

00:16:13.420 the herbalism and the women who practiced it seem suspect. Forms of knowledge that didn't come

00:16:19.720 from male authority and the approved authorities were suspect and dangerous. It made anything that

00:16:27.540 had to do with intuition, with a view of the world that saw life infusing matter and infusing 1.00

00:16:36.980 the natural world it made that all suspect and dangerous it made women who held property or who

00:16:47.100 had power or who stood up and had independent thoughts and stood up for themselves and became 0.88

00:16:56.160 prominent it made those women targets and it made i think deep inside our psyche as women is

00:17:05.760 a fear that actually I think is

00:17:09.340 an old archetypal collective unconscious fear that

00:17:13.400 comes from those times of being visible, being

00:17:17.280 seen, stepping forward, making yourself a whole new

00:17:21.380 root ball. So, you know, there

00:17:25.300 are many, many ways in which when we try to

00:17:29.460 get back to our own indigenous roots, it's like we 0.81

00:17:33.260 hit this block that makes all of that seem scary and dangerous or ridiculous and, you 0.99

00:17:45.340 know, not approved of.

00:17:48.160 And I think it makes it hard for us to go back through that path to our own roots when

00:17:55.540 we have European heritage.

00:17:57.660 which makes it seem much easier to take somebody else's heritage.

00:18:04.380 But then that often becomes kind of a form of cultural appropriation.

00:18:09.540 So I think it's important for us to know that history.

00:18:12.560 If we know that history, then we don't have to be ruled by it.

00:18:16.760 And we can allow that fear to pass through and say,

00:18:20.180 okay, behind that fear there may be enormous treasures of wisdom

00:18:26.280 and understanding and ways of connection to the natural world

00:18:32.340 and to one another and to that deep sense of compassion

00:18:38.720 and creativity and regeneration that infuses the universe

00:18:43.620 and that we like to call goddess.

00:18:56.280 là y oh

00:18:59.800 ô

00:19:00.800 $

00:19:04.000 o

00:19:05.440 $

00:19:06.680 y

00:19:12.040 s

00:19:13.540 y

00:19:15.280 0

00:19:15.540 sh

00:19:16.320 y

00:19:17.320 y

00:19:25.480 Sug as a place that is like

00:19:46.580 I don't think of him

00:19:54.060 My goodness, what a beautiful journey

00:20:20.220 that you just took us through this history

00:20:22.100 and how fear is keeping people from looking back

00:20:27.720 or keeping women from reclaiming this indigeneity.

00:20:33.100 It's just fascinating to explore the roots of the suppression of the feminine

00:20:38.240 and how malevolent depictions of women have trickled through history.

00:20:44.260 And, you know, I actually looked up the word witch in the dictionary

00:20:48.020 and it just receives this dark connotation.

00:20:51.220 And the dictionary literally says a woman thought to have evil magic powers, an ugly or unpleasant old woman or a girl or woman capable of enchanting or bewitching a man.

00:21:04.520 So it's really sad, of course, to see this disconnection and the separation to women's roots, indigenous roots, European roots.

00:21:14.280 And what's so beautiful is many Western women at this point have begun to reclaim the title of witch as healers or life givers and earth tenders and protectors.

00:21:25.160 And I'm wondering if you could speak to the power of reclaiming the identity of woman and witch in this modern context.

00:21:38.160 Yes. I mean, I think, as you've been saying, the word witch has sort of a dual connotation.

00:21:44.600 One is the dangerous, evil, ugly, old hag, and the other is the young, beautiful, but dangerously seductive woman. 0.96

00:21:55.700 For a lot of us who consider ourselves witches, it's been important to reclaim the word, 0.98

00:22:00.960 Because reclaiming the word means bringing forth that history and facing it and no longer having it be a kind of shadow in the unconscious, but rather being able to understand it consciously and consciously say, hey, we're willing to claim our power as women.

00:22:19.740 and we are willing to stand forth and not be afraid

00:22:23.980 and to say that there are many sources of knowledge and wisdom

00:22:28.060 and not all of them come from the male authorities or the academy

00:22:33.220 that our intuition and our deep sense of knowing and our spirituality

00:22:40.440 are also valid forms of knowledge.

