Starhawk: To Honor the Sacred — To This We Dedicate Our Lives

 Wisdom Quotes From

Starhawk

 

Love is the glue that holds the world together.

 

All began in love, all seeks to return in love. Love is the law, the teacher of wisdom, and the great revealer of mysteries.

 

The terrain of the mysteries is the ordinary. To seek out mystery, we don't have to go anywhere. We must simply change our perception, our description, our consciousness of where we are.

 

Each of us embodies the divine. Our ultimate spiritual authority is within, and we need no other person to interpret the sacred to us. We foster the questioning attitude, and we honor intellectual, spiritual, and creative freedom. 

 

If you see God as something outside the world, the world becomes subtly and not-so-subtly devalued. But if you see God—or Goddess, or whatever you want to call It—as embodied in human beings, in trees, in plants, in rocks, in animals—in the living world itself—then all those things, and particularly the interconnections between them, have that kind of deep intensive value.

 

The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our lives as holy, our aggression as healthy, our anger as purifying, and our power to nurture and create, but also to limit and destroy when necessary, as the very force that sustains all life. Through the Goddess, we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions. We can move beyond narrow, constricting roles and become whole.

 

That changes the way we see ourselves. The sense of personal authority we have to direct our own lives, to make choices about our own bodies, our own selves, who we are, changes very much if we see ourselves as embodiments of the sacred.

The symbolism of the Goddess is not a parallel structure to the symbolism of God the Father. The Goddess does not rule the world; She is the world. Manifest in each of us. She can be known internally by every individual, in all her magnificent diversity.

 

Our goal is not to get out of the world or to get out of life, but to integrate it, to celebrate it, to embrace it fully, and to embrace all the different cycles within it.

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

What shames us, what we most fear to tell, does not set us apart from others; it binds us together if only we can take the risk to speak it. 

But the final price of freedom is the willingness to face that most frightening of all beings, one’s own self. Starlight vision, the “other way of knowing,” is the mode of perception of the unconscious, rather than the conscious mind. The depths of our own beings are not all sunlit; to see clearly, we must be willing to dive into the dark, inner abyss and acknowledge the creatures we may find there. For, as Jungian analyst M. Esther Harding explains in Woman’s Mysteries, “These subjective factors … are potent psychical entities, they belong to the totality of our being, they cannot be destroyed. So long as they are unrecognized outcasts from our conscious life, they will come between us and all the objects we view, and our whole world will be either distorted or illuminated.

We also have a responsibility not to let ourselves be judged. We do not have to accept others' evaluations of our worth, nor are we obligated to believe in their superiority. Whichever role we are assigned, we can stop the game by refusing to play our expected part. When someone suggests that our recent behavior has undone our right to exist, a useful question to ask is, "What do you want? What can I do to make the situation better?" This often reduces the Judge's voice to silence, because what the Judge really wants — but cannot admit — is to make you feel bad, not to get the floor clean. When we feel secure in our inherent value, we do not have to argue about our worth as human beings. Instead, we can attempt to solve the problem.

Wisdom and knowledge can best be understood together. Knowledge is learning, the power of the mind to understand and describe the universe. Wisdom is knowing how to apply knowledge and how not to apply it. Knowledge is knowing what to say; wisdom is knowing whether or not to say it. Knowledge gives answers; wisdom asks questions. Knowledge can be taught, wisdom grows from experience. 

Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation. To do a ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way. The inner willingness is what makes the ritual come alive and have power. If you aren't willing to be changed by the ritual, don't do it.

Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.

Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power.

Beware of organizations that proclaim their devotion to the light without embracing, bowing to the dark; for when they idealize half the world they must devalue the rest.

The Judeo-Christian heritage has left us with the view of a universe composed of warring opposites, which are valued as either good or evil. They cannot coexist.

A defense strategy favored by many “spiritual” people is an elaborate form of denial, an assertion that the individual has “gone beyond” the shadow qualities of sexuality, anger, passion, desire, and self-interest. Many religions cater exclusively to this strategy. Priests, ministers, gurus, and “enlightened masters” who adopt a posture of transcendent superiority have great appeal to people with similar defense systems, who are able to escape their personal confrontations by identifying as members of an elite, 'enlightened' group.

I don’t believe that everything in our lives is a matter of choice. In New Age circles, I often hear people say, “We create our own reality.” That’s a shortsighted and simplistic misunderstanding of how reality works. We don’t choose all of our circumstances, or our range of choices. The poor don’t generally choose to starve, nor do the oppressed choose their oppression, and the casualties of war don’t choose to die. But we can choose how we respond to the circumstances we’re presented with.

If thoughts and emotions alone could cause things to happen, thousands of my contemporaries would have married the Beatles in 1964.

A spiritual organization with a hierarchical structure can convey only the consciousness of estrangement, regardless of what teachings or deep inspirations are at its root. The structure itself reinforces the idea that some people are inherently more worthy than others.

Helping the terminally ill to consciously end their lives is a crime, while denying health care to the living is seen as sound fiscal practice.

Mary Daly, author of Beyond God the Father, points out that the model of the universe in which a male God rules the cosmos from outside serves to legitimize male control of social institutions.

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

Only those who must bear the consequences of a decision have the right to make it. 

Because everything is interdependent, there are no simple, single causes and effects. Every action creates not just an equal and opposite reaction, but a web of reverberating consequences.

The Crone, the Reaper... She is the Dark Moon, what you don't see coming at you, what you don't get away with, the wind that whips the spark across the fire line. Chance, you could say, or, what's scarier still: the intersection of chance with choices and actions made before. The brush that is tinder dry from decades of drought, the warming of the earth's climate that sends the storms away north, the hole in the ozone layer. Not punishment, not even justice, but consequence.

