This week, in honor of Earth Day, I share my appreciation for three outstanding women activists for the Earth who happen to be coming to the Berkshires this spring: Eve Ensler, Starhawk and Joanna Macy.
Eve Ensler, speaking from the Body of the World
Eve Ensler, who will be giving a free lecture at the Williams College 62 Center on April 23, burst onto the scene in the 1990s with the wildfire success of her play “The Vagina Monologues,” and she hasn’t stopped since, publishing books on violence against women, body image and activism, as well as founding the powerhouse anti-violence organizations V-Day and One Billion Rising, both of which have become global movements for positive social change.
Ensler came to environmental activism later in life, discovering her passion for the Earth when she realized, through the ravages of cancer, that there can be no real disconnection between our bodies and our planet. In her moving, raging cancer memoir, In the Body of the World, Ensler writes:
“Cancer is essentially built into our DNA, our self-destruction programmed into our original design —biologically, psychologically. We spend our days, most of us, consciously or unconsciously doing ourselves in. Think building a nuclear power plant on a fault line close to the water. Think poisoning the Earth that feeds us, the air that lets us breathe” (194).
Ensler beats the cancer, and in her memoir she recounts how the “second wind” of life that she is given fans the flames of her activism to burn even more fiercely:
“I have lost my organs and at times my mind. I know it is a race now between the people who are helping themselves to the Earth, to the loot, and the rest of us. I despise charity. It gives crumbs to the few and silences the others. Either we go all the way now or there is no more way. Who will step off the wheel? Who will join the women who have lived in the forests, in the projects, in the loud and cramped cities and who carry sacks of pain on their backs and hungry babies on their breasts, who are not counted, but whose strength and whose work hold up the world? Who will stand with them and trust that they have always known the way? The world burns in my veins, just like chemo did only a few months ago. I dare you to stop counting and start acting. To stop pleasing and start defying. I dare you to trust what you know….
“Each one of you will know in what direction you need to move and who to take with you. You will recognize the others when you arrive. Build the circles. Listen to the voice inside. And when they come and say, “This is the one way… we need the oil, we need the drilling, the reactors, the tar sands, the fracking, the coal,” stay tight in your circle. Dance in the circles. Sing in the circles. Join arms in the circles. Surrender your comfort. We must be willing to go the distance. We must be willing to leave the kingdom and surrender the treasures” (216).
Ensler’s talk at Williams will focus on ending violence against women, but now undergirded by her new understanding of how violence against women is related to violence against the Earth, and how “the change will come from those who know they do not exist separately but as part of the river…. The only salvation is kindness. The only way out is care” (214).
Starhawk’s Magic: The art of transforming consciousness, healing the world
Why is it that women who believe in the sacredness of the Earth have been maligned and persecuted as witches?
Starhawk, who will be coming to the Rowe Center this June, burst on to the American intellectual scene in the 1980s when her book The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess started a wave of new interest in Wicca and other traditions of earth-based spirituality that honor the divine feminine as well as the divine masculine.
In the decades that followed, Starhawk was often found out in front of actions defending the Earth from the predations of globalized capitalism. Her practice of magic has always been strongly linked to a reverence for the planet and a critique of what she calls “estrangement,” the dominant Western worldview that sees “the world as made up of separate, isolated, nonliving parts that have no inherent value” (Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics, 5).
Estrangement, Starhawk says, “permeates our society so strongly that it seems to be consciousness itself….Yet another form of consciousness is possible….This is the consciousness I call immanence, the awareness of the world and everything in it as alive, dynamic, interdependent, interacting, and infused with moving energies: a living being, a weaving dance” (9).
Starhawk defines magic as “the art of changing consciousness at will,” and her work in recent years has been focused on igniting an ecologically based sense of consciousness that will help humans relate sustainably to our planet. She spends much of her time now practicing and teaching permaculture, as she explained in a recent interview in The Center Post, the journal produced by the Rowe Center:
“I now spend most of my waking time in nature. I teach a lot of permaculture design, which is a whole system of ecological design that allows us to look at nature and how it works, and to meet our human needs while regenerating the landscape and environment around us. I practice on the land in my own life, and for me it’s a really important aspect — knowing how to make compost, how to till soil, how to take carbon out of the atmosphere. We have to be engaged to do what we can to hold back the tide of disaster and really put the world on a regenerative course. If you believe that the Goddess is embodied in every human being, then you can’t just sit on your fanny when people are suffering; you have to try to make the world a better place.”
Starhawk is leading a two-week Earth Activist Training Camp (EAT) at Rowe with Charles Williams, May 31 – June 14. She describes the program as “practical earth healing with a magical base of ritual and nature awareness, teaching you to integrate mind and heart, with lots of hands-on practice and plenty of time to laugh.
