Permaculture is a movement whose time has arrived. We’re all concerned about “global weirding” (climate change), and according to Starhawk, permaculture offers a set of simple solutions to this problem. In my last post (and the accompanying video), Starhawk talked specifically about how permaculture would sequester carbon in the soil.
Carbon Farmers of America is a group that’s taking this issue seriously. Star explained that they’re funding research to discover the best practices for large-scale building of soil and paying farmers for every ton of carbon dioxide they capture in new topsoil by marketing carbon sinks to the public to fund the work. Topsoil has the capacity as a carbon sink to capture the excess carbon in our atmosphere. And our soils desperately need that carbon. So this group is creating a win-win situation, really taking the permaculture saying “Pollution is the solution,” and applying it directly to “global warming” and topsoil depletion.
Permaculture for Starhawk is a practical application of Paganism. This is the link that connects the Goddess(es) and our vegetable gardens. The Goddess, as we know her within Wicca and other forms of Paganism, represents the cycles of birth – growth – death – decay – and regeneration, exactly the cycles that permaculture deals with in a more pragmatic way.
To say that the Goddess is sacred doesn’t mean you have to believe in something outside of yourself, according to Starhawk. It simply means that you need to shift your attitude towards viewing these natural cycles as amazing, even miraculous. Spiritually, we need to pay attention to how they’re happening around us all the time. They are the ways we connect with each other most deeply and with all other life forms on the planet. If we approach them with awe, reverence, and respect, these natural processes will lead us into ways of living and working that will create more health, abundance, beauty, and biodiversity as well as more joy and freedom on the planet. And if we don’t, Starhawk admonishes, we’ll get the mess we’re in today.
Starhawk was generous with her time while she was here in Madison a month ago. She granted me two interviews, the first about Palestine and the second — which I will begin to post today now that I’m back from my vacation — about permaculture. For those of you who don’t know her, Starhawk is the best-known Wiccan author alive today. She’s published eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, which introduced many of us to Wicca. From the beginning of her career, she’s been very involved as an activist, and since the 1990s she’s been most active in promoting permaculture.
Star came to permaculture as a natural outgrowth of her Paganism. After many years in the Goddess movement — where we declared that the Earth was a sacred, living organism that manifests Herself in the cycles of birth, growth, death, and regeneration that occur in all of nature, including our own human culture — Star discovered permaculture. She soon realized it was a practical application of her spiritual path.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused Israel of increasing its arbitrary repression of Palestinian non-violent activism lately. Abdullah Abu Rahma’s arrest — which I reported on in the second segment of my interview with Starhawk — is part of this crack-down in Bil’in, Nil’in, and Ramallah, where grassroots demonstrations have begun to mobilize Palestinians, Israelis, and international solidarity against the wall being built between the occupied territories and Israel. According to HRW,
Israel is building most of the barrier inside the West Bank rather than along the Green Line, in violation of international humanitarian law. In recent months, Israeli military authorities have arbitrarily arrested and denied due process rights to several dozen Palestinian anti-wall protesters.
Starhawk believes that the Israeli government fears this non-violent resistance more than the violent action they’ve contended with for years. Why? Because the government knows the movement’s power to shift public opinion and mobilize people against Israeli injustice. These grassroots efforts undermine several pillars of Israeli control in the occupied territories, according to Starhawk, and start to shatter the story that Palestinians are all evil terrorists.
Like most Jewish kids in postwar America, Starhawk grew up believing that Israel was the salvation of the Jewish people. She collected pennnies to plant trees in the Holy Land, learned Israeli folk songs and Israeli dances, and dreamed of going to Israel. At 15 she finally attended a Zionist program in Israel.
Star believes that she was raised with a compelling story — that Jews were kicked around for 2,000 years, almost exterminated in the Holocaust, and out of those ashes, finally got their own land again. “And by God,” she adds, “nobody’s going to take an inch of it away from us.” This is a persuasive story for many people, according to Starhawk. But unfortunately, the Palestinians aren’t in it.
For Starhawk, as for many American Jews of her age, it was painful to face the injustice that Israel was carrying out against the Palestinian people. Star senses that much of this injustice stems on a deep psychological level from an inability to see the Palestinian people as people — with their own humanity, their own rights, their own desires and flaws. Denying Palestinians that full range of humanity — and acknowledging that their ranks include the good, the bad, the vicious, the kind, the compassionate — is at the root of the unjust treatment they receive. Seeing every Palestinian as a suicide bomber who wants to kill an Israeli will not resolve this conflict. Nor will denying the existence of the Palestinians.
