No sane person with a life really wants to be a political activist. When activism is exciting, it tends to involve the risk of bodily harm or incarceration, and when it’s safe, it is often tedious, dry, and boring. Activism tends to put one into contact with extremely unpleasant people, whether they are media interviewers, riot cops, or at times, your fellow activists. Not only that, it generates enormous feelings of frustration and rage, makes your throat sore from shouting, and hurts your feet.
Starhawk (b. 1951) American writer, activist, feminist theologian [b. Miriam Simos]
“Toward an Activist Spirituality,” Reclaiming Quarterly (Fall 2003)
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Quotations by:
Starhawk
Real spirituality has to come to terms with accident, with chance, with the great mystery that things happen and there may not be any direct cause for them.
Starhawk (b. 1951) American writer, activist, feminist theologian [b. Miriam Simos]
(Attributed)
Sexual integrity means honestly recognizing our own impulses and desires and honoring them, whether or not we choose to act on them. If we value integrity, we must also value diversity in sexual expression and orientation, recognizing that there is no one truth, or one way, that fits everyone. Sexuality is sacred because through it we make a connection with another self — but it is misused and perverted when it becomes an arena of power-over, a means of treating another — or oneself — as an object.
Starhawk (b. 1951) American writer, activist, feminist theologian [b. Miriam Simos]
Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics, ch. 3 “The Ethics of Magic” (1982)
To live with integrity in an unjust society, we must work for justice. To walk with integrity through a landscape strewn with beer cans, we must stop and pick them up.
Starhawk (b. 1951) American writer, activist, feminist theologian [b. Miriam Simos]
Dreaming the Dark, ch. 3 “The Ethics of Magic” (1982)
Each being is sacred — meaning that each has inherent value that cannot be ranked in a hierarchy or compared to the value of another being.
Starhawk (b. 1951) American writer, activist, feminist theologian [b. Miriam Simos]
The Fifth Sacred Thing, Introduction (1994)
The Trickster represents the quality of randomness and chance in the universe, without which there could be no freedom. In the Craft the Goddess is not omnipotent. 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 control or define everything.
Starhawk (b. 1951) American writer, activist, feminist theologian [b. Miriam Simos]
The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979)
But the final price of freedom is the willingness to face that most frightening of all beings, one’s own self.
Starhawk (b. 1951) American writer, activist, feminist theologian [b. Miriam Simos]
The Spiral Dance (1979)
The test of a true myth is that each time you return to it, new insights and interpretations arise.
Starhawk (b. 1951) American writer, activist, feminist theologian [b. Miriam Simos]
The Spiral Dance (1979)
Of course I vote! If you’re a woman, or a person of color, or a person who doesn’t own property, or even a white male who doesn’t belong to the nobility, centuries of struggle and many deaths have bought you the right to vote. I vote to keep faith with peasant rebels and suffragist hunger strikers and civil rights workers braving the lynch mobs of the South, if for no other reason. But there is another reason — because who we vote for has an enormous impact on real peoples’ lives.
Starhawk (b. 1951) American writer, activist, feminist theologian [b. Miriam Simos]
Blog post (2016-11-07), “Pre-Election Day Thoughts”
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