Meeting Starhawk
by Stephanie Hiller
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Meeting Starhawk by Stephanie Hiller |
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I went to see Starhawk as a sort of latterday comrade in search of a revolution, and got a dose of Sonoma County permaculture instead. "I wish I had a blueprint for a revolution," she said sadly. She has certainly tried. Since the 60s, when as a student at UCLA she demonstrated against the war in Vietnam, Starhawk has remained committed to the principles of nonviolence, putting them into practice in protests against nuclear weapons facilities, nuclear power plants, and war itself. The author of numerous books on feminist politics and pagan spirituality, Starhawk turned to fiction in l993 to explore what the future might bring if present social and political trends continue. Fifth Sacred Thing is a vision of America dominated by fascism and Christian fundamentalism, of a population subdued by addiction to mind altering pharmaceuticals and fear of reprisals, and the army is on the march to take over the last stronghold of independence and earth-based community, located -- where else? -- in San Francisco. Inflamed over the Balkan war and concerned about y2k, I've requested this interview to discuss the relevance of Fifth Sacred Thing to the challenges facing us now. It's a long drive on curvy roads, down to Monte Rio, west to the Coast, then up along the coast toward Fort Ross, where the cliff plunges perilously into the sea. From there, another curvy road through forest takes me to the dirt road on which Starhawk lives. Even with clear directions, I was nervous that I might have made a wrong turn and would be late, while at the same time I tried to enjoy the absolutely gorgeous views of open hillsides with the coast beyond. It's miles on a dirt road with few houses. Starhawk's drive is marked by two stone rabbits on posts. Then you descend into the forest, cross a stream, and park under the stately redwoods. The cabin is just above, its interior lit up like a stage by sunbeams from the skylights in the roof. There she is, sitting in an armchair, at her laptop. "I see you're not in the habit of running into town for milk!" I joke by way of greeting. "You know," she says, "I was going to ask you to bring some but. . ." (And why hadn't I offered?) "it turns out there's enough." Road weary, I visit the outhouse. It's a comfortable bench, enclosed on three sides by canvas and open to the forest at the front. Charming on this spring afternoon, but I bet it's a lot less appealing on a stormy winter's night! I should ask Starhawk if she has made this choice out of principle or necessity. "I'm just finishing up this one e-mail," she says as I re-enter. Hesitant to interrupt even one sentence, I come quietly in and take the seat offered to her left. The table between us is littered with books, including a big one on the life of the bees. The cabin is just one room, ideal for one person, or maybe two. It's homey and cheerful, but not the least bit fancy. A four-legged bathtub is tucked in a corner to the right of the kitchen sink. Herbs hang to dry in a rack next to the sleeping nook. I want to ask about the beautiful gallery of pictures on her wall, a joyous, colorful, multi-ethnic selection -- I like them -- but she is still writing. A few minutes later she asks if I'm hungry. We've both had lunch. She offers tea, and we move outside to the deck and settle into chairs around the table. She tells me right off the bat that her main obsession these days is gardening, joking about how when you know you've ordered a truckload of soil, you're deep into something. But gardens are not my interest today. Even in old jeans and tee-shirt, Starhawk is an impressive figure . She's tall, full bosomed, with thick waves of grey-black hair that stream unrestrained from a center part, resembling the flow of her sometimes impassioned prose. It's the kind of hair that could scare up a witchhunt; you can almost see how superstitious churchmen in medieval Europe could have believed that "witches raised storms, summoned demons, and produced all sorts of destruction by unbinding their hair," as Barbara Walker has written in her Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. But just like those good women of yore, Starhawk is not at all intimidating; she does not flaunt her power, but like a scholar or teacher, she speaks thoughtfully. Something about her -- the modulation in her voice, the gentle humor, the focused presence -- urges one to attune to a higher standard: one's best. She asks me what my intention is for this interview. Shall I say that I came to join forces with her to start a revolution? On the eve of the millennium, I want to know whether she sees us moving inexorably into the future she envisioned in her book, where the fascist, militarist regime of the Stewards has subjugated the entire population with the exception of the Bay Area. That 20th century bastion of psychedelic upheaval and political intransigence has become a self-sufficient egalitarian pagan community where the four sacred things without which life cannot exist -- the earth, the air, the fire and the waters -- are freely shared in a kind of heaven on earth easily recognized as the fulfillment of our new age dreams. How do you see that vision now, I ask, and do we yet face revolt against that ultimate patriarchy? She nods, and we begin.