00:22:45.200 Thank you.

00:22:46.280 and I would love to talk more about the importance of ritual in reclaiming an earth-centered

00:22:53.940 worldview and you had mentioned rituals and I'm wondering how can these rituals help us engage

00:23:01.300 and grow into deeper relationships with the land and ourselves and one another and then furthermore

00:23:09.540 how do they help us engender creative power in political and earth activism?

00:23:18.960 Well, a ritual is something that you do that lends a particular deep kind of importance to what you do it about.

00:23:27.640 If you do rituals that celebrate the cycles of the season, it's a way of saying,

00:23:32.360 you know what, the turning of the season means something, it's important, it's something to pay attention to.

00:23:38.720 It has resonances in our own changes, in our own growth and development.

00:23:44.260 If you do rituals to celebrate your life passages,

00:23:47.620 again, it's saying, like, this is something important.

00:23:50.280 This is something that needs to be marked.

00:23:54.360 You imagine if somebody dies and there's no ceremony,

00:23:58.540 there's no funeral, there's no memorial,

00:24:01.660 how empty, how unfinished that would feel.

00:24:05.740 And the same thing if someone is born.

00:24:07.800 You want to celebrate. You want to honor that.

00:24:10.620 You want to do something to say, hey, this marks a really important change

00:24:15.780 and a really important occasion.

00:24:18.540 So when you do a ritual, it's a way of often taking emotional, psychic, abstract ideas

00:24:28.120 and turning them into concrete actions

00:24:32.380 so that it speaks to many dimensions of yourself,

00:24:38.660 not just the intellectual self, but also the emotional self,

00:24:43.520 the sensual self, the embodied self, what we call your younger self.

00:24:50.280 So if you're doing a ritual, for example, to celebrate the spring,

00:24:58.380 then you think about what are those symbols.

00:25:02.380 There are other things that symbolize or embody those forces of renewal and regeneration, you know.

00:25:09.960 And that's why so many of the spring rituals involve things like eggs.

00:25:16.140 Also, if you live close to the earth and you raise chickens, you know that in the spring they start laying eggs again.

00:25:24.620 It's great after the winter when they haven't been laying so many.

00:25:28.760 You might have things like spring buds or spring flowers or green for the color of growth

00:25:35.860 and the new shoots coming out of the earth or seeds, you know, and do something around

00:25:41.060 planting seeds and think about what are you planting in the garden, but also what seeds

00:25:46.300 are you planting for yourself for the coming year.

00:25:49.960 So in some ways, ritual is kind of like poetry in that it's taking abstract ideas and turning

00:25:57.920 them into concrete, sensual images that you then enact, and that brings about a change.

00:26:08.300 So when we think about political action, the definition I've always liked for magic is

00:26:14.760 the art of changing consciousness at will.

00:26:17.900 That's Dionne Fortune's definition.

00:26:19.940 She was an occultist in the early part of the 1900s.

00:26:25.460 but I think that's also a good definition for political action

00:26:32.360 that it's not just about changing who holds power

00:26:36.640 or changing a particular policy.

00:26:39.800 It's about changing the consciousness.

00:26:42.520 It's not even just about stopping something like the code access pipeline.

00:26:47.660 It's about changing the consciousness that allows that pipeline

00:26:51.520 to even be conceived of or built in the first place.

00:26:55.480 And to do that, we need all kinds of activism, including ritual,

00:27:02.780 including symbolic acts that we take specifically to shift that consciousness.

00:27:11.780 So again, my guest Standing Rock, it was very beautiful to be in a space

00:27:15.580 that was consciously held as a spiritual space

00:27:19.020 and where people really said over and over again,

00:27:21.940 And everything we do is an act of prayer.

00:27:24.380 If we march to the gate or we march up to the place where they're drilling

00:27:30.580 or we take a foot of sacred land, all of that is a prayer.

00:27:35.820 It's a ceremony.

00:27:36.580 A ceremony isn't just what you do in the sweat lodge or meditating under a tree.

00:27:43.020 It can be marching on the street.

00:27:45.120 It can be writing a letter to your congressperson.

