Starhawk

Goddess Spirituality and Children

In an essay titled “What Children Teach Us,” Starhawk describes early experiences with her stepdaughters that deepened her commitment to Goddess spirituality. She recounts how her stepdaughters behaved in “courageous” and “political” ways, questioning why money was imprinted with “In God We Trust” when they did not experience religious freedom to talk openly about their participation in witchcraft. Starhawk, reflecting on how her stepdaughters have challenged patriarchy and revered the Goddess, believes everyone needs children in their lives, whether biological or chosen, to challenge and ground adults.

Teacher, Lecturer, Filmmaker, and Author

Starhawk is a veteran of progressive movements, from antiwar to antinuclear, and has expressed a deep commitment to bringing the techniques and creative power of spirituality to political activism. Together with Penny Livingston-Stark and Erik Ohlsen, she co-teaches Earth Activist Trainings: intensive seminars that combine permaculture design, political organizing, and Earth-based spirituality. She travels widely in North America and Europe to teach and lecture. She is a founding member of Reclaiming, a network of communities committed to linking Goddess spirituality and work for social change, and writes a regular column for the Reclaiming Quarterly.

Starhawk collaborated with director Donna Read on the Women and Spirituality series for the National Film Board of Canada, and recently formed their own film company, Belili Productions. Their first release was Signs Out of Time (2004), a documentary on the life of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, the scholar who made major discoveries about the Goddess cultures of Old Europe. Star-hawk and Donna are at work on their next film, an introduction to permaculture.

Starhawk is the author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, long considered the essential text for the Neo-Pagan movement, which has been continuously in print for over 25 years and revised twice; and the well-known ecotopian novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, which won the Lambda award for best Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction in 1994. Her book The Spiral Dance Truth or Dare: Encounters With Power, Authority, and Mystery won the Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement Award for nonfiction in 1988. Starhawk's newest book is The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature. Many of Starhawk's best political essays, credited with helping the global justice movement find and define itself, were collected into her book Webs of Power: Notes From the Global Uprising.

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