"I conceived the Fifth Sacred Thing purely as a way of taking the ideas I had been writing about [in nonfiction] and in my practice -- I'd been involved in the spiritual practice of the goddess tradition and wicca, and the political practice of nonviolent direct action which was all consuming during the 80s -- and to see what the world would be like where those ideas were really put into practice, where people really did the things I kept telling them would be good for them (laughs). It was also a way of looking at the future, at what would happen if we go on in the direction we seem to be going in without a change. Where do those trends lead? "So I really had two visions of the future playing against each other and that led into the real core question of the book, which is How do you resist violence without becoming what you're resisting? and how do you take a vision and a dream that's based on cooperation and interconnection, and protect it in a world full of violence? I think it's a question we've been struggling with for at least 5000 years, if not longer. "I think we'll be lucky if that's the battle that has to be fought. . . The battles we'll be fighting might be, how do we survive in a world that's totally ecologically devastated? "Did you see the Titanic? It's a powerful metaphor for our times. There's one point where the ship's hit the iceberg and the captain calls this conference with the engineer and the designer, and the seaman comes and reports, We've breached five bulkheads, and the engineer looks sort of pale and he says, Well, she's designed to float if we breach four bulkheads but if we breach five then she's gonna sink. They all look at him and say, She can't sink, she's the Titanic! And he says, She's made of steel and I assure you, she can, and will! "That's sort of how I look at it. We're running full speed ahead towards the iceberg with no lights and nobody can seem to convince the captain to either slow down or change course because we're convinced the ship is invincible and unthinkable, so the question is, Can we change that course enough -- I mean, we've already breached one bulkhead, maybe two or even three -- the question is can we limit the damage enough so that there's enough resilience in the earth not just to survive, because the earth is going to survive no matter what we do, but to maintain something of the kind of diversity that we love and that supports a joyful quality of life. " The book is so relevant to our times that it seems a prophetic vision. Was it produced by her magic work, given to her in the form of a vision? She replies that she "wouldn't recommend her process to anyone else," and then goes on to talk about the book in a literary context. "Well, it just started with a scene where Bird returns home and it was this person walking through the city and looking around and going, My goddess, there's children, they're still alive, somebody must have made it through. I had to figure out who this person was and what they'd made it through and who he was meeting, and it just sort of evolved from there and got woven together with material I had been working on for years. "My vision was to tell the story that was set in the mid-21st century and have one character whose story spanned our present time, who is Maya, and to interweave her story so you'd have this picture of the future as played against the events of our own lifetime. It just got longer and longer and longer until one day I had a stack of paper about three fight high. Then I realized it's going to have to be two books." She wrote this book first, before Walking to Mercury, which covers Maya's life in this century, "not for any particular reason except that I had written more of that one." The rituals used by the book are familiar, resembling work she has done with Reclaiming, the community which came into existence through her practice. I am fascinated with the healing techniques employed by Madrone, the granddaughter born of a brief interlude between Maya's two lovers, which seem to me to border on the miraculous. Are these healing techniques for real? "All of it is stuff that I've done, but I can't say that it works for me as well as it does for Madrone. "There's a lot of different approaches to healing, but essentially the more shamanic approach is that you can go into the other reality in which the disease exists in symbolic form and work with it there, and then it changes physically. In fiction, you can make it work really well. In real life, it doesn't always work, just like Western medical techniques. "My friend David Abram [author of The Spell of the Sensuous] would talk about how his consciousness changed when he came back to the states after being in a culture like Bali, where people expected magic to work. It was part of the collective reality and it did work. Whereas we are in a collective reality where people don't expect it to work, they're terrified of it, and so you're always in a sense fighting that consciousness." Many shamans use psychoactive drugs in their healing work. Because some of Madrone's healing experiences sound much like ayahuasca experiences I have read about, I ask