Starhawk hopes that another compelling narrative will begin to take the place of the one that she grew up with. This is a tale that’s very familiar to readers of Tikkun. It’s the story that Judaism stands for justice, for the regneration of the world, for tikkun olam. This, too, is a powerful story. And Star believes that if we can call people back to that story — as painful as it is to face the truth of what Israel has done to Palestine — then we can actually stop this injustice.
For those of you who don’t know her, Starhawk is the best-known Wiccan author alive today. She’s published eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, which introduced many of us to Wicca. And from the beginning of her career, she’s been very involved as an activist, most recently supporting Palestinians in the occupied territories.
After spending last week with Starhawk, I realized that she’s a “meta-activist,” a node of many different types of activism, and a font of knowledge about how to act most effectively when demonstrating, educating, and building a new world. She’s been active in the women’s movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, in creating greater sustainability and a permaculture for the Earth, as well as in supporting Palestinian non-violence for the creation of a Palestinian state. Fortunately for all of us, as an active workshop presenter, Star has been passing along what she’s learned in all these areas. I interviewed her about two of those movements, the two p’s: Palestine and permaculture, and want to share those interviews over the next few days, beginning with her thoughts about Palestine.
This past December, Star planned to participate in the Gaza Freedom March, a demonstration of 1,400 people from 38 different countries that included a large contingent from France. The purpose of this gathering was to bring in much-needed humanitarian supplies as well as to call attention to the inhumane conditions in Gaza after the yearlong Israeli blockade that followed their bombing of Gaza.
As you may recall, Israel attacked about a year ago in response to rockets that Hamas shot into Israeli settlements. As Star reiterated in her comments, the international demonstrators came to support Palestinian non-violent resistance to Israel, and in no way condoned Hamas’ hostility. But Israeli aggression a year ago worsened an already difficult situation in Gaza, killing 1400 people, destroying 4,000 homes and 88 public buildings. Since then the Israeli blockade has kept needed supplies from reaching Palestinians in Gaza, resulting in abject poverty, malnutrition, and bad drinking water, as well as a lack of building materials and equipment to rebuild the devastated area. The state of affairs has deteriorated to the point where Gaza has become essentially an open-air prison with little to keep it going.
I’ve been organizing two Starhawk workshops here in Madison, so that’s why I haven’t been blogging recently. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that I hope to include an interview with her on this site in about two weeks. Who knows whether she’ll talk about Israel and Palestine, permaculture, the WTO, Wicca, or all of the above. She’s a multifaceted person, and the interveiw may be wide-ranging.
In other pagan news, many of you know that the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs had a problem with religious bigotry about five years back. Evangelical Christian cadets harassed other cadets who didn’t share their faith. There were anti-semitic slurs. And one of the chaplains claimed she was fired for criticizing the proselytizing that was going on. Even the Yale Divinity School issued a report on religious intolerance at the academy.
After much work to correct these problems, there seems to be greater openness in Colorado. In a few weeks, Earth-centered religions– including Wicca, Neopaganism, and Druidism — will dedicate their own worship space. This sacred site will increase the collection of worship areas at the academy that already includes Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist chapels. As opposed to the other indoor areas, the pagan site is a lovely stone circle on the top of nearby hill overlooking the academy. It was created by moving some large boulders that originally sat near the Visitor Center. Here’s what it looks like:
I’ve been reading the GoddessScholars list and surfing the web looking for eulogies of Mary Daly, the radical feminist theologian (from theos, ancient Greek for God) who made thealogy possible (from thea, ancient Greek for Goddess). And in reading through several of them, I’ve been remembering how important she was to me in the early 1970s. At that point in time, I could buy every book on feminism that came out, and I did. But not each one opened up my mind like Beyond God the Father.
I can tell from my notes that although it was published in 1973, I must have read it in 1974. At that time I was a graduate student in the German Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a founding member of the Feminist Criticism Collective. Feminist literary criticism didn’t exist at that time, so we were creating it as we went along.
