Earth Path by Starhawk

Author:Starhawk [Starhawk]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

For this exercise, you need a full-length mirror and a bowl of salt water. Use only a few grains of salt, as you will eventually give the water back to the earth.

In a private place, ground and come into your senses. Take off your clothes, and look at your body in a mirror. Feel its curves, the fullness of your breasts, the roundness of your belly. Become aware of all the feelings that arise in you. Do you love your body? Hate it? Admire it? Are you ashamed of it? Want to change features of it?

Just acknowledge honestly all that you feel and think about your body. Ask yourself, How much of my energy is tied up in feelings or frustrations about my body?

Place the bowl of salt water at your feet. Breathing slowly and deeply, imagine all that energy, all of your thoughts and judgments, draining off of you into the bowl.

Now look at your body again. Going slowly, from your feet up to your head, look at every part that you might have felt judgment about, and bless it. See your curves as stored sunlight. Acknowledge and bless the stored energy in your body. Thank the plants and animals that transformed that energy into food for you. Thank the sun.

When you are full of gratitude, lift the bowl of salt water and breathe into it. Imagine filling it with sunlight and gratitude, transforming the energies you’ve poured into it.

When you are done, take some of the transformed salt water and anoint any places on your body that you need extra help in blessing. Then pour out what is left onto the earth. (If you are worried about too much salt affecting plants, dilute the solution even more before pouring it.)

Fire Ecology

In addition to the sun’s fire and the subtle energies, fire itself is a purifying and renewing force—and also a destructive force. Fire is the first tool human beings used to alter the environment around them on a large scale.

Fire can be an energizing and renewing force in a landscape. Here in northern California, we live in a fire ecology. Native American tribes regularly burned the forests and grasslands, to keep them healthy and diverse.9 Fire creates a mosaic of habitats. A wildfire burns at different intensities over different patches of ground, so when it passes through, it leaves a variety of different habitats and stages of succession intact. In southern Oregon, at an Earth First! gathering last May, we camped on the edge of a recent burn. Below us, we could see patches of scorched earth, patches of undamaged trees, lightly burned areas, and areas where all was black and dead. Each would provide slightly different conditions for plants and birds and animals, increasing the area’s diversity and the extent of its “edge.”

When our forests were burned regularly by Native Americans, they remained open and fires stayed low and relatively cool. In fact, regular burning prevented the enormously destructive wildfires we often experience today. Fire kept the meadows open, so the deer and elk could find good grazing.

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