Rooted Action: Starhawk & Rae Abileah

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