Starhawk: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Life demands honesty, the ability to face, admit, and express oneself.”

Starhawk

Life

“In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.”

Starhawk

Source: Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising

God

“There are times when it is inappropriate to feel wholly good. Now is one of them. As the saying goes, "If you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention."
This doesn't mean that we need to be in a constant state of rage or irritability or guilt. It means we need to use our magical tools to face the stark and overwhelming realities that confront us, acknowledge our feelings, and transmute them into the energy we need for change.”

Starhawk

Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

Feeling , Reality , Rage , Change

“The water we hold sacred is not some abstract image or fantasy of Water, but the real stuff that we need to drink and bathe and grow our gardens, that provides the crucial habitat for fish and plants and thousands of other creatures, that is the Earth's literal life blood.”

Starhawk

Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

Life , Drink , Fish , Water

“Another common, unspoken assumption is that spirituality is about calm and peace, and conflict is unspiritual. Which of course makes it hard to integrate the spiritual with the political, which is all about conflict.
In New Age circles, a common slogan is that "What you resist, persists." Truly spiritual people are never supposed to be confrontational or adversarial — that would be perpetuating an unevolved, "us-them" dualism.
I don't know from what spiritual tradition the "what you resist, persists" slogan originated, but I often want to ask those who blithely repeat it, "What's your evidence?" When it is so patently obvious that what you don't resist persists like hell and spreads all over the place. In fact, good, strong, solid resistance may be the only thing that stands between us and hell. Hitler didn't persist because of the Resistance — he succeeded in taking over Germany and murdering millions because not enough people resisted.”

Starhawk

Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

People , Age , Peace , Hell

“In the Craft, we do not believe in the Goddess — we connect with her; through the moon, the stars, the ocean, the earth, through trees, animals, through other human beings, through ourselves. She is here. She is within us all.”

Starhawk

The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979)

Star , Tree , Animals

“Each being is sacred — meaning that each has inherent value that cannot be ranked in a hierarchy or compared to the value of another being.”

Starhawk book The Fifth Sacred Thing

The Fifth Sacred Thing (1994), p. i

“We don't ideologically believe in the separation of spirit and matter, but in practice, we still tend to think that things that are too material, too real-life, are somehow not as spiritual. So a trance to Faery is perceived as "spiritual," whereas a trance to a Brazilian favela slum is not. We can argue about the reality of Faery, but the favela is undeniably real. If we truly believe that our spirituality is about deep interconnectedness, maybe it's more important for us to grapple internally with the reality of the favela than to dance with the faeries.”

Starhawk

Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

Life , Thinking , Reality , Dance

“Magic is another word that makes people uneasy, so I use it deliberately, because words they are comfortable with, the words that sound acceptable, rational, scientific, and intellectually sound, are comfortable precisely because they are the language of estrangement.”

Starhawk

Source: Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (1982), Ch. 1 : Power-Over and Power-From-WIthin, p. 13

People

“The god is Eros, but he is also Logos, the power of the mind. In witchcraft there is no opposition between the two. The bodily desire for union and the emotional desire for connection are transmuted into the intellectual desire for knowledge, which is also a form of union. Knowledge can be both analytic and synthetic; it can take these apart and look at differences, or form a pattern from unintegrated parts and see the whole.”

Starhawk

Bodhi Tree lecture (1999)

God , Knowledge , Parting

“We need to fully feel and express our emotions without worrying that they are likely to cause harm to another. But intensely and obsessively brooding on one's anger or resentment is not a good thing to do.”

Starhawk

The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979)

Feeling , Anger

“Our magical tools and insights, our awareness of energies and allies on many planes, can deepen and inform our activism. And our activism can deepen our magic, by encouraging us to create ritual that speaks to the real challenges we face in the world, offers the healing and renewal we need to continue working, and a community that understands that spirit and action are one.”

Starhawk

Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

World , Communication , Understanding

“Spirituality leaps where science cannot yet follow, because science must always test and measure, and much of reality and human experience is immeasurable.”

Starhawk

The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979)

Reality , Science

“The test of a true myth is that each time you return to it, new insights and interpretations arise.”

Starhawk

The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979)

Time

“Everyone has the right to their own opinion about a ritual, and to their own aesthetics. There's generally at least one invocation in every ritual that I could personally do without.”

Starhawk

Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

Personality

“The witches, the wise women, and the healers were also always the counselors. It's a whole other tradition of knowledge and learning that has been suppressed because it had political implications.”

Starhawk

As quoted in The Burning Times (1990)

Women , Knowledge , Learning

“When we founded Reclaiming two decades ago, our intention was to bring together the spiritual and the political. Or more accurately, some of us for whom the spiritual and the political were inseparable wanted to create a practice and community that reflected this integration.
Now, with the Bush forces pushing into an aggressive war, with horrific environmental and social problems left unaddressed, the need for activism is stronger than ever. The stakes have never been higher, and the sense of urgency is palpable.”

Starhawk

Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

War , Communication , Problem , Sense

“When power relations of domination are no longer the norm in society, and when men assume truly equal shares of all aspects of childrearing, perhaps we will be able to fully reclaim the nurturing aspects of the God. Until then, let us hope some men will begin this process by the way they lead their lives.”

Starhawk

The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979)

Men , God , Hope , Way

“I am often astonished at well-meaning, spiritual people who advocate beaming light toward world leaders, who scold activists for expressing anger toward authorities or police, who define compassion as loving the enemy — but somehow lose sight of the need to love our friends, our allies, and those who suffer at the hands of the perpetrators. I really don't feel much call to beam love and light at Bush or Cheney or the directors of the International Monetary Fund. Whether or not they suffer from lack of love is beyond me. From my perspective, they suffer from an excess of power, and I feel called to take it away from them. Because I do love the child in Iraq, the woman in the favela, the eighteen-year-old recruit to the Marines who never dreamed he was signing up to bomb civilians. I can't love them, or myself and my community, effectively if I can't articulate the real differences in interests and agendas between "us" and "them"”

Starhawk

between those who have too little social power and those who have too much.
Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

Love , People , World , Dreams