Photo by Zach Reiner

For The Wild presents Homebound as an offering of curated episodes from the archives intended to offer perspective and guidance in the midst of a time of tremendous uncertainty and possibility. In light of the personal and global impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak, our team has been drawing on wisdom from the archives to anchor us and help us to navigate this new reality. 

This week we’re reissuing this magical conversation with Starhawk, one of the most respected voices in modern Earth-based spirituality, that originally aired in 2017. A veteran of progressive movements, from anti-war to anti-nukes, Starhawk is deeply committed to applying the techniques and creative power of spirituality to political activism. She is the author or coauthor of twelve books, including The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, long considered the essential text for the Neo-Pagan movement, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, a call to re-conceive our political and economic systems at the very deepest levels, and the now-classic ecotopian novel The Fifth Sacred Thing. 

Starhawk’s call to bring together tools of spiritual empowerment with activism, asks us to critically examine systems of control and domination and our responses to them – including areas where we may be giving our power away unknowingly to so-called authority figures and/or systems and where sources of spiritual power may have been forcibly removed. During this global moment where governments are under pressure to uphold their end of the implicit social contract, it may behoove us to examine areas where fear may continue to dominate our thinking, and how we can reclaim our personal power during times of uncertainty by reclaiming a relationship to ritual, intuition, healing and nurturing power within.

Starhawk calls on us to ask ourselves:

• How do we define the world? What consciousness are we bringing and holding?

• Where have we internalized a culture of oppression so that we mirror it through our own minds and language?

• Do we have a frame of reference for the differences between types of power? “Power over” and its tentacles of dominion that we see at work in dominant culture vs. “power within” which is a spiritual birthright available to all of us, equally.

• How can we take our power back in day to day life – even while we are afraid right now?

• How can we build a supportive community, and foster healing at a distance?

Starhawk is a founder of Earth Activist Trainings (EAT), teaching permaculture design grounded in spirit and with a focus on organizing and activism. Together with Charles Williams and others, she co-teaches EAT courses in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. She also champions ‘social permaculture’: the application of permaculture principles to social organizations, policy and strategy. 

She has taught in many Bay Area colleges and universities, and is presently adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Starhawk travels internationally, lecturing and teaching permaculture, earth-based spirituality and ritual, and the skills of activism. She lives between San Francisco and West Sonoma, where she is developing a model of carbon-sequestering ranching, incorporating holistic management rotational grazing with sheep and goats, restorative forestry, food forests and perennial systems.

We invite you to continue to join us on Fridays to hear seeds of wisdom from the weavers of transformation and mobilizers of personal and cultural shift featured in Homebound.

♫ Music is "The Lost Lamb" by Abigail Washburn, "Putting It Back Together" by Magna Carta and “Power” by Irresistible Force