RECLAIMING PRINCIPLES OF UNITY

"My law is love unto all beings . . ."

The Charge of the Goddess

The values of the Reclaiming tradition stem from our understanding that the earth is alive and all of life is sacred and interconnected. We see the Goddess as immanent in the earth's cycles of birth, growth, death, decay, and regeneration. Our practice arises from a deep, spiritual commitment to the earth, to healing, and to the linking of magic with political action.

Each of us embodies the divine. Our ultimate spiritual authority is within, and we need no other person to interpret the sacred to us. We foster the questioning attitude, and we honor intellectual, spiritual, and creative freedom.

We are an evolving, dynamic tradition and proudly call ourselves Witches. Honoring both Goddess and God, we work with female and male images of divinity, always remembering that their essence is a mystery that goes beyond form. Our community rituals are participatory and ecstatic, celebrating the cycles of the seasons and our lives, and raising energy for personal, collective, and earth healing.

We know that everyone can do the life-changing, world-renewing work of magic, the art of changing consciousness at will. We strive to teach and practice in ways that foster personal and collective empowerment, to model shared power, and to open leadership roles to all. We make decisions by consensus, and balance individual autonomy with social responsibility.

Our tradition honors the wild and calls for service to the earth and the community. We value peace and practice nonviolence, in keeping with the Rede "Harm none, and do what you will." We work for all forms of justice: environmental, social, political, racial, gender, and economic. Our feminism includes a radical analysis of power, seeing all systems of oppression as interrelated, rooted in structures of domination and control.

We welcome all genders, all races, all ages and sexual orientations, and all those differences of life situation, background, and ability that increase our diversity. We strive to make our public rituals and events accessible and safe. We try to balance the need to be justly compensated for our labor with our commitment to make our work available to people of all economic levels.

All living beings are worthy of respect. All are supported by the sacred elements of air, fire, water, and earth. We work to create and sustain communities and cultures that embody our values, that can help to heal the wounds of the earth and her peoples, and that can sustain us and nurture future generations.

Reclaiming's coming of age reflects similar growth occurring among many Pagan groups. The nineties have seen Wiccan and Pagan groups continue to expand. More people began openly teaching and offering public rituals. The Internet supplied the safe meeting ground Pagans and Witches had not had for centuries. When people had a way to make connections without risk, the movement mushroomed. Now many groups are struggling with these same issues of growth and continuity as we move into the new century.

Amory Lovins says the primary design criteria he uses is the question "How do we love all the children?" Not just our children, not just the ones who look like us or who have resources, not just the human children but the young of birds and salmon and redwood trees. When we love all the children, when that love is truly sacred to us in the sense of being most important, then we have to take action in the world to enact that love. We are called to make the earth a place where all the children can thrive.

The Spiral Dance linked Goddess spirituality with political activism decades ago. In spite of fears by some political feminists that interest in the Goddess would divert energy from political work, Pagans and Witches have accrued a proud record of involvement in feminist issues, gay liberation, and antinuclear, antiwar, and environmental campaigns.

Personally, I stopped counting my arrests in direct action when they numbered something like two dozen. I chronicled some of the work we did in nonviolent direct action in the introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of this book. Over the last ten years, our community's political work has broadened in scope. In the last few months, for example, I've gone up to the Headwaters forest base camp to offer support for the blockade protesting the clear-cutting of old-growth redwoods; spoken at rallies; circulated petitions, and picketed the GAP as part of a boycott protesting logging activities in Mendocino County; visited an action camp in Minneapolis, where a strong Pagan presence has been an integral part of the organizing, to offer support and ritual; helped to found an organization m our community to address land use issues; facilitated meetings; opened a dialogue with vineyard owners around their use of pesticides; traveled to El balvador to visit the sister communities Reclaiming supports; passed out endless flyers; wrote to state, local, and federal representatives and the California Department of Forestry-not counting the petitions I've signed online, or the work of teaching and writing, which I consider highly political, or the hands-on organic gardening and permaculture I do on my own land. (And then there are the tree-climbing lessons-but we won't speak of those. Let us all pray that the survival of the redwoods never hinges on my ability to scale up a tree higher than about fifteen feet.) I'm more public than most Pagans, but not atypical. Our community has been deeply involved in direct action around nuclear power and weapons, Central American solidarity, and antimilitarism. We currently participate in an ongoing support program for a group in El Salvador that teaches sustainability. We are involved as well in feminist issues, gay liberation, and AIDS activism. The latest issue of the Reclaiming Quarterly reports on issues ranging from Headwaters to support for a local soup kitchen, from protesting the School of the Americas to an interview with the director of the Rainforest Action Network.

