(Yes, dear reader, I have finally gotten back to finishing my book, The Movement We Need, that I began writing almost two years ago, chapter by chapter, on Substack. I look at five core human needs: safety, belonging, value, agency and meaning, and try to envision a movement that could meet them all in positive ways. By the beginning of last summer, I’d gotten through the first four, and I’d seriously hoped to finish before embarking on my summer travels. That turned out not to be possible. There were just too many other things to do, to arrange all the details, prepare for teaching multiple courses, and then travel for nearly two months, that did include a wonderful ten-day family vacation in Ireland, the first ever! This just didn’t lend itself to the focus and concentration I need to write.
So I’d fully intend it to get back to this in September, when I was home. But in September and October, I was teaching four or five online classes a week, catching up on multiple medical appointments and preparing for a major surgery in November, all of which might sound like a bunch of excuses, and they are! Then surgery and recovery ate my brain for a few weeks. Who knew so much of my intellect was concentrated in my right knee?
But gradually, as my knee gains mobility. somehow my mind seems to be waking up again. And I am determined to finish this series before I do the left knee on March 31. Meanwhile, I finally figured out how to get all of the chapters into one section of my Substack. They are numbered, so you can read them all in order here should you so choose, or peruse any one of them separately.
And now…here is the first installment in the last section of The Movement We Need!)
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The Need for Meaning
One of our deepest human needs is for meaning. We want to make sense of the world. We want to know not just what, but why and what for. What are we here for? What are we supposed to be doing with our lives? How do we know what is good and ethical behavior? What are the standards by which we should judge our choices and our actions? Why are bad people rewarded, while good people often suffer?
Traditionally, people have turned to religion to provide this framework, to tell us how the world came into being, what the purpose of our life should be, what will happen after we die, and what values and ethics we should live by. Religion is often rooted in beliefs about spirits or deities, in mythologies about the doings of the Gods or on the stories of great heroes or heras, prophets, teachers and avatars. But some religions, Buddhism for example, are not deistic, and not all require belief per se. For Unitarian Universalists, seeking for truth is sacred. For Quakers, it is listening for the guidance of inner light.
Political philosophies and ideologies can also provide meaning. Marxism, for example, provides a comprehensive overview of history and an optimistic view of the future in a clear framework that sees a dialectic class struggle at the root of it all. Capitalism and its faith in the beneficence of the market economy is a belief system of its own, that promises ever-expanding opportunities for material gain, at least to the fortunate, if not to all. The ‘American Dream’—that anyone, by working hard, can achieve prosperity and security, is another guiding ideology. Even science is its own belief system: that the only reality that matters is that which is measurable and verifiable.
Meaning can also come from identification with some larger whole that meets our need for belonging. Our clan, our tribe, our culture, our profession, art, traditions, festivals, clothing and symbols all contribute to our sense of what the world means and how we fit into it.
For most of human history, that identity was given and somewhat unchangeable. You were born in a certain place, to a certain culture, to a certain family, perhaps relegated to a particular class, speaking a particular language, and unless you undertook a pilgrimage or a migration you probably didn’t travel much. You didn’t think of your identity as something you could choose; it was simply who you were. And your identity determined your place in the social hierarchy, the scope of your potential, your opportunities and your constraints.
For many, that place was oppressive, but at least it was clear and secure. Now identity is much more fluid, and overall, that’s a good thing. No longer are we bound to a life of serfdom on a lord’s estate because of our birth. Liberation movements, at their core, are struggles to remove constraints and open up opportunities that were previously denied because of gender, skin color, class, or some other feature of identity.
Some categories of identity that we thought were fixed and unchangeable we now see as malleable. We admire people who transcend their class background, and the feminist movement has opened the doors of many careers to women. Gender itself has become a more fluid category, and modern medicine has given us the option to physically change our bodies to conform to our inner sense of gender identity.
All of which is to say that the traditional categories in which we divided the world, and the traditional ways we made sense of it no longer hold sway. We live in a much more dynamic, fluid, and changeable world, and while that is liberating, it is also much more challenging and insecure. We need a sense of meaning and purpose, and many of us no longer have the societal framework that provides it.
