by Starhawk
Trust is a precious and fragile fabric in any group. Weaving trust is a process as challenging as weaving nettle shirts. In a sense, we are weaving the soul of a group with every act we take, everything we say or do. We can also easily rip the fabric apart with personal attacks, malicious gossip, or tasks left unfulfilled.
Revenge, jealousy, our own ill wishes, and wicked vows are like logs with which we build the pyre that will consume us even as we continue to try to finish our task of healing. But if we do the work in this book, the work of transformation, we can build a different kind of fire, a hearth fire that can warm and comfort us.
I’ve learned a lot about fire from living with a woodstove as my source of heat. When my relationship with the fire elementals is good (and/or the wood The is dry), I can toss in a match and whoosh—the room is warm. On a bad night, when I’m impatient, when I haven’t laid the fire correctly, it will fizzle out over and over again while I swear quietly and use up all my matches.
Fire is a teacher. It is no accident that the hearth is so much associated with the heart of home and community. Building a fire can teach us a lot about building a relationship, a family, a community, a movement. Following is a meditation—or, really, a sort of musing—I began working with at California, mid-Atlantic, and Vermont Witchcamps, with added inspiration from Kymistree, Baruch, Beverly, and Thorn.
Fire Meditation
Set up a fire pit, and ask each person in the group to bring something to build a fire. Be very careful not to specify what they should bring. (In the group Baruch and I led, people kept asking us, “What do you mean, ‘Bring something to build a fire’?” “Just come up to the fire circle, and bring something to build a fire,” we kept repeating patiently. Half the group brought wood, paper, or matches, and the other half turned up empty-handed. They’d brought passion, vision, courage, because they’d assumed we’d been speaking metaphorically.)
When the group gathers, look at what people have brought. Consider what we need to build a fire. Did anyone bring kindling? Small fuel to get it going? Matches? Did some people bring everything necessary in case others did not come through? Did some people forget to bring anything? Did some bring big logs?
Fire needs fuel, oxygen, and heat. What is the fuel that sustains your community? What is the oxygen, the breath of ideas, visions, concepts? What is the heat, the passion? And who or what is the spark, the catalyst to get things going?
To burn, a fire must have all these things arranged in the proper relationships. A fire has its own order. Before building a fire, consider what contains it. A woodstove? A fire pit? A cauldron? What boundary contains your community, defines it, and keeps it safe?
Begin with a small pile of something quick to burn. What catches fire easily in your community? Many times I start with garbage—used paper, old newspaper, tissues. Many times we begin to create community around our garbage: our old issues, our unhealed wounds. A fire needs just enough of that stuff to get it going. Pain can spark community into being, but to be sustained, we need to start adding sticks of hope and vision, small at first, then larger and larger. The big sticks, the grand visions, can’t be added until the fire is going strong. Put them on too early, and you smother the fire.
What size log can your fire handle? What does it need? What do you tend to bring to the fire—kindling? The little sticks, the dealing with everyday details, that lay the groundwork for the big logs? Too many sticks at the same time can deprive the fire of the air it needs to burn. Sometimes we may bring a perfectly good stick to the fire only to find that the timing is wrong, that it is not needed and may even harm the fire if we insist on adding it at that moment. Have you ever done that? What might have happened if you had been able to hold your stick back?
A strong fire can burn up a lot of garbage—but garbage alone cannot sustain a fire. How does your community find the big logs it needs to keep going?
A fire, to be sustained, must be tended. How do you feed your fire? How do you tend your community? Think of everything you do in community, every communication you make, no matter how small it seems, as an act of feeding the fire. Timing is everything in sustaining a fire. The same log that may keep the fire burning if placed when the flames are hot may kill it if you wait too long. Returning a phone call, answering an e-mail, sending out the minutes of a meeting—all the thousand small acts of service we do feed the fire best when they are done at the right time. Have you ever undone your own work by procrastinating?
A hot blaze is wonderful for a bonfire or for quick heat, but if you want to cook, you have to cook on the embers. How do we learn to find the creativity in the ember times, when energy seems to be lower and the issue is sustaining, not blazing? What can we accomplish then that we cannot when the fire is high?
Some things will burn but create toxic fumes if we add them to the fire. Backbiting, vicious gossip, and unkind rumors are like plastic waste added to a hearth fire. We cannot trust a group, we cannot safely breathe, in their presence. Have you ever added them to your group’s fire? Have you ever dumped explosives onto the hearth or dampened it with wet rags?
What are your own lessons from the fire? How do we sustain the hearth fire of this group?
When the group has had time to meditate, you can either open to discussion around the fire or move into more energetic ritual.
Weaving in the Dungeon
Rose holds her vision and continues to weave in the dungeon, on the way to the stake itself. When we undertake a great work of healing, we need a vision strong enough to carry us when we enter unfriendly or even hostile environments.
Harvard is not generally thought of as a dungeon, but to a Witch it is a learning environment built on assumptions about success and power very different from ours. Grove, a Reclaiming teacher who earned a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard, speaks of how she was able to continue to weave her unique vision in a highly competitive environment.