Not all Pagans or Goddesses are political activists, any more than all Christians, Jews, or secular humanists are. But in a cross section of the Pagan community you will find more activists per population than in just about any other spiritual tradition, except the Unitarians and Quakers, who have been breeding activists for centuries. And some are second-generation Pagans, among the first group of young people raised in the reemergent Goddess tradition.

The new areas I'm exploring arise from changes in my own life. A few years ago, while meditating in-where else?-my garden, I received this message: "You're teaching too much meditation and not enough observation." As a Witch, as a therapist, as a writer and novelist, I had spent years immersed in my own and others' internal imagery. I loved nature: I worshipped her and had often gone to jail defending her, but in many ways I really knew very little about her. My education had focused on art, psychology, and film, not biology, forestry, or horticulture. I grew herbs and made compost and took long walks in the hills, but often the garden, the forest, and the ocean were simply scenic backdrops to my own thoughts.

I shifted my personal practice to spend some time each day in nature, observing what is going on around me, whether I'm in the forest or in a backyard in the city. I began reading and studying, attending conferences; I took a permaculture design course that offered training in reading the land, working with nature, and in ecological design. The garden began talking louder and louder. "Grow food," the garden said. "Do you realize how much I travel?" "I don't care, just grow food. Because when you eat food grown on the land, you become the land."

Growing at least some food for myself and my friends and family became part of my personal spiritual practice. I began to look not just at food but at the herbs and plants we use in magic in a new way. They were no longer just names gleaned from old books but real characters that I had an ongoing relationship with. In David Abram's book The Spell of the Sensuous, he writes: "The traditional or tribal shaman, I came to discern, acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field" (p. 7). I began to wonder what that role would look like in the high-tech world of the nineties.

These changes coincided with other personal changes. Somewhere in there I fell in love with and married a sweet, supportive, and funny man who is also a Witch. David brought with him four wonderful stepdaughters. If you call the youngest of them on the phone, her answering machine invites you to "leave a message for any of these beautiful, empowered, and independent women ...," which describes them all. I have two-soon to be three-step-grandchildren and a tribe of Goddess daughters.

My mother died the summer I remarried. A couple of years later, the coven I'd been in for sixteen years dissolved. Covens, like any organism, have a life span, and ours had reached its end. At the same time, Reclaiming's activities were expanding. I found that after teaching five or six intensives a summer, what I needed as a counterbalance was nature and solitude. I began spending more and more time on our land in the coastal hills of northern California, living, as a proper Witch should, in a little hut in the woods, complete with skylights and solar panels.

Now nature was no longer an abstraction but a daily condition. The elements were no longer theoretical: fire meant the real danger of summer wildfire, and the fire I had to build in the woodstove out of wood, someone had to chop. Water meant the hundred or more inches we receive in a wet winter, the erosion it may cause, the spring that supplies our drinking and irrigation water, the pipeline that carries it, with its annoying tendency to break, the tanks that store it, and the drip system that distributes it. The imagery and symbolism I'd been working with for decades finally got real.

My current passion is to integrate more closely the worship of nature with knowledge that comes from the observation of nature, and to infuse science, ecological design, and environmental activism with the deep connectedness that comes from acknowledging the sacred.

Looking back at the past inevitably leads to looking forward to the future, especially on the edge of a new millennium. At one Brigid ritual, I was sitting with Allison, a child I've known and loved since her birth, who lived with us for her first two years. We were close to the cauldron, watching people come up to the fire to make a pledge. The Brigid doll, woven of wheat and grasses and dressed in white, was especially beautiful that year, and Allison was watching with a look of awe on her face. After a time, she gathered her courage and went to the fire to make her first pledge. I realized that this ritual was as central to her universe as the Jewish High Holidays were to me as a child. I remembered the origins of each piece of the ritual: I could say, oh yes, that year we began the pledges, that year we first made a doll. But to her, this was simply a core marker in every year of her life. (She is, after all, the child who at age two encountered the wild crowds that filled the streets of San Francisco after the 49ers won the Super Bowl and thought they were excited because the moon had come back.)

I realized that we who had begun these traditions now had a sacred responsibility. We could not abandon them if some year we simply weren't in the mood, or had other commitments. Or rather, we needed enough of a support system and structure so that if one person dropped back, others would be there to carry on.

In middle age, I no longer operate under the delusion of immortality that sustains the young. I know that I won't be here forever. My concern has shifted from "How do I learn to do this?" to "How do I pass this on?" How do I ensure that others will carry on the work, continue not just to tend the garden but to continue to create it, expand it, compost the plants that no longer thrive, and feed the deep-rooted ones that can live a thousand years?

