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.
Interpretation
Community provides support and strength, allowing us to collaborate and heal together.
In this quote, Starhawk emphasizes the importance of community as a source of strength and support. She suggests that a community not only helps individuals to accomplish necessary work but also serves as a safe space where people can rely on one another, find healing, and experience freedom. The imagery of circles signifies inclusiveness and the interconnectedness of individuals within a supportive network.
In practice
In a community meeting focused on mental health, this quote could emphasize the supportive nature of collective healing.
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.
The Old Religion, as we call it, is closer in spirit to Native American traditions or to shamanism of the Arctic. It is not based on dogma or a set of beliefs, nor on scriptures or a sacred book revealed by a great man. Witchcraft takes it's teachings from nature, and reads inspiration in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, the flight of birds, the slow growth of trees, and the cycles of the seasons.
It happens over and over again—a group of people come together, fired up with passion to create change. They begin with huge inspiration and enthusiasm—and a year later, it’s all foundered in the mire of conflict. We could have changed the world ten times over—if we didn’t have to do it together with other people, those irritating, self-righteous, controlling, fluff-brained, clueless idiots who are our friends and allies.
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.
In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.
We need the discipline of magic, of consciousness-change, in order to hear and understand what the earth is saying to us. And listening to the earth, doing the rituals the land asks us for, giving back what we are asked for, will also bring us healing, expanded awareness and intensified life.
There is no executive order; there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision.
We're all in this together. I learned that lesson growing up in West Philly. When I shoveled the sidewalk my parents didn't let me stop with our house. They told me to keep shoveling all the way to the corner. I had a responsibility to my community.
Busy people tend to forgo the one activity - TV watching _ that is most lethal to community involvement
Our rural communities are the heart of our state and too often lack equitable access to housing, transit, and economic opportunity, so I'm deeply committed to working in Washington to reverse that trend in Georgia.
A community to be truly community, must have a quality of unselfconsciousness about it.
We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.
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