Starhawk how she feels about using these plant spirit medicines in her work? "I don't use them in my magic practice or my spiritual practice. In Reclaiming, all of our public rituals and classes are very specifically clean and sober because the things that drugs do in terms of changing your consciousness are changes you can learn to make without drugs. In this culture drugs are so loaded with other associations and so likely to lead you into addictive patterns that I think it's better to do your magical practice without them. "We call magic the art of changing consciousness at will. When you've been practicing for a while, you get your psyche wired in certain ways. I know how to make certain shifts and how to come back from them, and I know the edges I'm working on, and I have no idea what a hit of acid would do to all that. "To be honest, I'd have to say that certainly if I'd never taken acid, I wouldn't be who I am right now. It was like catching a glimpse of the incredibly different dimensions that consciousness can go to. But I found that after awhile it kept taking me back to the same place over and over again and it wasn't deepening and getting richer, it was kind of forming its own pattern. Now I understand, from a magical perspective, how that works. You can create a certain key and use that key so that it can quickly take you to a certain level. Drugs do that in very powerful, very physical ways but then they become keys to that particular doorway and that's where they take you." We talk for awhile about shamans and healing before we get back to the central question for this interview. Almost a decade after writing her futuristic vision, how does Starhawk view the trends in our world as we approach the millennium? "I see it getting both worse and better. There's a tremendous awakening consciousness in the world and lots and lots of people who are working on change and transformation, more than we think there are, but I also see the power of a certain corporate globalization getting stronger and stronger. Here in this area we had to organize because suddenly there's people coming in who want to put in big vineyards that produce $100-a-bottle wine because we happen to be a prime area for growing Russian River pinot noir. That caters to a certain group who can afford to support these vineyards. . . not those of us who are struggling just to make the rent. "We've seen this tremendous widening of the economic gap on a scale that's just unbelievable. We have a sister group in El Salvador, where people are working in factories for multinational corporations for $4 a day, in free trade zones where safety rules and so forth won't apply. Where the real governments are the multinational corporations, then all the effort we spend trying to deal with our government is almost aside from the real issue. We could overthrow the government but what good would that do, when the real power is not invested in any particular government but is transgovernmental? "To overthrow the corporations, it will have to be a totally different kind of revolution. I just wish I had a real clear blueprint for one. . . "You know, I was really meditating on this a lot after one trip to El Salvador, and really in a lot of distress about it. The only answer I got was that corporations are systems and structures of power, and all structures of power complete themselves and come to an end at a certain point. . . I said, Thank you very much, now how about being a little more clear? "I think we have to work on a lot of different levels. One of the levels -- and I think that's why I was attracted to permaculture -- is by building and creating the alternatives. To me permaculture -- observing nature and working with nature -- is the other end of the spectrum of the goddess tradition. If we really mean that nature is sacred then that really affects every aspect of our lives, if we take it seriously and we try to make it real. "Our problem isn't that we don't have answers but we don't have the political will. We have the answers to pretty much all of our ecological problems!" Nonviolent resistance is one way to voice our opposition to In recent years, Starhawk has continued her commitment to nonviolence by protesting the cutting of the Headwaters Forest north of here, where the last existing stand of ancient redwoods remains under threat of the logging by Pacific Lumber, purchased by Charles Hurwitt some ten years ago to pay off junk bonds. "In Fifth Sacred Thing, the north decides to fight the struggle using nonviolent resistance, people think about Gandhi and Martin Luther King, I like to think of the suffragettes in the women's movement. Again, it's easier to do in fiction than in life. I've done nonviolent resistance here in this country and there certainly is oppression, and we've seen at Headwaters that they're by no means above using torture on nonviolent resistors with the pepper spray and stuff, but it's certainly not what we've seen in El Salvador with the death squads or facing the Contras. What I wanted to see was, could this really work with a power this ruthless, and what would it really take? Even in fiction it was very