Insecurity is exacerbated when other forms of insecurity come into play. Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under Clinton, identifies how our growing economic inequality has created both real and existential insecurity for massive numbers of Americans. Today, the bottom 50% own 2% of the county’s wealth, while the top 1% own 34%! Wages have remained stagnant since the 1980s, and the tremendous wealth generated by increases in productivity and by new technologies have almost entirely gone to the top 10% and even more disproportionately to the 1%. This inequality has warped our politics, undermined our democracy, and for massive numbers of people, generated a sense of being left out, of fighting against a system rigged against them. It shatters the American Dream. (1)
That sense of grievance seeks meaning, preferably some clear, simple framework of belief that can make sense of an unfair world, and finger someone to blame. Too often, that blame gets directed at some outgroup of lesser power and status, instead of focusing on those who truly benefit from growing inequality.
When the overarching institutions of culture and religion no longer suffice to explain the world, people turn to other sources of meaning and identity, such as fundamentalist religions, conspiracy theories or the MAGA movement.
To counter these destructive stories, we need a framework of our own: not just a laundry list of all the wrongs in society, but a clear picture of how the world might make sense if we get it right. That worldview cannot be simplistic, because the world is not simple, although it is harder to promulgate viewpoints that are complex and full of nuance than those that lend themselves to succinct sound bites. It must not be at odds with science, because science and technology so completely shape our world that we cannot deny their reality and efficacy, although we may take science further than the rationalists want to go. And it must have a spiritual core that’s not bound to any particular dogma or belief system, but is inclusive and rooted in wonder, joy and reverence for the natural world and what may lie beyond.
A Worldview of Interconnection
Fortunately, there is such a worldview, and it’s both ancient and modern, rooted in ancestral and indigenous ways of knowing, and aligned with the latest discoveries in science. It calls us to a different way of seeing the world, not as an assembly of separate, isolated objects, but rather as a tapestry of relationships in which we are embedded.
This worldview is ancient because it is shared by many indigenous cultures. I’m always wary of saying ‘indigenous culture’ as if it were one thing, because there are thousands of different indigenous societies and they have a myriad of worldviews. Yet there is a common thread that runs through cultures of those who live deeply connected to land and place, and that is the understanding of our deep interconnectedness. We are in relationship with other human beings and with the whole of nature, and tending those relationships is a core task of what we are meant to do in life.
In the words of Aboriginal writer and teacher Tyson Yungaporta, “In Aboriginal worldviews, nothing exists outside of a relationship to something else. There are no isolated variables—every element must be considered in relation to the other elements and the context. Areas of knowledge are integrated, not separated. The relationship between the knower and other knowers, places, and senior knowledge keepers is paramount.” (2)
Or as Potawatomi botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer says in Braiding Sweetgrass, “It was an architecture of relationships that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together.” (3)
This understanding is also cutting-edge current—it infuses systems theory and all of its applications to other disciplines, from psychology to ecology. It forms the basis of quantum physics, where atoms and their component particles are no longer seen as tiny billiard-balls circulating, but as waves of probabilities. It underlies the architecture of the internet itself.
Yet science alone lacks the emotional component that makes a set of beliefs more than an intellectual exercise. There are also “the questions science doesn’t ask, not because they aren’t important, but because science as a way of knowing is too narrow for the task.” (4)
Kimmerer studied botany because she was fascinated by plants and thrilled by the beauty of the world, by the way goldenrod and asters bloom together in a meadow, making a carpet of purple and gold. “I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.”
When we truly understand the world as one fabric of interconnection, we are moved to love. Instead of a dogma telling us to believe in things we can’t see, a relational world-view inspires us to regard those things we can see with awe and reverence. A green leaf glows against a blue sky. What a miracle! Within it, tiny cells are doing alchemy, using sunlight to combine air and water and create sweet food. What a wonder, that in so doing they fill the air with oxygen, that very thing we need in order to ingest that food and turn it into the energy for growth and life! How incredible that two billion or more years ago, tiny bacteria figured out this magic at a time when new life was about to run out of food. Knowing that, can we doubt that the tapestry is woven of threads spun from some innate creative force?