“Part of a Witch’s training involves moving between different realms,” Grove says. “At Harvard I translated that into moving between different schools. I was able to hold my own center and move between the Business School, the Kennedy School of Government, and the Divinity School, where the cultures and communities are very different.”
Just as Rose had her nettles with her in the dungeon, we bring our magical skills and understandings with us, whatever environment we find ourselves in.
“It was all too easy to feel less than ‘the best and the brightest’ at the Business School,” Grove admits. “I realized I needed to help myself very actively. Three crystals came to me, and I charged them with the red leaves of an autumn maple and the light of the full moon. Then I planted them around the Business School campus, one of them in full view in the bowels of the library, where I could see it every time I entered, and one in the chapel, and one along my path. I empowered myself through this spiritual action, increasing my sense of peace in being there, and decreasing the power of the illusions around me.”
Grove used many magical skills and tools for support, from listening to the elements to spellcrafting and trance journeying. Perhaps most important, she was clear about her intention: “I was not there to change others or to inform them about Wicca. I was not there to be adversarial to the institution—rather, to be a part of it for a time and to learn as much as I could. I was very clear about my own spiritual path and commitment to the Goddess. Going to divinity school was an incredibly broadening academic experience, but not the spiritual searching that it is for some people. My own path is quite eclectic, so more exposure to other traditions was a gift rather than a challenge.”
To anchor her intention, “the phrase that came to me was ‘this bridge called my brain,’ a variation of the title of a very important collection of writings by women of color: This Bridge Called My Back. I sensed that this education my brain was taking in was a bridge between many worlds.”
Rose’s intention was embodied in the shirts she was sewing for her brothers. Even in th
e dungeon, the shirts were a constant image of the human form, the soul she hoped to restore. As Witches, as workers of magic, we know the importance of directing our will through an image that holds our intention.
In political actions, we often focus strongly on what we are protesting against. We shout “No war!” or “Stop the bombing!” But our understanding of magic tells us that Younger Self doesn’t understand no. Younger Self is like a dog: if we say, “Rover, I’m not taking you for a walk today,” Rover hears “Walk!” and gets excited. To truly change consciousness, not only must we know what we don’t want; we must hold a clear vision of what we do want. That vision must be embodied in the actions we take, in the way we structure our groups and treat each other, and in the messages we put out to the world.
Margo Adair is a longtime activist, meditation teacher, and friend of Reclaiming. She and her friend Ruby Phillips created the following meditation for shared intent (which is taken from Margo’s forthcoming book The Applied Meditation Sourcebook) as a preparation for political actions. It incorporates breathing, grounding, and creating an anchor to an intention for the action. As they put it, “This meditation creates a way for people to easily tap their own internal resources and feel collective purpose in the midst of chaos.”
Shared Intent Meditation
Sit, stand, or lie in a comfortable position.
Bring your awareness into your body. Notice your body breathing.
Feel breath rolling through your body. Feel the rise and fall of your breath, relaxed and full.
Breath carries life. All that is alive breathes. Appreciate the simple miracle of breath. Breath renews life. As you breathe, feel your breath renew you now. Every cell of your body is bathed by breath.
Feel your feet… Feel the earth. Feel yourself supported by the earth. Feel the stability of the earth. Grow roots down into the ground; draw strength from the earth.
What you breathe out, the plants breathe in. Breath weaves life together. Breath carries life.
Imagine that the earth is breathing with you, as though the earth and sky breathe, as though All That Is is alive. Remember the sacred. Life is sacred. Remember the beauty and uniqueness of human beings living in different places on the earth. All people on the earth are sacred. Remember the life of the forests, and remember the life of the seas. Breathe the powers of the forests, the animals, the seas, and deep in the earth…
Now notice that all of us here are breathing.
Remember that we are all here to take a stand for life, for all living beings on the earth. We are all here together; together we are powerful. Breathe the power of life. Imagine that our breathing finds harmonic rhythms. Notice how the quality of energy here is changing as we focus on our common purpose. Bathe in this energy.
Breathing our unity, breathing our common purpose, breathing the power of our shared intention … breathing with the earth, breathing with each other, breathing the sacred.
Now create a symbol or a gesture that represents this energy, whatever feels right to you. Know that when you call this to mind, you evoke our shared intent. Know that every time you evoke it, its power increases. Tell yourself this now.
As you breathe out, send this power to where it is needed to help us work well with one another, to stand with all life. Imagine bathing the situation with this energy.
Tell yourself you will remember to call upon this energy. Tell yourself this now. Expect it to be true. Envision the success of our shared intent. Expect it to be true.
Vision Meditation
Finding a vision of what we want is often much more difficult than identifying what we don’t want. The many issues we care about, the complexity of the problems we face, can seem overwhelming.
“I try to focus on just one issue at a time,” says Oak, a Reclaiming teacher, therapist, and lifelong activist. “I imagine what a true victory would mean for that issue: ‘What if all food were organic?’ And what I find is that one victory changes everything.”
