The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature

If you are looking for something to read that will change your life you cannot go past Starhawk's latest book "The Earth Path" which is her best so far. Whereas her previous book "Webs of Power" was about explaining the international global justice movement and what it is fighting for, in this new book Starhawk focuses on the local intimate landscape and gets down and dirty with permaculture. Permaculture is a holistic method of horticulture, agriculture and landscape design, originally invented in Australia by Bill Mollison, which seeks to establish a kind of perpetual, self-sustaining `wild' bounty. Why is this important for Witches? Starhawk wants to emphasise how so much of modern magick is abstracted into intellectual concepts, nature is idealised, romanticised and despite our claims to "worship" nature, most urban Witches are really not particularly familiar with just what "nature" actually is. Starhawk urges us to dispense with tokenism regarding Witchcraft concepts such as the four elements and the Goddess and God, and instead become cognisant of the real elements - real tangible fire, water, air and earth, real sky, real plants, real land. How does water actually work in your environment? What are its cycles, what is its source? What is the relationship of fire to you, to your environment? How does fire behave out in nature compared to on a candle wick? Starhawk has an enthralling story-telling ability which makes this book really interesting, plus to help us to observe and participate in grounded reality she provides eighty exersises, meditations and rituals. Personally, I'm a huge fan of seeking truth in nature even if what we find there may not always be pleasant or good for our egos. I believe that nature is both the source and goal of Witchcraft and that we owe it to ourselves to rend the veil of illusion and stare boldly at the Goddess Earth in all her incomprehensible glory as Starhawk advocates. This book is a boon for beginners and jaded old-timers as well. Highly recommended.

One of the most widely read and respected authors in Wicca and Earth-based spirituality, Starhawk, has written no less than ten books on the subject. Her most recent book, "The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature" that was published in 2004, is an amazing combination of spiritual, emotional, practical and even political aspects of Earth-based spirituality. Written in twelve chapters with ample footnotes and references, the first four chapters deal primarily with understanding and recognizing what is sacred in Earth-based spirituality: the Earth and all of its many components, from the land, the water and all living things from the smallest to the largest. The most important lesson here is to realize that the Earth is much more than its individual components, which runs counter to Western science and philosophy that tend to view things in a purely mechanistic and compartmental manner as exemplified by the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes. Granted, great scientific understandings have been attained by this philosophy; but it fails in its understanding of emergent characteristics and patterns of complex systems as described elegantly by Fritjof Capra in his book "The Web of Life". However, where Fritjof Capra presents his book from a purely secular perspective, Starhawk expands this view into the spiritual aspects, including the realization that our ancestors aren't just humans, but also the myriad of single-celled creatures and bacteria that gave the Earth an oxygen-based atmosphere through the gifts of chlorophyll and photosynthesis. For without these, we would not exist. The next aspect that Starhawk examines extensively is observation. If one is to learn how to read and understand Nature and what the Earth is speaking, one must learn how to listen to the birds, insects, plants, trees, the ground, the water, etc. To achieve this, Starhawk includes a number of meditative exercises focused on learning to understand a particular animal, plant, insect or even fungus. Some may not be interested in fungi, but Wicca and Earth-based spiritualities recognize the interconnectedness of all things, as well as the cycle of birth, death and rebirth. For without death, there would be no life and no rebirth. Fungi, which on the surface may not seem particularly spiritual, is at the heart of death and rebirth because it is fungi that break down dead matter into its essential elements so that they can be reused and renewed. A prime example is Starhawk's "Fertility and Decay" meditative exercise on pages 163 through 166. Starhawk's meditative observation techniques come in particularly useful for understanding each of the four elements (air, fire, water and earth, as well as spirit in the center) that are an inseparable part of Wicca and Earth-based spirituality. I also especially liked the blessing for each element that Starhawk wrote for each element at the end of each element's chapter. Interlaced throughou