00:27:49.380 It can be anything you do with that focused intention.

00:27:53.720 It reminded me of a quote from a working definition of reclaiming, and it's quoted,

00:28:00.940 We know that to name these things as sacred is an inherently political act.

00:28:07.240 For what is sacred must not be exploited or despoiled.

00:28:11.460 We also know that action in the world, in the service of the sacred, is one of the core expressions of our spirituality.

00:28:18.400 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.

00:28:35.160 And I think talking about the decay of cultural ceremony has accompanied the rise of hegemony and capitalism.

00:28:46.760 You know, most of us grow up deprived of traditions that ground us in the earth and our communities and our unique gifts.

00:28:57.440 And resultant is a disconnected fog that blankets our society.

00:29:02.760 And the young people of today are left stumbling for purpose, yearning, perhaps even unconsciously, for guidance from their elders.

00:29:13.220 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?

00:29:28.620 and what have we collectively lost as a culture by shedding such customs?

00:29:35.500 I think initiation ceremonies for young people are very important.

00:29:40.860 They're part of how a culturist society helps young people make that transition

00:29:46.480 from child to adult or from adolescent to adult.

00:29:51.580 And again, they're a way of marking it, of saying,

00:29:53.780 hey, these changes your body is going through, they're important.

00:29:58.180 And you're important.

00:29:59.580 You are an important member of the community,

00:30:03.960 and the community is here to help you go through this change

00:30:09.260 and be welcomed as part of us.

00:30:12.580 So in our community, reclaiming, which we've mentioned a couple times,

00:30:16.500 is our tradition of the craft, of witchcraft, our goddess tradition

00:30:22.720 and that is very much involved also in political activism and personal healing

00:30:30.440 and in earth healing as part of our spiritual tradition.

00:30:36.300 We do coming-of-age ceremonies for young women to celebrate their first menstruation

00:30:44.460 because we feel it's important that this is recognized as something that's beautiful and natural

00:30:51.720 and not something to be ashamed of.

00:30:55.500 So we'll do something like take the girl and her mother out to the hills or the beach

00:31:02.420 and tie their hands together, and they run together as far as the mother can run. 0.91

00:31:08.040 And when she gets tired, we cut them apart and let the daughter run on alone.

00:31:13.200 And then we go back to someone's house, 0.80

00:31:15.920 And we spend an afternoon telling stories about our own first menstruation, giving her gifts.

00:31:25.280 And then in the end, there's a big feast of red foods that the men prepare.

00:31:31.460 And she's welcomed by the men and also people who are of fluid gender

00:31:36.440 because we feel it's important that young girls know

00:31:43.840 that this is something the whole community can celebrate.

00:31:47.460 Again, it's not something shameful or something embarrassing.

00:31:50.880 It's something to be celebrated.

00:31:55.360 And we do a similar ritual for the young men

00:31:57.520 where, again, they go through a challenge

00:32:01.120 and the men take them off and instruct them in mysteries

00:32:05.560 and then they come back and are welcomed by the community

00:32:10.060 and by men and women both.

00:32:13.440 I think every traditional culture has some kind of rite of passage.

00:32:18.920 And I think without that, young people create their own,

00:32:23.060 and often their own will involve something like drugs or alcohol

00:32:27.020 or some other kind of risk-taking.

00:32:29.120 because I think intuitively we know we need that challenge.

00:32:35.600 We need to face something difficult and overcome it

00:32:39.920 or face a danger and get through it

00:32:45.120 in order to develop that sense of self and confidence and strength

00:32:49.580 that you need to have in dealing with the adult world.

00:32:53.800 So if culture doesn't provide that,

00:32:56.000 And I think young people try to find that for themselves and oftentimes get into some bad situations as a result.

