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Starhawk is the author of nine books, including her bestselling The Spiral Dance, The Pagan Book of Living and Dying, and Webs of Power, winner of the 2003 Nautilus Award for social change. She has an international reputation, and her works have been translated into many different languages. Starhawk is also a columnist for beliefnet.com and ZNet. A veteran of progressive movements who is deeply committed to bringing the techniques and creative power of spirituality to political activism, she travels internationally, teaching magic, the tools of ritual, and the skills of activism. Starhawk lives part-time in San Francisco, in a collective house with her partner and friends, and part-time in a little hut in the woods in western Sonoma County, where she practices permaculture in her extensive gardens and writes.

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From time immemorial, artists and poets, prophets, and shamans have drawn strength and inspiration from walking the earth. In The Earth Path, bestselling author Starhawk takes the reader on a journey into the heart of the natural world, showing how we can have a more intimate connection with the world that surrounds us.

Institutionalized religions have sacred texts -- messages written in holy books that are the inspiration for their beliefs and rituals. But the sacred texts for Wicca, like other ancient native or indigenous traditions, are written in nature -- in the magic circle of the elements: air, fire, water, and earth. With The Earth Path, Starhawk, an activist, ecofeminist, and leader in the women’s spirituality movement, places you in the center of that magical circle. As you become attuned to the rhythms of the earth, your thinking will shift from focusing on isolated objects to marveling at the multitude of interconnecting patterns and relationships in nature. These patterns and connections can hold the key to your own spiritual renewal and restore your sense of responsibility for preserving this world that nurtures and sustains us.

Filled with awareness exercises, inspiring meditations, and magical rituals, The Earth Path not only teaches the reader to respect the ecology of our natural world, but shows how to spiritually connect with and channel the powers inherent in nature.

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The Earth Path

HarperSanFrancisco

Chapter One

Toward the Isle of Birds

On a hilltop in the coastal mountains of northern California, I meet with myneighbors just before sunset on a hot day in July to go to a fire protection ritual.All summer long, our land and homes are at risk for wildfire. In the winter, weget eighty to a hundred inches of rain in a good year, and trees and grasses andshrubs grow tall. But no rain falls from June through September, and in summerthe land gets dry as tinder. A small spark from a mower, a carelessly tossed cigarette,a glass bottle full of water that acts as a magnifying lens can all be thebeginning of an inferno that could claim our homes and lives.

We live with the constant risk of fire, and also with the knowledge that ourland needs fire, craves fire. This land is a fire ecology. All the trees on it evolvedin association with forest fires. The redwoods, with their thick, spongy bark,withstand fire. The madrones and bay laurels and tanoaks resprout from rootcrowns to survive fire. Fire once kept the meadows open, providing habitat fordeer and their predators, coyote and cougar. Fire kept the underbrush down,favoring the big trees and reducing disease. The Pomo, the first people of thisland, burned it regularly to keep it healthy. As a result, the forest floor was keptopen, the fuel load was reduced, and fires were low and relatively cool. But nowthe woods are dense with shrubby regrowth, the grasses tall and dry. A firetoday would not be cool and restorative, but a major inferno.

Below us is the small firehouse that belongs to our Volunteer FireDepartment. We can look around to the far horizons and see our at-risk landscape.Deep canyons are filled with redwoods and Douglas firs, with bay laureland madrone and vast stands of tanoak filling in the open spaces left wherestands of giant conifers were logged a hundred years ago and, again, fifty yearsago. The tanoaks are bushy, with multiple small stems that create a huge firehazard. Big-leaf maples line the stream banks, and black oaks stud the openhillsides where fifty years ago sheep grazed. Tall stands of grasses in the openmeadows are already dry and ready to burn. Once the meadows would havestayed green all summer with deep-rooted native bunchgrasses, but a century ofgrazing favored invasive European grasses that wither quickly in the summerheat. Small homes fill the wrinkles in the landscape, most built twenty yearsago by back-to-the-landers out of local wood and scrounged materials. On thehigh ridges, we can see evidence of the latest change in land use, a proliferationof vineyards. Behind us is a huge fallen tree -- a remnant of the 1978 wildfirethat started just over the ridge and burned thousands of acres.

We begin by sharing some food, talking and laughing together, waiting foreveryone to arrive. Then we ground, breathing deeply and with great gratitudethe clean air that blows fresh from the ocean just a few ridges over. We imagineour roots going into the earth, feeling the jumble of rock formations andthe volatile, shifting ground here just two ridges over from the San Andreasfault. We feel the fire of the liquid lava below our feet, and the sun?s fire burninghot above our heads.

We cast our circle by describing the boundaries of the land we wish to protect-- from the small town of Cazadero in the east to the rancheria of theKashaya Pomo in the north; from the ocean in the west to the ridges andgulches to the south of us. We invoke the air -- the actual breeze we can feel onour skin; the fire, so integral to this landscape yet so dangerous to us now; thewater, the vast ocean now covered in a blanket of fog, the sweet springs thatfeed the land; the earth herself, these jumbled ridges and tall forests.

In the center of the circle is a small bowl. One by one, we bring water fromour springs and pour it into the vessel. My neighbors know exactly where theirwater comes from. Each of us has spent many hours digging out springs, layingwater pipes, fixing leaks.

"This is from a spring beyond that hill that flows into Camper Creek thatflows into Carson Creek that flows into MacKenzie Creek that flows intoSproul Creek that flows into the South Fork of the Gualala River ..."

We offer the combined waters to the earth with a prayer of gratitude -- greatgratitude that we live in one of the few places left on earth where we can drinkspringwater straight from the ground.

Excerpted from The Earth Pathby Starhawk Excerpted by permission.
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