Inspiration-when something is flowing through you, the music is playing you. - Starhawk

It’s hard to remember now just how mind-altering the very concept of a Goddess was in an era when there were no women priests, no women rabbis, few women ministers, and scarcely any models of women’s spiritual power and leadership

That is exactly what nobody seems to grasp about this karma business. It’s not a simple matter of cause and effect, reward and punishment. It’s a question of what’s available. You see, as long as life for the majority of souls on this planet is just a long round of starvation, misery, torture, and early death — and believe me, outside this fortunate watershed that is an apt description of the state of affairs — as long as only a few live in comfort while the masses scrape along in want, then all us returning souls have to take our fair share of shifts among the hungry. You think this life you’ve lived was tough? Let me tell you, it was just R and R between the ones where you never get a solid meal two days running or you die before your first birthday from drinking bad water.

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.