00:33:26.000 We've been through so many changes

00:33:33.360 Seen our fortunes on the ground

00:33:37.220 Catch my eye and I could show you

00:33:45.220 Where I've been with until now

00:33:48.160 Almost done but getting on some

00:33:51.660 We're pulling it back together

00:33:59.860 Listen to me catch the meaning

00:34:07.840 Of the words that slip away

00:34:11.540 We are weary only

00:34:18.900 thank you for that analysis and also for sharing the stories of the initiation for young women i

00:34:29.080 got chills when you were speaking about the young woman and her mother running down the beach that

00:34:35.360 was beautiful and while thinking about cultural ceremony and how we make relation to our world

00:34:43.440 the dominant paradigm is so afraid of dying. The medical system is framed in a way of beating

00:34:51.320 death or killing that disease or, you know, extending life in unnatural ways. And we are

00:34:58.080 in turn profoundly disassociated from death. And, you know, we don't touch our dead. We

00:35:04.020 no longer bury the bodies of our loved ones directly in the earth that nourish them. And

00:35:10.440 many of us have hollow, if any, customs to honor ancestors. So this severance with our relationship

00:35:18.680 to death has left us out of touch with the circle of life, and it's impacting the way we heal from

00:35:25.260 loss and connect to our existences. So I'm wondering, how does the pagan view of death

00:35:35.000 differ from that of the dominant paradigm?

00:35:39.080 And how do you think this relationship with death shapes the way we live?

00:35:44.080 I think in paganism, we see death as being part of life.

00:35:48.700 It's not something to be feared, although it's certainly not something you rush towards.

00:35:54.800 But it's a natural part of life.

00:35:57.280 It's something we will all experience.

00:36:00.720 And without it, there is no life. 0.72

00:36:03.160 there could be, you know, if we didn't die and make way for another generation, there

00:36:09.740 would be no way that we could all live here on this earth.

00:36:14.080 So, and many pagan traditions believe in some form of rebirth, that when you die, your spirit

00:36:23.960 continues on and you come back again in another form at another time.

00:36:30.460 So we have ceremonies, you know, when someone is dying,

00:36:35.040 we tend to gather and be with them and tell them stories about how they've impacted our lives,

00:36:44.000 sing to them, meditate, pray with them, kind of sing them over into the other world.

00:36:51.040 And we have memorials, of course, for people who've died where we can remember them

00:36:55.480 and tell stories about them and comfort the people who are left behind.

00:37:02.120 But death can be a beautiful thing.

00:37:05.780 Again, it's a natural thing that's part of the whole cycle of life.

00:37:12.060 It's not an ending.

00:37:13.840 It is an opening into some other dimension.

00:37:19.160 We also have rituals like our Samhain ritual on Halloween every year

00:37:23.920 where we honor our beloved dead, mourn them,

00:37:27.940 and where we like to think the dead can come back and visit you for a night.

00:37:32.780 That's the original origin of a lot of those Halloween customs,

00:37:36.220 like candles and pumpkins were lights to help your ancestors

00:37:42.360 find their way back to your house and come back for a visit.

00:37:46.680 It kind of all comes back to community

00:37:50.400 and having people around you to celebrate and to engage in these rituals and customs and

00:38:00.180 in recent decades you know we've seen waves of people attempt to create alternative communities

00:38:07.300 in resistance to the capitalist system such as homesteading communes etc yet the idea of

00:38:15.120 a flourishing community is often romanticized and it's underestimating the hard work it takes

00:38:22.880 to create one. And in the wake of an individualistic paradigm, people struggle to truly

00:38:30.520 build collaborative and regenerative relationships to one another. I was just reading one of your

00:38:37.380 more recent books, The Empowerment Manual, A Guide for Collaborative Groups, and it dives into this.

00:38:43.860 So I'm wondering if you could tell us some of the common struggles you've witnessed.

00:38:49.080 Do you believe that these challenges stem from our current cultural conditioning, or are there inherent flaws in human beings?

00:39:01.240 Yeah, I wrote the Empowerment Manual because I've been working in different kinds of groups for many decades,

00:39:10.900 and I kept seeing them all run into the same kinds of problems,

00:39:14.780 mostly involving how do you deal with conflict.

00:39:18.660 And particularly groups that define themselves as non-hierarchical,

00:39:23.460 as not having a top-down structure,

00:39:26.920 I think need some other tools for dealing with conflict

00:39:30.760 because we grew up in families where, you know,

00:39:34.620 mom can kind of come in and say,

00:39:36.240 hey, you kids, shut up, stop fighting. 0.92

00:39:39.360 Be good to your brother. 0.99

00:39:40.620 He's younger than you.