difficult, it was very difficult to make that book work out in the end." When it becomes clear to the community that passive resistance alone will not stop the army, they decide to go one step further. Inspired by a vision that was given to Maya, they agree to meet the enemy with an invitation. "There's a seat for you at our table, if you choose to join us," they tell the soldiers at every encounter. And finally, their willingness to acknowledge the humanity of soldiers trained to crush them is what wins the war. "Marta, the woman in El Salvador, talks about her realization as a revolutionary that it wasn't about fighting for peace, it wasn't even about working for peace, it was about being peace; that if she could be peace, then peace was there. But that's an enormous shift to make," Starhawk acknowledges. Buddhists speak of a "fierce compassion" such as that exhibited by the Tibetan nun who was able to forgive the men who raped her. That depth of recognition and understanding has not been enough to prevent or stop the Chinese invasion of Tibet. But in the book, the possibility that we could overcome oppression through a brave compassion becomes plausible. "In the book, part of the real shift that happens is that the soldiers basically come to see where their self interest lies, that it's not with obeying orders but with throwing their lot in with a different kind of system that offers them freedom. I think maybe that is part of the ultimate challenge in terms of revolutions, in terms of making shifts -- more and more of us coming to see where do our real self interests lie. How do we stop participating as much as possible in the things that go against our self interest and shift our energies toward the things that are truly sacred to us." As if acknowledging the validity of this statement, a raven calls in the canopy over our heads. "I don't think we're at a point right now where we can organize a nonviolent revolution -- or a violent one! -- I think we are at the point where what we need to be doing is talking to people, forming circles, forming groups, raising consciousness kind of like the woman's movement did with raising consciousness groups in the late 60s and early 70s. "It's always hard to tell when those moments of action will come politically. They're almost unpredictable. Sometimes you think everything's in place and this is really being a big thing, it's going to make a huge change -- and nothing happens! And other times something happens that suddenly thousands of people have their lives transformed. I was involved in the Diablo Canyon blockade in 1981, and when I look back on that, it's amazing the impact that movement had. Our entire reclaiming organization was built on that movement. When we were having a meeting of the Cazadero Land Use Group and whether to use consensus, so many people said, well, we learned consensus at Diablo Canyon. Sometimes a movement or an action has an impact that you couldn't have conceived of when you were sitting there having your endless agonizing consensus meeting about whether you were going to get arrested standing up or sitting down. . . "In the Gulf War-- in San Francisco there were thousands of people in the street every single night. And then on Kosovo, that doesn't seem to be happening. It's really very strange. Maybe Clinton has a better astrologer than Bush. . ."
After all this intense conversation, it felt really good to walk a quarter mile up the road to visit Starhawk's terraced garden. And with the real interview concluded, we were able to chat and joke like friends. As soon as we got to the garden, Star set to work with such marked concentration that further conversation seemed inappropriate. I found a comfortable spot on the side of the hill and inhaled the incredible vista with each fresh breath of the cool breeze. It was still early in spring and the plants had not yet achieved their full growth, but the garden is full of greenery. Paths meander, following the curve of the hillside; the ground is so heavily mulched that you have to be careful not to sink into it or trip. No parallel rows of carrots and turnips here! You get the feeling Star came out in the moonlight to scatter the seeds like so much fairy dust. The arrangement of plants is dictated by how well they agree with one another rather than by the principles of uniformity. I confess complete ignorance of permaculture but the artichokes certainly looked robust, and it was wonderful to see beds of flowers and herbs shooting up amidst the cabbages, sort of like Peter Rabbit's garden must have been. She was unraveling a rope of tubing for the sprinkler irrigation system. I helped her untangle it and together we stretched it downhill alongside some delicate raspberry shrubs. Then we planted seeds of carrots and beets in a semicircular bed in front of a trellis of pea vines, the backdrop for what could have been a small stage for fairy theatrics. I left soon after, assuring Starhawk that it was no problem for me to find my way back to the two stone rabbits. But they are small, and set back from the road, and I missed them. I walked energetically about twice as far as I needed