by Lena DeGloma, BA, LMT, CDLast week I had the rare opportunity (at least for a New Yorker) of being in the same room as beloved San Fransisco-based Starhawk, internationally known eco-feminist, peace activist, author, permaculture designer and teacher, and leading figure in the modern earth based spirituality movement. She was in the city giving a talk titled Letting the Wildness In hosted by Evolver.net.
Last year, as a group, the Nettle Patch read Starhawk’s first fiction novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing, a utopian tale set in the San Francisco Bay Area in the year 2048. The story follows the clan of the protagonist, Madrone, a midwife and healer living in the liberated zone of the Bay Area as their utopian community clashes with fascist forces (a coalition of greedy corporations and religious extremists) that have usurped power and turned the US into a disastrous world of chaos, oppression, environmental disaster, poverty, and suffering beyond imagination. The inspiring story details an alternative way of living and the power of human cooperation that rivals the oppressive forces of the fascist regime in the outside world. As herbalists reading this book, our group appreciated the image of a world where herbal medicine and natural healing are an integral part of the culture and where everyone in the community has access to healing and medical care; a community where the natural elements of the earth are viewed as sacred, not to be owned or controlled. Personally, I had read this book prior to ever studying herbal medicine when my life was more focused on community organizing, peace work and social justice than on the healing arts. At the time, as an activist and organizer, I was deeply inspired by Starhawk’s philosophy on social change. It was partly this novel that motivated me to expand my vision as an activist to include an understanding of sacredness, spirituality and healing. It was very exciting to finally see her live and soak up her powerful energy.
In a room packed with eager faces in the META center on 29th Street in Manhattan, Starhawk began her talk by reading the beginning of her new children’s book titled, The Last Wild Witch, an allegorical tale depicting a town that has shut out the “wildness” of nature, ignorant to the natural forces that govern life, and instead living by strict social rules. The adult population in the story is so disconnected from the natural world that they decide the surrounding “wild woods” must be destroyed for fear that their children would be influenced by the wild (and, even worse, by the “wild witch” living in the woods).
Halfway through the story Starhawk paused to discuss the dangers of becoming disconnected from nature, alluding to our diverse interconnected global crises. She expressed the idea that individual spiritual practice is to be the basis for engaging the current global crises. Her own spiritual practice used to be a more internally focused meditation practice, but has morphed into a form of meditation that centers on tuning her senses in to the natural world and fostering a state of receptivity, awareness and openness to the patterns, energies and forces of nature. She offered to us New Yorkers that this practice is equally profound in an urban setting. We should attune ourselves to the beauty and distinct energy of the urban ecology. She also suggested that those of us living in urban environments make a concerted effort to connect with nature, be it through spending time in our city parks, community gardens, or even connecting with the weeds growing through the cracks in the pavement. And obviously, at least every once in a while we should get out of the city altogether to sit in true wilderness.
“Letting the wildness in,” Starhawk teaches, is a twofold process. First, we must recognize that forces exist that are bigger than we are (which she feels is actually a comforting, not frightening, belief), and that some things in the world are just not to be “messed with.” She believes some forces, such as nuclear energy, are powerful parts of nature that we humans foolishly believe that we have enough control over to employ safely, when in fact, we do not. For example, some of the radioactive byproducts of nuclear power have half-lives of thousands or millions of years. What makes us think we can keep our current nuclear plants running long enough to keep these substances contained until they are inert? She cited the current nuclear disaster unfolding in the wake of the Japan earthquake/tsunami as a prime example. “Who continues to make decisions regarding how we use nuclear power?” she asked emphatically. “The same people who decided it was a good idea to put the back-up generators in the basement of the plant in an area at known risk for tsunamis!” Thus, to let the wildness in is to acknowledge and respect these types of powerful forces instead of myopically making use of them.
Second, in order to “let the wildness in,” we must let out the wildness that is in each of us. This involves acknowledging our natural and creative impulses, even when they clash with social norms, and being willing to push just a little bit beyond the parameters of social acceptability. Social control, Starhawk notes, is only minimally enacted directly by someone else and is, instead, much more often enforced internally through our own self-judgment. It is partly based on these subtle forces that the status quo of inequality, injustice, and environmental disregard is upheld. We must transform ourselves individually and push ourselves just a little bit past our comfort zones in order to break this power dynamic.
After this reflective interlude, Starhawk transitioned into reading us the end of her children’s book: when the adults of the town finally decide the best way to get rid of the “wild” forest is to burn it down, the children instinctively protest by running into the woods, farther and farther away, knowing that their parents won’t burn it down with them in there. The parents have no choice but to follow their children into the woods in search of them, deeper and deeper, until they eventually start to hear the sounds of the birds singing and the branches rustling in the wind. After some time in the woods they begin to realize that the forest is not such a scary place after all; over time they begin to integrate the woods and the wild witch into their society, creating a more balanced culture and stable ecology.
After she finished the story an open Q&A period began. I believe the first question Starhawk was asked is if there are any plans to turn her epic novel The Fifth Sacred Thing into a film. Everyone in the room seemed thrilled to hear that the answer is yes. They are still in the very beginning stages of gathering funds and searching for a director and producer, but it seems that even this early on there is a lot of interest and support. Starhawk is even working with a public official in San Francisco who is very supportive of her ideas to build various types of permaculture spaces to be used for the set that would actually become a permanent part of San Francisco. An exciting project indeed!
Starhawk answered a variety of other questions including how she envisions a balanced future for humans and our planet and how we can individually deal with the seemingly inevitable loss of hope in the face of enormous and apparently insurmountable challenges. Starhawk was hopeful and inspiring without sugar-coating the gravity of our current global situation. She did not hedge around the fact that there are strong economic and political forces that have a vested interested (albeit a short-sighted one) in either ignoring our problems or pushing things in the wrong direction. However, she believes that even when the task seems impossible we cannot give up. She gave examples in the history of our planet that demonstrate the impressive potential for life to change and adapt in the face of enormous environmental shifts. We must use our vast creative potential to expand our ecology and economy by employing more and more complex relationships between the different resources and systems that already exist as an alternative to continuing on the path of exploiting more and more resources in a finite world. She cited various examples where this is already in practice on a small scale and believes that it needs to be expanded more widely. This mostly exists where people are making use of permaculture principles to come up with holistic creative solutions in both urban and rural settings, integrating an understanding of our food systems, economic system, healthcare system and so on.
Among our many tasks as individuals, Starhawk relayed, a key responsibility is to be like the children in her story – to entice as many others as we can into the “wild” and to get them to take off their “blinders” so that they may connect with natural world in order to save it… and ourselves.
Starhawk ended the evening with a powerful chant set to the rhythm of her hand drum. The energy in the room dropped into a deeper spiritual plane as we sang together,
“The laugh of a child,
The grace of a tree,
In our hands their destiny;
The wild which sings of freedom and danger,
Be the change,
Be the changer!”
