Show Notes
Earth, Spirit, and Collective Empowerment
Recorded live at a SAND Gathering on September 13, 2026
In a time of profound ecological and social upheaval, we are invited to remember something ancient: we are not separate from the living world. The Earth is not a backdrop to our lives, but the ground from which we arise, and a source of wisdom for navigating profound change.
Author, activist, permaculture teacher, and elder wisdom keeper Starhawk joins Rae Abileah to explore how earth-based spirituality, ritual, imagination, and the wisdom of living systems can help us meet this moment.
Following each film in SAND's The Eternal Song series, we hear a recurring question, particularly from people of European descent: how do we reconnect with land, ancestry, and the sacred? How do we live in meaningful allyship with Indigenous peoples while recovering our own earth-based ways of knowing? Starhawk's life and work offer possibilities. Rooted in Pagan earth-based practice while honoring her Jewish ancestry, her journey has carried her from ritual circles and permaculture communities to accompaniment in Palestine and engagement with Indigenous land protection movements.
After more than five decades exploring spirituality, ecology, and social transformation, Starhawk is asking a new question: what would a regenerative movement look like? And how might we move beyond simply resisting what is broken to cultivating belonging, agency, resilience, joy, and new possibilities for life?
Together, Rae and Starhawk explore what living systems teach us about transformation, how spirituality and strategy can nourish one another, and how imagination helps us practice futures that do not yet exist. They consider how to keep ancestral and ecological intelligence alive amid the rise of artificial intelligence, and how to remain awake to profound injustice without surrendering our capacity for beauty, relationship, pleasure, and joy.
Topics
00:00 Welcome, Rosh Hashanah, and 25 years since 9/11
00:09 What renews her: a solidarity economy in Guinea
00:14 Why Earth Activist Training brings permaculture and organizing together
00:17 Spiritual practice as survival tool and political strategy
00:21 What nature is telling her, and the fight over data centers
00:24 Ancestral intelligence in an age of artificial intelligence
00:25 Reading the Bible in its Mesopotamian context
00:31 Reclaiming Judaism from nationalism
00:39 Where to begin, and the fire ritual
00:43 Cultural appropriation, and Standing Rock
00:49 Composting the patriarchy
00:53 The Movement We Need: safety, belonging, value, agency, meaning
Starhawk
Author, activist, permaculture designer and teacher, and one of the most influential voices in contemporary earth-based spirituality and ecofeminism. She is the author or co-author of thirteen books and a co-founder of Reclaiming. She directs Earth Activist Training, teaching permaculture design grounded in spirit with a focus on activism.
starhawk.org
Starhawk's Substack, where she is writing The Movement We Need chapter by chapter
The Movement We Need podcast
Earth Activist Training
Books mentioned
The Spiral Dance
The Empowerment Manual
The Fifth Sacred Thing and its sequel City of Refuge
Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery
Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics
Rae Abileah
Social change strategist, Jewish faith leader, facilitator, and former co-director of CodePINK. She connects relational threads across the SAND team and helps create resources supporting The Eternal Song film series.
CreateWell
Beautiful Trouble
Also in the conversation
Standing Rock, 2016, and what Starhawk found at the gate: here you enter a place of prayer and ceremony.
The fire chant from her Sonoma County land: Sacred fire that shapes this land, summer teacher, winter friend, protect us as we learn anew, to work, to heal, to live with you.
The five core emotional needs she names as the foundation of movement
More from Sounds of SAND
What if humans and AI share the same hallucination?
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee grew up with a Sufi teacher living downstairs and fell in love with jazz at an early age. He is now a Sufi teacher himself, a filmmaker, and the founder of Emergence Magazine. His new book Remembering Earth asks what it would take to come back into relationship with the living world. We talk about silence, the primordial covenant, the eye of unity, walking as practice, dreams, and what it means to meet this moment without turning away from beauty.
Joan Tollifson returns to the podcast three years after her first conversation. We talk about her June essay Two Inseparable Truths, on the relative and the absolute and the trouble with getting stuck in either one. Along the way: the silence of many nondual teachers in a dark time, what cancer and an aging body insist on that philosophy cannot, and why "I don't know" may be the answer closest to truth. She closes by reading her essay 'Radiant Light in Dark Times' in full.
Part of SAND’s The Great AI Unraveling Series