The God is wild, but his is the wildness of connection, not of domination and violence. Wildness is not the same as violence. Gentleness and tenderness do no translate into wimpiness. When men — or women, for that matter — begin to unleash what is untamed in us, we need to remember that the first images and impulses we encounter will often be the stereotyped paths of power we have learned in a culture of domination. To become truly wild, we must not be sidetracked by the dramas of power-over, the seduction of addictions, or the thrill of control. We must go deeper.

A real relationship with nature is vital for our magical and spiritual development, and our psychic and spiritual health. It is also a vital base for any work we do to heal the earth and transform the social and political systems that are assaulting her daily.

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. 

Amory Lovins says the primary design criteria he uses is the question “How do we love all the children?” Not just our children, not just the ones who look like us or who have resources, not just the human children but the young of birds and salmon and redwood trees. When we love all the children, when that love is truly sacred to us in the sense of being most important, then we have to take action in the world to enact that love. We are called to make the earth a place where all the children can thrive. 

At this moment in history, we are called to act as if we truly believe that liberty and justice for al is a desirable thing.

This is how it works: Someone has a vision that arises from a fierce and passionate love. To make it real, we must love every moment of what we do. Impermanent spirals embed themselves in asphalt, concrete, dust. Slowly, slowly, they eat into the foundations of the structures of power. Deep transformations take time. Regeneration arises from decay. Si, se puede! It can be done.

When young people ask me for advice today, I generally say, “Decide what is sacred to you, and put your best life energies at its service. Make that the focus of your studies, your work, the test for your pleasures and your relationships. Don’t ever let fear or craving for security turn you aside." When you serve your passion, when you are willing to risk yourself for something, your greatest creative energies are released. Hard work is required, but nothing is more joyful.

But a windbreak is also a great teacher, for me, about nonviolence. How do we respond to strong forces—anger, rage, even physical attack—without becoming violent in return? How do we respond to what might be well-meant but harsh criticism (whether well intentioned or intentionally hurtful)? If we become a wall, shutting out the energies coming at us, we may actually strengthen the anger of the opposition. On the other hand, if we simply brush off or bat away criticism, the opposition may expand its criticism to include our reactions. But there’s a third alternative: if we can learn from the trees, we can take in and transform the energy coming at us. We do this by staying calm and grounded and centered, by listening rather than responding, by swaying with the wind and letting it blow itself out.

Patriarchy values the hard over the soft; the tough over the tender; punishment, vengeance, and vindictiveness over compassion, negotiation, and reconciliation. The 'hard' qualities are linked to power, success, and masculinity — and exalted. The 'soft' qualities are identified with weakness, powerlessness, and femininity — and denigrated. 

And meanwhile we decayed. When I was born, when I grew up in the fifties, we believed our country was the land of opportunity, where nobody was doomed to remain poor, where every person of goodwill had a chance to rise. By the time my child was born in the nineties, beggars were crowding the streets of every city, accosting shoppers in the malls. There were camps of homeless in the parks and empty lots, young people going to war with each other for drugs and booze and a few bucks. Our compassion eroded faster than the topsoil, and when we began to notice the earth changes, the droughts and the warming and the die-offs of the animals, the hole in the ozone layer and the epidemics of strange diseases that showed our own immune systems faltering, when we still had a chance to save so much and avert the worst of what followed, we continued to distract ourselves with war.

War teaches us to need an enemy to conquer and overcome and to see those who are different as lesser, dangerous, inhuman. 

You don’t have to be a black-flag-waving anarchist to be outraged by this shortsightedness. Anyone who loves capitalism should be especially maddened — because solutions and alternative sources of energy do exist that could enable us to transition swiftly from our fossil-fuel-based economy to one that runs on clean, renewable energy sources that don’t contribute to global warming.

The process of cultural change is a long and difficult one.

There are two kinds of power. One is power over, which is always destructive, and the other is power from within, which is a transcendent and creative power.

Systems change in response to forces that disturb their equilibrium. External forces, changes in conditions, new energies, and new challenges can shake up self-regulating cycles. So one way to change a system is to stir it up. That’s the role of protest and direct action, and it’s the reason why stronger forms of action are often necessary to bring change. Sweet reason, gentle persuasion, and dialogue that doesn’t challenge the functioning of the system often end up becoming incorporated in the system’s own efforts to maintain equilibrium.

We hope for a harvest, we pray for rain, but nothing is certain. We say that the harvest will only be abundant if the crops are shared, that the rains will not come unless water is conserved and shared and respected. We believe we can continue to live and thrive only if we care for one another. This is the age of the Reaper, when we inherit five thousand years of postponed results, the fruits of our callousness toward the earth and toward other human beings. But at last we have come to understand that we are part of the earth, part of the air, the fire, and the water, as we are part of one another.

We cannot change the world alone. To heal ourselves, to restore the earth to life, to create the situations in which freedom can flourish, we must work together in groups.

Despair breeds fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. A world of truly shared abundance would be a safer world.

For great as the powers of destruction may be, greater still, are the powers of healing.

Another world is possible! Another world is also necessary, for this one is unjust, unsustainable, and unsafe. It's up to us to envision, fight for, and create that world, a world of freedom, real justice, balance, and shared abundance, a world woven in a new design.

Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.

The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them. 

To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. 

Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy. 

All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity. 

To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible. To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives.

— Starhawk 

https://starhawk.org/