Earth Path is largely a discussion of nature, ecology and environmental sustainability/stewardship. It's a welcomed and wanted addition to the Earth Spiritualist/Pagan library. Ironically, in religious and spiritual traditions believing the Earth to be sacred and in which holiday, ritual, and wisdom are founded in the rhythms of nature, too many of us aren't well-schooled in the science and ecology of those rhythms. Sure, there are clues in our liturgy, symbols, metaphors, much of our ritual... all beautiful elements of Pagan culture, but not the whole story, in my opinion. As Tori Amos sings, "I think the good book is missing some pages." Or perhaps... the Earth, herself is the "good book" and she's missing some readers! :) It isn't just a problem of Earth Spiritualist culture... education and awareness about ecology and sustainability are not yet standard, stable parts of public education. I've even seen environmental science teachers have to fight for their right to remain in curriculum, threatened alongside other disciplines like art and music that are tragically considered expendable. Earth Path is a vital effort to raise awareness and introduce readers to a study of ecology with Earth Spiritualist sensibilities. What must we know and what can we do to become better citizens of the Earth community, to be in right relationship, both physically and spiritually, with sacred Earth? How do we expand beyond anthropocentric interpretations of her ecology? We must do our best to learn her many languages, her curves and crevices, how she breathes, what tones her muscles and makes her bones strong, what she likes for breakfast, and what she doesn't: what makes her stressed and unhealthy, what gives her a yeast infection, what makes her hair fall out. We must study and learn from our past and current generations of human relationship with her, from what has worked and what hasn't, as well as how we might improve our relationship into the future. The more intimately we can understand, perhaps the more difficult (or less easy) to betray her best interest, whether by short/narrow-sighted human self-interest or by accidents of well-meaning ignorance. Earth Path offers 70+ rituals, meditations, and exercises, a chapter on observation, a chapter proposing "Earth-Centered values" among Pagans, and a chapter about "What Every Pagan Should Know About Evolution," which could be helpful for navigating the current political and religious debates about the subject in science education. The book also organizes information and practical exercises around chapters focusing on Air, Fire, Water, Earth, and Center. For example, in the "Air" chapter, there is a discussion of birds that includes info. about learning the five voices of songbirds: the call, the song, the feeding plea, male-to-male agression, and the alarm call. This section is followed with one titled "What the Birds are Saying About You." Wouldn't we love to know! :) The Air chapter also discusses top

In between her writing ventures, I seem to forget why and how much I admire Starhawk's work. Then her next book or essay is released and I am reminded all over again of the reasons her philosophy grounds me in the profoundly sane dream of a better future. Her most recent book, The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004) serves as a guide to developing awareness of the most basic (and, as such, perhaps most elusive) elements of the natural world. Retreating somewhat from the frenetic pace of the streets in Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising (New Society Publishers, 2002), The Earth Path takes us to Starhawk's home in the Cazadero Hills and through a journey of observing earth, air, fire, water, and spirit - the elements that sustain all life. The opening chapter uses the fairy tale of the Isle of Birds to illustrate the author's desired outcome for this journey. In the story, a king sends his beloved son to learn the language of birds. After 21 years, the prince learns to hear, to understand, and to respond. For some inexplicable reason, this angers the king (perhaps he expected his son to learn marksmanship?), but the moral of the tale (and subsequently the entire book) is the importance of deep awareness and the simple fact that such awareness requires time and attention. In addition to the author's stated intentions, The Earth Path serves as a wake-up call to Pagans that our spirituality involves a tangible and intimate relationship with nature, not just a theoretical acknowledgment of it. The book gently chastises Pagans who have allowed their relationship with the earth to slip into the abstract - perhaps for fear of getting cold, dirtying ritual garb, encountering insects, or simply because our culture places very little value on activities that foster deep awareness. As a result, few Pagans have "time spent talking to trees" penciled into our day planners. A tragedy for us as well as the trees! Indeed, Starhawk takes the whole culture to task perhaps more for keeping us so ignorant of the ecological processes on which our lives depend. As she notes, it's entirely possible (even common) to be educated all the way to a doctorate level with no more than a 4th-grade understanding of photosynthesis and often no education at all as to how our local ecologies sustain themselves nor how our communities can sustain themselves without interrupting this ecological self-regulation. Readers who have followed Starhawk since she first published her best-known work, The Spiral Dance (Harper and Row, 1979), will delight in watching her evolve in her spirituality and its application. Throughout what has become a veritable canon, we watch her grow from an idealistic girl to a mature woman whose strength and wisdom has only aggregated over the years. The Earth Path will not disappoint her fans and students. It remains as accessible and unpretentious as her previous writing, with the honesty and emoti

As someone familiar with Starhawk's previous work, I thought that this book marked a new direction for her, one which I welcome. In previous books, she has based her writing on myth, history, feminism, psychology, and politics; while those strands are still woven through this work (especially in environmental politics), in "The Earth Path" she draws more from science and ecology. She manages to create poetry, suggest courses of concrete action, and impart at least an intuitive grasp of some of the basic principles of ecology and permaculture. One of my friends who has a degree in Natural Resources from Cornell says that much of the stuff in the book is kin to the basic things they learned in that course of study. I thought that the writing in the book was very beautiful, and I feel that reading it has increased my appreciation of the diversity and complexity that exist in the world all around me. I also thought that, while a few of the exercises might be repetitive for someone who has read her other works, most of them seem very useful in honing my observation and awareness skills and building my understanding of and relationship with the world around me - which is, after all, the concrete basis of my own Pagan path. I also found the bibliography to be useful and hope to get a chance to read a lot more of the books that she cites.