00:39:42.820 And when we're in our collectives or our permaculture guilds or whatever

00:39:48.360 and everybody's an equal, there's nobody who has the authority to come in and say,

00:39:52.560 hey, you kids, stop that.

00:39:54.700 Behave yourself.

00:39:56.840 So we need other tools for getting people to behave respectfully

00:40:03.940 and think well of one another

00:40:07.660 and be willing to face the uncomfortable process

00:40:12.660 of actually dealing with our conflicts directly.

00:40:18.600 So in the empowerment manual,

00:40:20.880 I talk about different tools for communication

00:40:24.360 and for allocating power in groups

00:40:28.820 and for mediating and resolving conflicts.

00:40:33.940 And my hope is that it helps, I feel like, if our groups function more effectively, then everything we do is more effective.

00:40:44.200 Could you share with us some of these tools to navigate or reconcile conflict?

00:40:50.640 Well, one of my favorites comes out of the world, actually, a business management group headed by a guy named Peter Senge, where they talk about the learning organization.

00:41:02.200 and he talks about backing down the ladder of inference,

00:41:07.300 that something happens, you know, an event happens.

00:41:11.180 You know, I walk into a party and I see my neighbor.

00:41:14.320 I go to the table to sit down and talk to her

00:41:16.200 and she gets up and goes away.

00:41:18.740 You know, that's the event.

00:41:20.500 That's what a video camera would record.

00:41:23.920 Well, that generates feelings in me.

00:41:26.160 Maybe I feel hurt or surprised or shocked or rejected.

00:41:30.680 And that feeling tends to make me start thinking of data to support it.

00:41:40.160 So I'm thinking back on all the times that neighbor has said something disrespectful

00:41:45.700 or got mad at me, whatever, and I start trying to find a reason for her behavior.

00:41:53.420 And maybe that reason I come up with is she's mad at me about this certain thing

00:42:00.200 or she hates me or she doesn't like me for this reason or that reason.

00:42:05.660 And then that reinforces the feeling.

00:42:08.560 And it can finally lead to, you know, an action on my part.

00:42:16.320 You know, I might be telling myself a story about, you know, 0.67

00:42:21.440 she's a terrible person like all those other mean girls in high school 0.96

00:42:26.620 that never liked me.

00:42:27.720 and I'm just going to have to do something about this

00:42:32.040 because it's so uncomfortable I can't stand not doing anything.

00:42:36.420 I'm going to go up and just like say,

00:42:39.420 I won't say it because it's a podcast, right? 0.68

00:42:45.060 I'm going to say something nasty right to her face, you know,

00:42:48.240 and then I do that and that creates another event.

00:42:51.820 Whereas if I can back down that ladder and sort of say, 0.97

00:42:56.380 okay here's what happened she got up and walked away i actually don't know why she did that

00:43:02.580 rather than whipping myself up into this whole cycle of emotional frenzy maybe i could back down 1.00

00:43:13.660 and ask hey suzy at that party last night i came over to sit down to talk to you and you got up

00:43:22.680 and walked away what's going on you know i might even disclose some of my discomfort or my

00:43:31.220 you know assumptions and check them out and see if they're true you know i wondered if you're

00:43:38.180 angry at me about something would you be willing to talk to me about it and you know to listen to

00:43:47.360 When I hear it, I might hear, yeah, I am angry at you about this and that.

00:43:52.260 Or I might hear, no, I'm angry, but not at you, right?

00:43:56.820 Or I might hear, I ate something terrible and just had to rush to the bathroom, you know.

00:44:03.500 I don't know what it is until I actually ask and check it out.

00:44:08.580 And I think if we become more skillful at doing that, then we can actually certainly avoid escalating conflicts

00:44:18.480 and sometimes resolve conflicts much more simply.

00:44:23.320 It's when we whip ourselves into our assumptions about what other people are thinking and feeling and doing

00:44:30.180 and why they're doing things that we get entrenched often

00:44:35.900 in some really negative patterns in groups and organizations.

00:44:40.140 That makes so much sense.

