Starhawk Quotes

In fact they were looking for weapons eager to find something they could justify the millions of dollars and massive deployment of personnel, the collection of stun-guns, tear-gas guns, pepper-spray guns, M16’s, horses, clubs, and armored personnel carriers with which they intended to protect the city from our hordes of puppet carriers and potentially illegal gardeners

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.

The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control. Understanding this keeps us humble, able to admit that we cannot know or define.

Systems don't change easily. Systems try to maintain themselves, and seek equilibrium. To change a system, you need to shake it up, disrupt the equilibrium. That often requires conflict. To me, conflict is a deeply spiritual place. It's the high-energy place where power meets power, where change and transformation can occur.

An initiation is a symbolic death and rebirth, a rite of passage that transforms each person who experiences it.

The three core principles of Goddess religion are immanence, interconnection, and community.

Was there some deeper, level some plane upon which the consciousness of mountains responded to death and waste and pain? Was there a compassion embedded in the very rocks, so that they offered their beauty in compensation for human loss?

It’s worth ten times the price to get you out of those things. Besides, I’ve got credits to burn.” He did. They all did. The more they worked, the more credits they got. The more they got, the more they needed to spend them before they expired, which they did after a year. You didn’t need to save them. All the things that Maya’s generation had saved for — a home of one’s own, retirement, the kids’ college education, medical emergencies — all those were now each person’s birthright. When the surplus was totaled each year — for the City inevitably ended up with a net surplus — it was simply a measure that they had produced more than they consumed, given more than they took back.

Finally we learn the Mystery — that unless we find the Goddess within ourselves we will never find Her without. She is both internal and external; as solid as a rock, as changeable as our own internal image of Her.

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.

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.

A group that is raising power together should always be made aware of each person’s intention and imagery. To use the power of a group for a private, unacknowledged end-even a positive one-is manipulative.

Bird was watering the pots. She stood still for a moment and watched him. The spray of the water made rainbows in the low, afternoon light, and the leaves of the chard glowed emerald and ruby. And how could she distinguish him from her, or her from the garden, when it was all light, colors playing against one another, wrapped in scent, rich earth and citrus? Bird himself was merely a sphere of turquoise and gold, laced with darker streaks. Musk and sweat and sun-warmed skin. She inhaled, wondering what elixir she could brew from this moment of perfect beauty.

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.