Starhawk
Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation. To do a ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way. The inner willingness is what makes the ritual come alive and have power. If you aren't willing to be changed by the ritual, don't do it.Collection: Opportunity
To work magic is to weave the unseen forces into form; to soar beyond sight; to explore the uncharted dream realm of the hidden reality.Collection: Dream
Earth Mother, you who are called by a thousand names. May all remember we are cells in your body and dance together.Collection: Mother
There are two kinds of power. One is power over, which is always destructive, and the other is power from within, which is a transcendent and creative power.Collection: Two
The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our lives as holy, our aggression as healthy, our anger as purifying, and our power to nurture and create, but also to limit and destroy when necessary, as the very force that sustains all life. Through the Goddess we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions. We can move beyond narrow, constricting roles and become whole.Collection: Strong Women
For great as the powers of destruction may be, greater still, are the powers of healing.Collection: Healing
A society that could heal the dismembered world would recognize the inherent value of each person and of the plant, animal and elemental life that makes up the earth's living body; it would offer real protection, encourage free expression, and reestablish an ecological balance to be biologically and economically sustainable. Its underlying metaphor would be mystery, the sense of wonder at all that is beyond us and around us, at the forces that sustain our lives and the intricate complexity and beauty of their dance.Collection: Real
Energy moves in cycles, circles, spirals, vortexes, whirls, pulsations, waves, and rhythms—rarely if ever in simple straight lines.Collection: Moving
Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.Collection: Strength
We cannot change the world alone. To heal ourselves, to restore the earth to life, to create the situations in which freedom can flourish, we must work together in groups.Collection: Working Together
The Goddess does not rule the world; She is the world. Manifest in each of us, She can be known internally by every individual, in all her magnificent diversity.Collection: Diversity
To work magic is to weave the unseen forces into form; to soar beyond sight; to explore the uncharted dream realm of the hidden reality; to infuse life with color, motion and strange scents that intoxicate; to leap beyond imagination into that space between the worlds where fantasy becomes real; to be at once animal and god. Magic is...the ultimate adventure.Collection: Dream
I am a witch, by which I mean that I am somebody who believes that the earth is sacred, and that women and women's bodies are one expression of that sacred being.Collection: Believe
Our way out involves both resistance and renewal: saying no to what is, so that we can reshape and recreate the world. Our challenge is communal, but to face it we must be empowered as individuals and create structures of support and celebration that can teach us freedom. Creation is the ultimate resistance, the ultimate refusal to accept things as they are. For it is in creation that we encounter Mystery.Collection: Support
In the Craft, we do not believe in the Goddess - we connect with her; through the moon, the stars, the ocean, the earth, through trees, animals, through other human beings, through ourselves. She is here. She is within us all.Collection: Stars
The Goddess does not rule the world; She is the world.Collection: Doe
To practice magic is to bear the responsibility for having a vision.Collection: Responsibility
Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.Collection: Humility
On some deep cosmic level, we are all one, and within us we each contain the potential for good and for destruction, for compassion and hate, for generosity and greed.Collection: Hate
Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power.Collection: Eye
Our goal is not to get out of the world or to get out of life, but to integrate it, to celebrate it, to embrace it fully, and to embrace all the different cycles within it.Collection: Goal
All began in love, all seeks to return in love. Love is the law, the teacher of wisdom, and the great revealer of mysteries.Collection: Teacher
Wisdom and knowledge can best be understood together. Knowledge is learning, the power of the mind to understand and describe the universe. Wisdom is knowing how to apply knowledge and how not to apply it. Knowledge is knowing what to say; wisdom is knowing whether or not to say it. Knowledge gives answers; wisdom asks questions. Knowledge can be taught, wisdom grows from experience.Collection: Knowing
Each being is sacred - meaning that each has inherent value that cannot be ranked in a hierarchy or compared to the value of another being.Collection: Holiness
Beware of organizations that proclaim their devotion to the light without embracing, bowing to the dark; for when they idealize half the world they must devalue the rest.Collection: Dark
In the Craft the Goddess is not omnipotent. The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control.Collection: Perfect
Magic has always been an element of Witchcraft, but in the Craft its techniques were practiced within a context of community and connection.Collection: Community
To choose is also to begin.Collection: Inspirational
Ritual and myth are like seed crystals of new patterns that can eventually reshape culture around them.Collection: Culture
a lot of people have been telling me how brave I am. I've always thought it was a mistake to get a reputation for courage, on the grounds that if you acted bravely once, people would expect you to act courageously again, and you might be having an off day.Collection: Courage
Love for life in all its forms is the basic ethic of Witchcraft.Collection: Love Life
Magic has often been thought of us the art of making dreams come true; the art of realizing visions. Yet before we can bring birth to the vision we have to see it.Collection: Dream
In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.Collection: Sacrifice
To live with integrity in an unjust society we must work for justice. To walk with integrity through a landscape strewn with beer cans, we must stop and pick them up.Collection: Integrity
Amory Lovins says the primary design criteria he uses is the question How do we love all the children? Not just our children, not just the ones who look like us or who have resources, not just the human children but the young of birds and salmon and redwood trees. When we love all the children, when that love is truly sacred to us in the sense of being most important, then we have to take action in the world to enact that love. We are called to make the earth a place where all the children can thrive.Collection: Children
Only by transforming our own economy to one of peace can we make possible economic democracy in the Third World or our own country. The present economy generates wars to protect its profits and its short-term interests, while squandering the future. Unless we transform the economy, we cannot end war.Collection: Country
Love is the glue that holds the world together.Collection: Love Is
At this moment in history, we are called to act as if we truly believe that liberty and justice for all is a desirable thing.Collection: Believe
My spirituality has always been linked to my feminism. Feminism is about challenging unequal power structures.Collection: Challenges
If we are to reclaim our culture, we cannot afford narrow definitions.Collection: Culture
At its essence, the message of the Occupations is simply this: ‘Here in the face of power we will sit and create a new society, in which you do count.’Collection: Essence
Fascination with the psychic - or the psychological - can be a dangerous sidetrack on any spiritual path.Collection: Spiritual
Insanity is repeating the same actions and expecting different results.Collection: Inspirational
The healing of our relationship with place begins with the preservation of the natural environment. We cannot go to the wild for renewal if no wilderness is left.Collection: Nature
Spirituality promotes passivity when the domain of spirit is defined as outside the world. When this world is the terrain of spirit, we ourselves become actors in the story, and this world becomes the realm in which the sacred must be honored and freedom created.Collection: Stories
Only poetry can address grief.Collection: Grief
What we name must answer to us; we can shape it if not control it.Collection: Names
From a magical point of view, the term 'nonviolence' doesn't work well. Every beginning Witch learns that you can't cast a spell for what you don't want - that the deep aspects of our minds are unclear on the concept of 'no.' If you tell your dog, 'Rover, I can't take you for a walk,' Rover hears 'Walk!' and runs for the door. If we say 'nonviolence,' we are still thinking in terms of violence.Collection: Running
Another world is possible!' ... Another world is also necessary, for this one is unjust, unsustainable, and unsafe. It's up to us to envision, fight for, and create that world, a world of freedom, real justice, balance, and shared abundance, a world woven in a new design.Collection: Hope