A Dynamic, Ever-Changing World
A relational, interconnected world is also a dynamic one, animate and everchanging. “Nothing is created or destroyed; it just moves and changes, and this is the first law. Creation is in a constant state of motion, and we must move with it as the custodial species, or we will damage the system and doom ourselves. Nothing can be held, accumulated, stored. Every unit requires velocity and exchange in a stable system, or it will stagnate—this applies to economic and social systems as well as natural ones. They all follow the same laws.” (6)
That dynamic universe is alive and infused with spirit and consciousness. “In Potawatomi 101, rocks are animate, as our mountains and water and fire and places. Beings that are imbued with spirit, our sacred medicines, our song, drums, and even stories, are all animate. The list of the inanimate seems to be smaller, filled with objects that are made by people of an inanimate being, like a table. We say “What is it?” and we answer “Dopwen yewe”. Table it is. But of apple we must say “Who is that being? And reply “Mshimen yawe.” apple that being is.” (7)
When I was writing The Earth Path, (8) I was aided by evolutionary biologist David Seaborg, who helped me understand some of the science involved in the Gaia theory, Lovelock and Margulis’ theory that the earth functions like a living being, self-regulating her complex systems. “But remember,” he cautioned me over and over again, “That doesn’t mean the earth is conscious!” (9)
And yet, how does consciousness arise if the tapestry isn’t woven of its threads? Or, to put it another way, if the firing of neurons in our brains gives rise to consciousness, a sense of self, emotions and philosophies, is that not its own miracle? And is not the earth a richer place when we see it as infused with awareness and spirit? As Kimmerer says:
“Imagine walking through a richly inhabited world of Birch people, Bear people, Rock people, beings we think of as persons worthy of our respect, of inclusion in a peopled world…Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us.” (10)
Kelly Lara, Hupa artist and regalia maker, speaks of the life inherent in the sacred objects she creates. “However, at a certain point the piece takes on its own life or spirit and begins to direct me. It becomes itself. There is resistance in trying to manipulate the outcome. When a piece becomes itself, it is a powerful moment…It is when a dress or regalia piece speaks. This is when a regalia maker becomes humble.” (11)
“He and my father ingrained in me that the canoe is a living thing, as our our regalia and ceremonial items. I would always ask questions like “Why are there lines and bumps in there?” They would respond that the canoe has body parts, and those body parts keep the canoe alive as our human parts keep us alive. They taught me that there are the kidneys, lungs, heart, and nose that make the canoe breathe so it can live.” (12)
As a sometime writer of fiction, I’ve had the same experience, when my own characters seem to take on a life of their own and direct the story. Perhaps any true work of art has the potential to incarnate the creative spirit and come alive. In a world that we experience as imbued with being and consciousness, how much more might our creativity flourish?
For those of us whose indigenous roots lie buried in deep time, under the detritus of thousands of years of conquests, it’s important to remember that European culture, too, was once infused with dynamism and spirit, its forests peopled with elves and the Fair Folk, its landmarks identified with myths and stories, its folk tales rich with talking animals and spirit beings. Europe had rich herbal and healing traditions, customs, songs and ceremonies that integrated the people with the seasons and the lands. Some of these still exist today, although often their original meaning is forgotten, in traditions like the Padstow Hobbyhorse or the mummers’ dances. Traveling in the Dordogne in the ‘80s, my friend Rose was healed after a fall by a traditional roboteuse, and every village still had its own healer, each of whom specialized in a particular type of disease or injury. To this day in Scotland or Ireland, road workers will often refuse to cut a fairy tree or intrude upon a haunt of the little people.
But a dynamic, changing world was a threat to a hierarchy that needed peasants to stay in their fixed roles. The 16th and 17th centuries in Europe saw the Witch persecutions stage an assault on traditional healers and the remnants of older, Pagan traditions that saw spirit immanent in nature. The persecutions, while not limited to women, were primarily directed against women and promulgated a vicious misogyny, painting women as sexually insatiable and inherently prone to evil. I have written elsewhere more extensively about the social, economic and political forces that fueled the Witch persecutions, as have others, such as Sylvia Federici and David Kubrin. It was a lecture by Kubrin in the early ‘80s that first alerted me to the extensive implications of this history. (13)
As Europe transitioned from medieval feudalism toward modern capitalism, the elite of the old order saw their sources of power and wealth in land and agriculture shaken. The Black Plague of the 1300s had depopulated the laboring classes and raised wages, which the moneyed classes immediately attempted to undo with laws and restrictions that led to a series of peasant revolts, of which there were more than a hundred in Europe between the Black Death and the French Revolution. And although these uprisings were almost universally suppressed, the fear of revolt was always present among the propertied classes.