Here are just a few of the important ideas I found in Beyond God the Father:
1) That women had “the power of naming stolen from them, and that the liberation of language is rooted in the liberation of ourselves” (p.8)
2) That in the women’s movement, “[W]omen are hearing ourselves and each other, and out of this supportive hearing emerge new words” (p. 8). I guess I must have forgotten that Daly originated this thought, because a couple of years later Nelle Morton said it again as a slogan, and that’s when it stuck for me. Morton said femininst “women were hearing each other into speech.”
3) That we needed to overcome “methodolatry” (p. 11).
Today we celebrated our annual water service at First Unitarian Society. Pouring water together that we had brought back to Madison from vacations in other spots, we celebrated our community gathering again after a summer spent apart.
Like rivers running to the sea,/We’re coming home… (UU hymn)
The worship service also commemorated water as the holy necessity it is in our lives: the sacred water that runs through our veins, the water we drink to maintain our lives, the water that brings the earth alive, the life-giving liquid flow that cycles through the clouds, the rain, the springs, the lakes, the streams, the rivers, finally streaming to the oceans, where it evaporates to become rain again. Without water, there is no life.
The ocean is the beginning of the earth./All life comes from the sea. (Wiccan chant by Starhawk)
I don’t normally read Thomas Friedman’s op. ed. pieces. But this one — “Connecting Nature’s Dots” — drew my attention, probably because of the word “Nature” in the headline. Practicing Wicca attunes me to nature, since to me it’s sacred. I ground my spirit in its rhythms (as the title of Starhawk‘s recent book The Earth Path proclaims). We are creatures of Mother Earth. She sustains us. And being in touch with Her cycles gives me significant insights into my life.
Thomas Friedman’s recent eco-safari in Africa seems to have brought this home to him. Of course, as a journalist, he sees it all from the perspective of a newspaper. In fact, you could sum up his piece as “Extra, extra, read all about it in the animal and insect tracks on the earth.” But I found his insight significant, nonetheless. Friedman’s guide, Map Ives — the 54-year-old director of sustainability for Wilderness Safaris, which supports ecotourism in Botswana — could read the tracks of passing animals as well as detecting the weather from their marks. More importantly, Ives pointed out all the interconnections and “free services” that nature provides.
Plants clean the air; the papyrus and reeds filter the water. Palm trees are growing on a mound originally built by termites. “If you spend enough time in nature and allow yourself to slow down sufficiently to let your senses work,” Ives said, “then through exposure and practice, you will start to sense the meanings in the sand, the grasses, the bushes, the trees, the movement of the breezes, the thickness of the air, the sounds of the creatures and the habits of the animals with which you are sharing that space.”
Before I started blogging for Tikkun Daily, my web publishing consisted of my own website, www.mamasminstrel.net, and articles in Matrifocus, the web magazine by and for Goddess women published four times a year. What I love about Tikkun Daily — the lively interaction that’s beginning to occur — is something I found in embryo in Matrifocus.
Matrifocus always has a wide variety of articles that inform me, entice me, lead me to think a little differently, and most importantly, feed my soul. Often it includes essays by some of he most interesting thinkers in feminist spirituality: Patricia Monaghan, Vicki Noble, Susun Weed, Max Dashu, Johanna Stuckey, and even occasionally Starhawk. It always includes poetry and beautiful art, as well reader-submitted reviews of Goddess books, DVDs, theater, and films.
Ritual is not a word that we Unitarian Universalists tend to use. We think of it as formal, rigid, hollow of any meaning, coming out of traditions that have prescribed rules and customs that we no longer perceive as valid. Ritual, as I said, is not a word that we UUs tend to use.
Unless we’re pagan UUs. Then the word has very different connotations and meanings. Ritual, for me as a pagan UU, has to do with creating an experience that shapes energy in a particular way with a particular group of people for a particular purpose. It’s will in action, directed energy. Ritual is a participatory experience. And as Margot Adler (another UU pagan) says (in Drawing Down the Moon),
Ritual seems to be one method of reintegrating individuals and groups into the cosmos, and to tie the activities of daily life with their ever present, often forgotten, significance….Just as ecological theory explains how we are interrelated with all other forms of life, rituals allow us to recreate that unity in a non-abstract, gut-level way. Rituals have the power to reset the terms of our universe until we find ourselves suddenly and truly “at home.”