00:44:42.320 And, you know, another thing when I'm contemplating the success of communities

00:44:48.300 or relationships, my thoughts turn to the elements of power,

00:44:55.340 responsibility, accountability, trust.

00:45:00.180 which are kind of hard to define and difficult to uphold, but essential to examine.

00:45:08.500 So I'm wondering, how does one balance power and responsibility within leadership roles?

00:45:17.440 Well, in the Empowerment Manual, I talk about what I call the talisman of healthy groups,

00:45:22.620 which is like a magic circle with power and responsibility being one axis

00:45:30.000 and accountability, communication, and trust being the other axis.

00:45:37.460 And I think we balance power and responsibility when people gain power in a group

00:45:44.240 by taking on responsibility and fulfilling it.

00:45:48.240 And when people take on a responsibility, the group empowers them.

00:45:53.560 The group gives them the authority, the license to use power to do what it is they need to do.

00:46:01.400 If those two things are in balance, then a group is much healthier

00:46:06.500 and has a much healthier chance of surviving and thriving.

00:46:17.340 I want, I want, I want nobody, nobody, to run my life, nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody,

00:46:47.340 Thank you.

00:47:17.340 As we envision this forthcoming cultural shift, a spectrum of options for governance structures

00:47:31.700 arise. We have anarchism and socialism, which often surface as healthier alternatives to our

00:47:38.300 current state. Do either of these frameworks resonate with you, and what can we learn from

00:47:44.560 them in your opinion um sometimes i've identified both as an anarchist and a socialist right uh in

00:47:54.340 that what i like about anarchism is the idea of decentralization and of each person being

00:48:02.000 you know their own authority and of mutual care mutual responsibility but i actually believe we

00:48:13.680 need government at this point in history if only to protect ourselves from the greed and

00:48:20.320 rapaciousness of corporations and capitalism what i like about socialism is it says hey we

00:48:27.360 get together and we collectively uh care for one another we pool our resources so that everybody

00:48:36.320 has something and i think that we very much need to do that in many ways there are many ways in

00:48:42.400 which, you know, we do, right, from things like, you know,

00:48:48.760 providing education and things like roads and public health and all of that.

00:48:56.020 And I think we actually need to do more of that,

00:49:01.320 that we should be providing things like health care for everybody,

00:49:05.920 not just tied to work and not even just tied to Obamacare,

00:49:10.420 but something like what other civilized countries have,

00:49:15.120 a single-payer system where everyone's entitled to health care.

00:49:19.680 We need to be providing education for everyone.

00:49:23.400 It shouldn't be something you go into debt for half your life

00:49:26.900 in order to get an education.

00:49:29.660 And society should say, hey, it benefits all of us

00:49:32.820 to have an educated population.

00:49:36.000 So we need to be willing to provide that for the next generation.

00:49:40.420 So for me, I think a healthy government is one that is committed to protecting those things that actually sustain life

00:49:52.020 and defending them and putting resources toward them.

00:49:55.200 So protecting the environment, protecting our health, educating the next generation, protecting our safety,

00:50:08.020 not just with military defense, kind of a last resort,

00:50:13.820 but there are so many other ways that we need to protect our safety.

00:50:20.820 And I think that we need to do that collectively with something like fire department.

00:50:29.960 We need to do things collectively that are too big to do individually.

00:50:34.500 And I think we need that collective power, again, to protect us from the greed of the unbridled forces of capitalism.

00:50:48.900 So my last question for you is around activism and the New Age.

00:50:54.040 And I know that essential to many New Age thinkers is the power of transforming your consciousness in order to bring about change.

00:51:03.200 and there is a potency to that but I think there lies a fine balance between maintaining a positive

00:51:10.320 consciousness and opening up to the grief of the world to mourn the death of species

00:51:17.460 and to empathize as suffering is to show respect and to feel that pain is to fiercely love

00:51:25.320 and that letting the grief into your heart isn't the end but only the beginning of a path towards

00:51:32.320 action. Now, I've read that your work in permaculture and earth activist training,

00:51:37.820 among many other endeavors, embodies this merging of personal transformation and tangible action.