“The animist concept of nature as a divine, self-active organism came to be associated with atheistical and radical libertarian ideas. Social chaos, peasant uprisings, and rebellions could be fed by the assumption that individuals could understand the nature of the world for themselves and could manipulate its spirits by magic.” (14)
Kubrin describes how an enspirited, animist worldview was identified with “…‘enthusiasm’…the word itself used for the first time in 1603, literally means “full of gods”. It was enthusiasm that explained the beheading of Charles I, the seizure of land from their ‘lawful’ owners, the abolition of the House of Lords…the Rosicrucian concept of the inherent activity of all matter fed the activism of the enthusiasts…The world’s inherent lifefullness, seen in its incessant transformations, and based on the imminence of divinity, could encourage the self-confidence needed by militants to allow them to do battle against such unspeakable odds and to take on the most powerful of institutions, the most exalted of beliefs. Emphasizing the individual man or woman’s ability to act upon the world, enthusiasts found in magic a pathway to their inner sources…” (15)
The Witch persecutions took place at the time of expropriation of land through enclosures of common land and commodification of property that expelled thousands from their traditional holdings and created a new class of wage dependent laborers. The customs, traditions, and rustic rituals, the remnants of pre-Christian, earth-based spirituality, were labeled demonic and suppressed, as were the rituals and traditions of indigenous people in the lands Europeans were beginning to colonize at the same time, and those of the Africans enslaved to provide a labor force for the colonies. The Witch persecutions targeted traditional healers, midwives and herbalists and helped to consolidate the power of a male dominated medical profession. They removed many sources of income and agency from women. And they expropriated knowledge itself. Religious experience was only valid if it came in an approved form, Catholic or Protestant depending on which sect held power at the time. Science, as it developed, in an attempt to distance itself from religious dogma, and out of fear of being associated with radical sets and rebellious peasantry, adopted a strictly materialist and mechanistic model of the universe.
And so we are left today to live in a shell of a world, the life and spirit sucked out of it. We may find some solace in traditional religion, yet in a world so overwhelmingly shaped by mechanistic science and technology, we cannot believe in angels and demons with the innocent faith of our ancestors. The Christian Nationalists would attempt to force us back into a strict hierarchy of God over man, man over woman, whites over black, but the vast majority of us cannot stomach that regime. Our hunger for an enspirited world can easily lead us to appropriate traditions and cultures that are not ours in a disrespectful way, or to adopt superstitions and belief systems that are shallow and have no basis in any true reality. Our discontent with the limitations of mechanistic science can lead us to discard its many contributions and abandon our common sense. Indeed, in a world of AI and constant lying from officials, reality becomes harder to discern every day.
And yet there is a path back to the re-enchantment of the world, one that does not discard science, but integrates it, that does not abandon reality, but deepens and broadens our experience of it. By listening respectfully and learning from indigenous cultures without appropriating them, by reconnecting to our own deep roots in a living dynamic world, and above all, by nurturing our direct experience of nature and approaching the natural world with reverence awe and wonder, we can, without abandoning reason, nonetheless re-enchant the world.
Cycles and Patterns
The living, dynamic world moves in cycles. It’s not linear. It’s not moving to some apocalyptic end, but ever renewing itself in cyclical time.
“First people’s law says that nothing is created or destroyed because of the infinite and regenerative connections between systems. Therefore, time is non-linear and regenerates creation and endless cycles.” (16)
A cyclical world is a reciprocal world, filled with cycles of giving and receiving. We too are bound by that law of reciprocity. We cannot endlessly take from the world without giving back. What goes around comes around.
