February 2009 Archives

It was good to see someone I've been reading off and on for 20 years, and to hear of her permaculture and justice work, which she even manages to combine. For example, imagine coming up with composting toilets and the like for the G7 type protests over in Europe or wherever - then using the same technology to help victims of Hurricane Katrina! Starhawk is always where it's at!! Like when she met with shamans in South America and they came out of deep meditation realizing that maybe we did not have the TIME to stop global warming - maybe we were doomed - and she reminded them that witches and shamans can operate outside the normal realm of time!!

Starhawk talked about stories. The conservatives like stories that confirm people's sense of entitlement - endless expansion, globalization, the continuing tide of wealth lifting all boats. No tide keeps rising forever! Letting corporations roam free can't work and fraud is revealed daily, from Madoff's Ponzi scheme to sending youth to prison for kickbacks. Conservatives continue to stand behind policies that haven't worked, such as those of the neocons/"Chicago school."

She talked about how women, earth, minorities, workers were all devalued as "dark matter" vs the more cerebral and light and male corporate spirit. Yet she reminded us that "dirty could be good - to "go deep," "get down." She advocated new metaphors in which "balance" and emphasis on cycles were emphasized rather than "dark forces" or the "dark side" or "light being." She also spoke of a shift from objects to relationships, starting with our relationship with our self and then our community (so permaculture, buying locally, knowing what's around you.)

"We are mother earth's transition team," she said. The personal is political. We need to be "harpies" against war, killing and use of military rather than diplomatic solutions.

The most powerful moment for me came when she talked about women my age who were introduced to feminism in the 1970s and there was kind of a "woman good men bad" mentality. She wondered whether this had to do with the fact that for women my age (and hers), our fathers were veterans of WW2. As such, they were traumatized but had no way to socially process much of this. They were expected to be heroes in a glorious and their feelings and experiences were denied and repressed. Grief, loss, and fear were cut off and they became somewhat forgetful of events and distanced emotionally. For years, I had felt like it was just my father, who had "shell shock" and electroshock treatments at the VA, lost the ability to teach and never spoke much about the war. To think that it was a whole generation, and to think in terms of fatherhood as juxtaposed with their war experiences but collectively, was revelation to me. Starhawk concluded that trauma can disconnect, and that a shift to a world based on relationships is what we need.

On the personal level, she talked about how in consciousness raising groups, we would get together and talk about something, like "rape" and to do so was unheard of at the time. It would be surprising to find out how common of an experience rape, molestation and other exploitation actually was, and also to her this talked about aloud. The talking proceeded in a circle, without interrupting the speaker, to allow the quietest voices to be heard. I remember this! Getting the issue out in the open was powerful.

Beyond personal relationships, Starhawk advocated for extending relationship to community - to push against downsizing, pressures for productivity, lack of time off - against corporate culture. She reminded us that our wage had been flat since the 1970s, so women went to work, then hours got longer, then people started working two and three jobs, and finally they started to borrow money. It used to be possible to buy a modest house for around the same price as renting. Now people want mini-mansions with lots of square footage.

If we downsize and support our community, we are doing the opposite of globalizing as we are not serving first an abstract profit for someone far off. If you believe in killing off any aspect of the self of the world that you don't like, from pesticides for plants to "wars" for terrorists, you also kill off the "beneficials." Less hate is bred when we feed what we want to grow rather than killing what we don't want. (This line of thinking can easily be extended to events in the middle east.) The planet has people, not "haters" - we need to know their reasons and to listen - this is diplomacy. We are not small tribes anymore who can shut out outsiders - we need to draw a larger circle. Starhawk also advocated for saying "no" as well as "yes" - where "no" is the opposing of the wrong and "yes" is using ritual to action.