00:51:46.160 So I'm curious if you could share any ideas how the consciousness movement

00:51:51.120 and the New Age can ally with resistance activism.

00:51:55.100 yeah i think the thing about changing your consciousness is you don't change consciousness

00:52:02.420 in a vacuum you know we're not living somewhere in outer space where there's pure consciousness

00:52:08.340 and nothing else your consciousness is always interacting with everything else going on around

00:52:13.440 you and part of how you transform your consciousness is by engaging with what's going on around you

00:52:20.060 and by acting with integrity.

00:52:23.640 So if you have a belief that says nature is sacred 1.00

00:52:27.720 and you see idiots destroying her all around, 1.00

00:52:33.220 you can't just sit back on your behind. 1.00

00:52:36.200 You have to take action and try to both prevent the harm 0.86

00:52:40.740 and generate the good.

00:52:44.100 If you believe that human beings are sacred vessels of spirit

00:52:49.960 and light, then you can't sit back around when police are shooting young black men or 0.67

00:52:59.960 women, you know, just because of their color.

00:53:03.320 You need to be active and working for justice. 0.98

00:53:07.160 And in taking that action, there are thousands and thousands of opportunities to have experiences

00:53:13.920 that allow you to engage and also transform your consciousness.

00:53:19.960 Because again, transformation isn't something that just happens when you're sitting up on the mountain meditating.

00:53:26.600 Real transformation happens with every act you take, every step you take, everything you do in your daily life,

00:53:34.180 everything you engage with as part of your transformative journey.

00:53:41.180 Well, thank you so much, Starhawk, for taking the time to speak with us today.

00:53:45.380 And I should probably say to people who do teach permaculture design courses

00:53:52.160 with a grounding in spirit and a focus on organizing and activism,

00:53:57.320 you can find them at my website, starhawk.org, or earthactivisttraining.org.

00:54:04.240 We have one coming up in the summer in the Midwest

00:54:11.020 and in January in Northern California.

00:54:15.380 and also a couple in Europe this summer.

00:54:19.120 I also am a writer, and my book, The Fifth Sacred Thing,

00:54:24.020 which kind of envisions the future rooted in balance and permaculture and justice,

00:54:32.960 it's now actually all as an audio book that people can get on Amazon or Audible or iTunes.

00:54:41.460 and it's the sequel

00:54:44.620 City of Refuge

00:54:46.320 just came out last year

00:54:49.200 and that's also available

00:54:51.160 online and through my website

00:54:54.040 at starhawk.org

00:54:55.440 and many other places

00:54:56.680 Thank you for listening to Starhawk

00:55:01.160 on For the Wild podcast

00:55:02.700 I'm Ayanna Young

00:55:04.160 This episode was produced in collaboration

00:55:07.040 with Living Village Culture

00:55:08.620 and The Compass at Lightning in a Bottle

00:55:11.960 Starhawk, along with myself and many other visionaries, will be speaking this year at the festival, so please join us.

00:55:19.200 And don't miss Mentoring the Movement panel with Starhawk, Paul Stamets, Penny Livingston, and James Stark, moderated by me at The Compass at LIB, and get activated.

00:55:32.280 The music you heard today was Abigail Washburn with The Lost Lamb, then Magna Carta, Putting It Back Together.

00:55:40.060 followed by power by the irresistible force our theme music is silence return by beau

00:55:48.300 and like a river by kate wolf the show is produced and edited by myself and march young

00:55:53.960 and our research director is madison mogulski please visit for the wild dot world and check

00:56:00.300 out our other projects and donate if you can next week i'll be facilitating a webinar with

00:56:05.460 Joanna Macy on keeping sane and active amid mass psychosis. Register on forthewild.world

00:56:12.280 or tune in on Facebook Live on For the Wild's page and leave comments and share. It will be

00:56:19.360 May 18th at 6 30 p.m pacific standard time. Also the native species nursery will commence next week

00:56:26.860 with pond building and earthworks. Stay tuned on social media and watch the meadow be transformed.

00:56:35.460 Thank you.

For The Wild - May 13, 2017

STARHAWK on the Roots and Shoots of Earth-based Community ⧸46

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