I hope that in the next two decades our traditions will develop more resources for children and youth. We have not yet been able to love all the children because we have not been free to openly educate our own. Up until the present, the virulent prejudice against Pagans in the larger culture has made any kind of work with children or youth problematic and even dangerous.

That situation is slowly changing. More and more, Pagans are demanding to be seen as a religious tradition just as valid as any other. The ability to openly practice one's faith without fear is a basic religious freedom. At twenty-eight, I didn't mind being a rebel. The need for secrecy around Witchcraft just added to its charm. But at forty-eight, as I see the children grow up around us, I find the necessity for fear and secrecy around our tradition intolerable. We cannot pass on a tradition to the next generation unless we can be open, honest, and unafraid. We cannot continue to be forced to say to our children, "This is beautiful, sacred, and meaningful-but don't tell anyone about it!" Religious freedom is a political issue as much as any other. I'm deeply grateful to the many Pagan organizations that have stressed education, media outreach, and interfaith work in attempting to redress this problem.

I also hope that in the next years, we as a movement can become ever more inclusive, diverse, and accessible, that people of all backgrounds and ancestries will find a warm welcome in our communities and a deep understanding of the complex issues of race and class in our society. Twenty years ago, we often had agonized discussions about whether gays and lesbians and "straight people" could ever work together. Today, in the communities I work with, we take for granted that many different sexual orientations not only can Work and celebrate together but also can enrich each other's understanding and broaden our perspectives. There are many other kinds of diversity, however, that are not yet well represented in our communities, and this is one of the greatest challenges we face in the coming years.

A few years ago, I participated in a public ritual for El Dia de los Muertos organized by the Latino community in San Francisco and warmly supported by Reclaiming. That year, we mourned the youth who had died from violence on our streets that year, called their names, and grieved for the ways their deaths diminished our community. When the ritual was over, a woman approached me. She was obviously a street person, her face ravaged by years of hard living and pain. "Thank you for that ritual," she said. "I needed it. One of my babies died of an overdose, and one committed suicide, and I really needed that ritual."

Her comment stayed with me as the challenge we take with us into the next century-how to bring ritual and healing, how to bring the fruits we have grown to those who most desperately need them.

When young people ask me for advice today, I generally say, "Decide what is sacred to you, and put your best life energies at its service. Make that the focus of your studies, your work, the test for your pleasures and your relationships. Don't ever let fear or craving for security turn you aside." When you serve your passion, when you are willing to risk yourself for something, your greatest creative energies are released. Hard work is required, but nothing is more joyful than work infused by love.

My mother always hoped that Witchcraft was just a phase I was going through. After twenty years, it seems more in the nature of a lifework. What does it mean to have lived a life in service to the Goddess? In spite of all the anti-Craft prejudice, it has not generally meant great personal sacrifice or danger, although the possibility is always there. What the Goddess has asked of me is more a certain shamelessness, a willingness to stand up for ideas other people find weird, flaky, or silly, to look foolish, to refuse to be molded by others' judgments. New ideas always meet resistance, and one generation's woo-woo weirdness may be another generation's brilliant breakthrough (too often becoming the rigid orthodoxy of yet another era).

It was said of the Goddess Isis that "Her service is perfect freedom." Freedom is among the great rewards I've received in this life-along with love, friendship, good work with good companions, and the satisfaction of feeling my gifts are well used. I've always had what I needed. I'm not rich, but neither am I poor. I consider myself among the most fortunate human beings on this planet, and if I work hard it's out of the desire to give back a small part of what I have.

Twenty years ago, I ended this book with a vision of the future. We're not quite as far into that future as I imagined we would be, but we've made some steps. We have celebrated first blood rites for our daughters, and coming-of-age rituals for our sons. On the Winter Solstice and the full moon, many groups gather and celebrate, in San Francisco and around the world. There are many Witches working to love all the children, to heal the land, to defend the wilderness that remains, to succor the homeless, to comfort the dying, to feed the poor, to nurture the power and vision of women and men of goodwill.

But no, we cannot yet-say that in our city no one goes hungry, that no one is left to die alone, that we can walk the dark streets without fearing violence, that the air is clean, that life has returned to the waters of the bay, that we are at peace.

The Goddess continues to awaken in infinite forms and a thousand disguises. We have tilled the garden bed, planted seeds, and tended the slow, early growth. But much work still remains.

STARHAWK CAZADERO, FEBRUARY 1999

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 827