In sacred space, think of an issue you feel passionate about. (You might reflect back on the wand meditation described in chapter 6.) Breathe deeply, and let yourself imagine what a victory around that issue would be like. What would change in your life? What would change for the poorest third of the people? What would change for the earth?
What would have to change to bring about this victory in the aspects of air, in the ways we think about things? Our ideals, our constructs of reality?
What would change in terms of fire aspects, in our energy systems, in who holds power and how that power is gained and distributed?
What would change in water aspects, in terms of our images of value or success or abundance? What would change emotionally?
What would change in terms of earth aspects, in our environment? How would our economic systems change?
How would we change in the realm of the spirit?
What’s already changing to bring about this victory?
Breathe deeply. Is there a concrete image you can visualize of your victory? A symbol that you can weave into your magic and your actions? A word or phrase you can use to convey the essence of this vision?
Give thanks for your victory, and open the circle.
Headline Bonfire
Jeffrey Alphonsus describes a ritual performance in which he shouted out headlines from the newspaper while his partner Med-o told the real story of what had happened. To end, they burned the newspaper in a flaming cauldron and asked the audience to shout out the headlines they wanted to see. Create a ritual, a performance, or a mummer’s play around the headlines you would most like to see. Give some thought to phrasing them in positive language: “World Peace Declared!” instead of “All Wars Ended!”
In your journal, write the news story of your victory. Infuse it with magical intention, and keep it on your altar to be charged with energy.
When our vision is clear, sometimes the most powerful political statement we can make is simply to enact it. Rose May Dance was part of a group of Reclaiming Witches who also worked as counselors for drug users around AIDS issues. From their research, they determined that making clean needles available to drug users would help slow the spread of AIDS. Providing such supplies was illegal in our state. Nevertheless, they set up a needle exchange, beginning their action on November 2, the Day of the Dead, and holding both a magical and political intention. Instead of arresting the group, the police and later the mayor gave the group tacit support. Prevention Point, as the group was called, collected vital data that had a worldwide impact on AIDS-prevention programs, spurred the de facto legalization of the exchange, and eventually became a publicly supported program.
No matter how strong our vision, activism still often demands that we say no to injustice or destruction through all the usual forms of marches, petitions, and rallies. Demonstrations can also be joyful celebrations of life, and when we participate in them as Witches, using all our magical skills, we can have a powerful effect on the energy. We can use the symbols of our vision on posters, flags, and flyers. We can weave our phrases into chants. In many demonstrations over the years, we’ve learned the power of a song begun at the right moment or a spiral dance on a blockade line. At one Headwaters rally to save the old-growth redwoods, a group of us started a spiral dance when a planned civil disobedience was abandoned and the event needed closure. We had to fight a blaring sound system and a battery of thumping drummers, but by working the energy together we raised a cone of power as a double rainbow crowned the sky.
At the November 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization, giant puppets, flags, and balloons converged on the streets of Seattle. Sea turtles danced through the streets. Reclaiming Witches brought the banners of earth, air, fire, and water to represent the Elements of Life. Jeffrey Alphonsus was part of a group that drummed through the streets to hold the energy of hope and vision amid the tear gas.
“I had never felt such a real sense of urgency about the power of the drumming, how needed it was,” h
e says. “People were coming to me saying, ‘Will you come over here?’ or ‘Will you go over there?’ They weren’t just seeing us as entertainment; they could feel the power of the drums in keeping their spirits up.”
We can weave a symbol into many aspects of an action. The I’ll Drink to That affinity group, at the WTO demonstrations, went into a hotel bar where many delegates were gathered the night before the action. They bought a round of drinks for the house and began toasting the Elements of Life. They ended up drinking and talking with delegates until the wee hours, opening a dialogue that could not have taken place on the street in the heat of the action. And they continued to work with water and in-drinking as a symbol in many forms, from charged ginger tea to chants and libations.
When political action takes the form of nonviolent civil disobedience, it may afford us the opportunity to literally weave in the dungeon. Over the last twenty years, I’ve done many rituals in jail. After the WTO blockade, several Reclaiming Witches were held for five days for refusing to obey an illegal decree banning protest and free speech in the downtown area. We taught chants and sang songs, held morning meditations, and encouraged our fellow blockaders to share their skills and knowledge in everything from organizing strategies to folding paper cranes. We held a spiral dance in a holding cell and gave each other aura brushdowns before release.
“I found that what was most important was just working with the elements,” Oak said afterward. “Again and again, that’s what I would come back to. The guards took away my asthma inhaler, and I had to keep invoking the air spirits and stay focused on breathing. In that place where there was nothing but concrete, it was so powerful to know that we could still connect with the elements and be in touch with the powers of nature.”
Extreme situations test the depth of our practice and compassion. We know we have worked a powerful spell when we can transform imprisonment into empowerment. But perhaps even more important is the weaving we do every day, the thousands of magical transformations that happen in our homes, our workplaces, our communities, whenever we enact our visions and truly care for one another.