“EAT’s goals,” she says, “are: To bring the knowledge and resources of regenerative ecological design to communities with the greatest needs and fewest resources….To teach visionary and practical solutions and personal sustainability to social change activists, and to teach practical skills, organizing, and activism to visionaries….To cross-pollinate the political, environmental, and spiritual movements that seek peace, justice, and resilience.”
Having participated in a shorter version of this workshop last June at Rowe (see my write-up of the experience here), I can say with confidence that there are few of us who would not benefit from a healthy dose of Starhawk’s magic!
Joanna Macy: Doing the work that reconnects
Joanna Macy’s May workshop at the Rowe Center is sold out, but there are still some places left in her September workshop, “The Growing Storm: The Work That Reconnects Accompanied by Rilke’s Poetry.” Macy has been doing “the work that reconnects” with groups for many decades; now in her 80s, she is still going strong, leading workshops all over the world. I had the honor of participating in one of her workshops at Rowe last fall, and it was a transformative experience in every sense of the word.
Macy calls our time “The Great Turning,” a critical transition time in human history on the planet, during which we will either learn to live harmoniously and sustainably as stewards of the Earth, or we will be swept away into the maelstrom of the Sixth Great Extinction, caused by our own carelessness and ineptitude.
Macy’s seminal book Coming Back to Life has just been reissued in an expanded edition, and it not only lays out the theory, but also generously gives guidance on how to pick up and use her techniques of working with groups for social change. Here are her “basic assumptions of the work,” taken from her website. I recommend that you read them slowly and thoughtfully.
- This world, in which we are born and take our being, is alive. It is not our supply house and sewer; it is our larger body. The intelligence that evolved us from stardust and interconnects us with all beings is sufficient for the healing of our Earth community, if we but align with that purpose.
- Our true nature is far more ancient and encompassing than the separate self defined by habit and society. We are as intrinsic to our living world as the rivers and trees, woven of the same intricate flows of matter/energy and mind. Having evolved us into self-reflexive consciousness, the world can now know itself through us, behold its own majesty, tell its own stories — and also respond to its own suffering.
- Our experience of pain for the world springs from our inter-connectedness with all beings, from which also arises our powers to act on their behalf. When we deny or repress our pain for the world, or treat it as a private pathology, our power to take part in the healing of our world is diminished. This apatheia need not become a terminal condition. Our capacity to respond to our own and others’ suffering — that is, the feedback loops that weave us into life — can be unblocked.
- Unblocking occurs when our pain for the world is not only intellectually validated, but experienced. Cognitive information about the crises we face, or even about our psychological responses to them, is insufficient. We can only free ourselves from our fears of the pain — including the fear of getting permanently mired in despair or shattered by grief — when we allow ourselves to experience these feelings. Only then can we discover their fluid, dynamic character. Only then can they reveal on a visceral level our mutual belonging to the web of life.
- When we reconnect with life, by willingly enduring our pain for it, the mind retrieves its natural clarity. Not only do we experience our interconnectedness in the community of Earth, but also mental eagerness arises to match this experience with new paradigm thinking. Concepts which bring relatedness into focus become vivid. Significant learning occurs, for the individual system is reorganizing and reorienting, grounding itself in wider reaches of identity and self-interest.
- The experience of reconnection with the Earth community arouses desire to act on its behalf. As Earth’s self-healing powers take hold within us, we feel called to participate in the Great Turning. For these self-healing powers to operate effectively, they must be trusted and acted on. The steps we take can be modest undertakings, but they should involve some risk to our mental comfort, lest we remain caught in old, “safe” limits. Courage is a great teacher and bringer of joy.
Macy has made a life study of Rilke’s poetry, and frequently recites this poem, which emphasizes the eternal interconnectedness of human consciousness and the physical world. This translation is by Macy and Anita Barrows, who will be co-leading the September workshop at Rowe.
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
We are going to need all our courage, resilience and collaborative energies in the months and years that lie ahead. This is not an easy time to be humans on Earth, but for those of us who are awake to the transitions we’re living through, and open-hearted enough to be called to work for change, these are exciting times that can bring out the best in each of us as we seek to work together for the good of all, following the model of powerful guides like Eve Ensler, Starhawk and Joanna Macy.
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The weekly EDGE WISE column is curated by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D., associate professor of comparative literature, gender studies and media studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and the Founding Director of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. Women writers interested in publishing in EDGE WISE can find writers’ guidelines on the Festival website, or may submit queries or columns to Jennifer@berkshirewomenwriters.org.