to go before I realized I was in unfamiliar territory. So I got some good exercise, both in muscle work and in maintaining my calm despite the possibility, however slender, that I was lost in the forest. On the way home I listened to a tape of Star's talk at the Bioneers conference two year's ago, in which she talks about how the goddess spoke to her one day, in her garden, saying, You're teaching far too much meditation and not enough observation. "As witches we talk about learning the language of nature," she went on to say, "but we don't always do it." Starhawk is doing it now. When I left the city some years back, we grew a big garden. I remember plunking myself down in the hot sun after doing some weeding and listening to the whir of the cicadas in the tall grass, mind virtually empty of thought. During the same talk at the Bioneers, Starhawk told an old French folktale about the young man who was sent by his father, the king, to an expensive university to learn the language of birds. When he returned after the first seven years,his father asked what he had learned. He said, "I have heard a thing." His father sent him back for more education, and it was another fourteen years before he could report that he also could "say a thing." To the king's, chagrin, his son had learned simply to be. The drive down the Sonoma Coast in the light of the setting sun is stunningly beautiful, and I feel full. Visiting a teacher is always a sort of pilgrimage. I have tremendous respect for Starhawk's work and experience, and I feel that our purpose in life is the same. Like me, Starhawk is thinking. Like the rest of us, she doesn't know what will happen, or how. She does not resort of New Agey platitudes about creating a happy future through positive thinking. If she knows more, she's not telling. If her book was prophetic, we will yet see. Like other wise women I am blessed to meet, she does not indulge in making predictions. Even my mention of y2k was left unheeded. We don't know what's going to happen, so talk about the future is only speculation. We are sitting in that place of not knowing, chewing on a blade of grass and watching the wind in the trees before going back into the house to make dinner. If not all of my questions were answered in the way that I expected or hoped, perhaps, like the king's son, I have learned a thing this afternoon in Cazadero.
Starhawk was sitting on the steps to the left of the stage, talking with someone quietly. I watched her for awhile, thinking of how much practice it must take to hold the energy for a group like that. Nothing on Starhawk's face indicated that she was doing anything more than having a converation, yet watching her I had the clear sense that behind the social interaction was a very focused presence which was holding a subtle but very effective influence on the activity in the room. Not putting anyone into a spell or a trance, not manipulating or controlling anyone, but simply holding the room within her awareness. It seemed to me she noticed me making this observation, and there was a subtle connection that happened which was very powerful and strong, from her focused essence to mine and back again, the way energy flows when you hold two acupressure points on the body to bring healing chi through the circuitry. And through that energetic connection both of us were linked, belly to belly as it were, to Power that we happily shared, a great feast of power from deep within our separate selves which yet reverberated with the bounty of Her supreme, unconditional and ultimately impersonal, love. From that point on, the ritual became for me a very concentrated experience of being in the goddess. And as it happened, the invitation to sacred space was very well orchestrated, with beautiful and poetic invocations to the four directions and the above and below, and especially the center, and a wonderful circle in which we each bragged of something we had accomplished during the summer that was now part of this first harvest. I was stunned by the beauty of what I heard. A woman telling how she was finally able to give up her job to do the work she felt called to do, which certainly struck a chord of gratitude in my heart, who have taken the same departure, stepping over fear and self doubt again and again to create this magazine. A man who had learned to love, a child who had finished first grade, someone who passed through difficult illness, someone who made peace with a mother, on it went, with quite a few men standing forth to share sweetly what they had accomplished and what looked forward to. There must have been a hundred of us who spoke, and nothing -- nothing! -- that was said seemed cheap or boring. Sturdy plants growing tall in Starhawk's ritual garden, we savored the first fruits of our personal harvests, embraced and supported by a community of shared feeling that is as ancient and natural as life itself. Perhaps in the final hour, the soldiers of the corporate world will put aside their sweatshops and their corporate mergers, their axes and their bombs, to join us at our table, and stay for the feast.
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