Nature As Sacred Text

Whether we are looking to heal and transform our personal hurts or the huge wounds our society inflicts on the earth and other human beings, the earth herself is our greatest teacher and healer. The ancient Goddess traditions had no sacred texts or dogmas: instead, their mystics learned to read the book of nature.

Understanding how the earth’s cycles work, how change occurs in nature, and how mother earth designs co-evolving, interdependent systems can help us be better designers of the changes we want to see in our own life and the world. Starhawk draws on her work with Witchcraft—earth-based spirituality—and permaculture to explore how our connection to earth can be our deepest source of hope, renewal, and strength.

Starhawk is a writer, activist, permaculture designer and teacher, and a leading voice for ecofeminism and earth-based spirituality. She is the author of thirteen books on earth based spirituality and activism, including The Spiral Dance, The Earth Path, and The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups, on group dynamics and social permaculture, and her novels, The Fifth Sacred Thing and City of Refuge.

Together with director Donna Read Cooper, Starhawk has worked on five major documentaries, including the Goddess Trilogy for the National Film Board of Canada and Permaculture: The Growing Edge.

Starhawk directs Earth Activist Training, which teaches the tools of regenerative design with a grounding in spirit, a focus on social permaculture, organizing and activism. Her website is http://starhawk.org, and she is on Twitter @Starhawk17 and Facebook @StarhawkAuthor.

melanie bonajo (they/them). Through their films, performances, music and installations, they study subjects related to how technological advances and commodity-based pleasures increase feelings of alienation, removing a sense of belonging in an individual. Captivated by concepts of the divine, Bonajo explores the spiritual emptiness of her generation, the erosion of intimacy, examines peoples’ shifting relationship with nature and tries to understand existential questions by reflecting on our domestic situation, ideas around classification, concepts of home, non-humans, technology, gender and attitudes towards value.