“The Indian laws and customs that were established by the spirit beings and or surmised by the Auth (human beings) in their astute observations of the natural world established a moral and ethical foundation steeped in generosity. Such laws mandate Indian lifeways that are based upon respect, responsibility, and reciprocity, and that are essential for healing and sustaining the world for many generations to come. Through life and ceremony, these teachings have instilled within our peoples the important responsibility that mandates that we take from the natural world only what is needed for basic survival and give back an equal amount. Balance is secured and respect expressed through an offering of tobacco or medicine or through our good thoughts and deeply held emotions for what we have taken or received. This is a critically important role that we must fulfill, as earth healing and earth renewing peoples, this is our spiritual purpose and is most significant to the recovery of our ceremonies.” (17)
Reciprocity is woven into the very fabric of the world itself. Pop science looks at nature as a battlefield of competition, each organism, each species out for its own good. But in reality, nature is as much or more a tapestry of mutualism, of interwoven species that co-evolve in ways that benefit them both. Wolves may prey on elk and bison, but their predation influences elk behavior in ways that benefit the larger ecosystem. Elk cannot congregate around streams and decimate their vegetation—they must keep further away, coming down to drink only sporadically, so the willows and aspens can flourish and provide stability for the banks and food for the fish. Bison, banding together to defend against predators, move in tight herds that graze down an area, fertilize the ground with their manure, break down the old, dead grasses, and then move on. The grasslands have time to recover before they return, and benefit from their disturbance. Grasslands need grazers, and grazers need predators. (18)
Forest Scientist Suzanne Simard’s experiments in West Coast rainforests demonstrated that webs of underground, mycorrhizal fungi link the roots of trees. Through those networks, trees in the sun feed trees that grow in the shade, even trees of a different species. (19) As Kimmerer says, they “weave a web of reciprocity, of giving and taking. In this way, the trees all act as one because the fungi have connected them through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual.” (20)
If we see ourselves as part of a unified whole, then the well-being of the whole must be our concern. We can no longer justify extracting and hoarding the lion’s share of benefits for ourselves or for a privileged few. We can no longer prize profit over the well-being of the environment. When we take, we must give back. What we extract, we must replenish. The world itself is a gift, and it is the generosity of sharing that gift, passing it on through ever more complex cycles, that makes the world go round.
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Footnotes:
1) Robert Reich, labor secretary under Clinton and long-time professor of economics at U.C. Berkeley, has multiple talks, lectures and entire courses online that speak about wealth inequality and its consequences.
https://rbreich.com/
And here’s a few short reels that make his point:
Robert Reich. Inequality for All: Has the Movie’s Warning Come True?
How Wealth Inequality Empowers Demagogues
The roots of Trumpism
How can Outrageous CEO pay be Stopped?
2) Tyson Yungaporta. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Harper One, P.150
3) Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Thinking, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants. Minneapolis, MN; Milkweed Editions, 2013 P. 46
4) Kimmerer, p.36
5) Kimmerer, p. 46
6) Yungaporta, p.39
7) Kimmerer, p. 56
8) Starhawk. The Earth Path: Grounding Our Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature. San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco,
9) David Seaborg, personal communication
10) Kimmerer, p. 58
11) Kelly Lara in in Kishan Lara-Cooper and Walter J. Lara Sr. Ka’m-t’em: A journey Toward Healing. Temecula, CA; Great Oak Press, 2019, p.237
12) Donald Moore. “It Is Our Purpose” in Lara-Cooper and Lara, p. 299
13) Three good references to learn more about this period:
Sylvia Federici. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY, Autonomedia, 2004
Starhawk. Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics. Boston, Beacon Press,1982
David Kubrin. Marxism and Witchcraft. Brooklyn, NY, Autonomedia, 2019
14) Carolyn Merchant. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. NY, Harper & Row, 1980 quoted in Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark, p.100
15) Kubrin, p.181
16) Yungaporta p.45
17) Chris Peters and Chisa Oto, “Voices From the Sacred” in Lara-Cooper and Lara Sr.
p. 20
18) See the work of Alan Savory on the relationship between grazers and grasslands. A good introduction is his TED talk: “How to Green the World’s Deserts and Reverse Climate Change”. https://savory.global/science_library/ted/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22846686707&gbraid=0AAAAADonxMkmKqoEiyTka54ReR7SZKgOM&gclid=Cj0KCQiA4pvMBhDYARIsAGfgwvyEMdM1_ppRVAhSskZ34m3jvnm6vvlX9RwP29aciWSrqsPwhQMl5z0aAld-EALw_wcB
19) Suzanne Simard. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. NY, Alfred. A. Knopf, 2021
20) Kimmerer, p. 20
This post has been syndicated from Starhawk’s Substack, where it was published under this address.