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Less than a week to go on our Kickstarter campaign for The Fifth Sacred Thing movie. We’ve done so well–but still have far to go! However, it occured to me that it was past time to share with you all the Green Plan I wrote up for our production. It’s designed to guide us in making the movie, and to explain to potential collaborators and investors what our goals are, how permaculture principles can inform a project like this, and to generate excitement. We welcome feedback as this plan evolves, so please feel free to comment. And if you like what you read, please support our Kickstarter campaign if you can! Thanks–it means so much to have you on our team!
 The Fifth Sacred Thing envisions streets turned to gardens. The Fifth Sacred Thing:
The Green Plan for Production
The Fifth Sacred Thing shows us a vision of a positive, resilient future, where at least one city has achieved environmental balance and social harmony. Applying the ethics and principles of permaculture to the production of The Fifth Sacred Thing will embody the message of the film and generate ecological, social and financial returns.
Why do this? First and foremost, because it’s the right thing to do. And fortunately, doing right will bring back enormous rewards—financially as well as spiritually. Here’s how:
These values will attract high-quality people to work on the production and inspire them to do their finest work.
By ‘walking our talk’, we will create enormous public relations benefits and attract a huge following of supporters.
Each environmental group or social agency we link to expands our web of support—people who will spread the word about the film and bring others to see it.
Reducing waste will reduce costs.
We will set a new bar for green production in the film industry.
Each innovation we create can be a focus of news stories and blogs that will publicize the film.
In solving our problems, we will potentially find solutions, develop systems and create spin-offs that are applicable to other productions and industries. These are also potential sources of additional income.
The cost of living our values will be a small percentage of the overall cost of a big-budget film, and will be offset both by savings and PR.
We will contribute to the overall health of the planet and its people.
Permaculture for the Film Business
Permaculture is both an approach to ecological design and a global movement. Begun by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970’s, it now has practitioners and projects all over the world. The ethics and principles of permaculture can be applied to everything from gardening to business planning, guiding us in creating systems that meet human needs while regenerating the environment around us.
Permaculture Ethics:
Care for the earth:
The Fifth Sacred Thing will set a new standard for ‘green’ film production, going beyond ‘carbon neutral’ to ‘earth positive’: creating inspiration, education and resources for ecological regeneration.
Care for the people:
The Fifth Sacred Thing will go beyond fair labor and hiring practices to create positive benefits for the larger community.
Care for the future:
By presenting a positive and hopeful vision of the future, The Fifth Sacred Thing will inspire action and optimism. The production will invest some of its operating costs in resources that will provide ongoing benefits in the future.
Permaculture Principles
Abundance Springs From Relationships:
Build a network of beneficial relationships within the company, with other ventures, with artists, technicians, workers, performers and audience.
Cherish relationships—treat people well at every level.
Develop links and networks—look for ways to involve other organizations with mutual benefits. Every link you make multiplies your impact.
Catch and store energy:
Use renewable sources of energy—solar, wind, etc.
Find ways to capture the enthusiasm and good will that surrounds a project, to help people feel involved and connected.
Money is energy—look for ways to spend it that will multiply its impact and build interest and good will for each project. For example—buying food locally on a location shoot can create good will for the project in the area and provide more fresh and healthy food for the crew.
Close loops:
Produce no waste. Look for ways that ‘waste’ can be a resource. Re-use and recycle materials. Donate materials to other organizations to create partnerships—for example, used building materials to Habitat for Humanity or similar organizations.
Use onsite, re-usable, renewable and recyclable materials. Avoid the use of toxic substances.
Stack functions:
Every element in a system should serve more than one function.
A website, for example, could promote the film, give people resources for going deeper into subjects the film presents, provide a platform for people to engage and bring their own ideas and creativity to bear on aspects of the story world—which in turn will build relationships, ‘buzz’, and audience.
An internship program could help train disadvantaged youth and solve social problems, create strong relationships within the community, provide useful services at low cost, and generate good public relations.
A portable solar power unit built for one film could be re-used, loaned to nonprofits to generate good PR, taken to festivals such as Burning Man as good film promotion, sold at the end of production or donated to a school or organization.
Redundancy:
Every crucial function should be provided by more than one element. Have multiple streams of financing and potential revenue, multiple sources of energy.
Always have a plan B.
Plan for catastrophe—Have a backup location for an indoor shoot in case of bad weather outdoors.
Work smarter, not harder:
Begin by observing, analyzing and designing. Observation, forethought and creativity will save time, money, effort, energy and materials.
Put things in the right place to facilitate ease of use. Things used most frequently should be in the most central location.
Do things at the right time and in the right order.
Value creativity—an unlimited resource. The problem is the solution—solving problems will lead to new opportunities and create new resources.
How we will put these principles into practice:
Abundance springs from relationships:
We begin the production with a wealth of helpful relationships:
Executive producer Philip Wood has extensive networks in the Bay Area film, technical, arts and music communities.
Writer and producer Starhawk has enormous networks in the environmental community, the global permaculture network and the Bay Area ‘green’ networks. A permaculture designer and teacher herself, she heads up Earth Activist Training which has trained hundreds of students in permaculture design. Earth Activist Training partners with a community-based organization, Hunters Point Family, which runs violence prevention and food justice programs in Bayview Hunters Point—a low-income neighborhood of San Francisco plagued by unemployment, drugs, gangs and violence. Starhawk trains at-risk youth in permaculture and environmental leadership skills, in conjunction with three community-run gardens that provide food in a neighborhood with no supermarkets or access to fresh produce. The program includes media training, where youth learn video and audio production to document what they are learning.
These connections give us a huge pool of talent to draw from, for everything from interns to gardeners to inventors and artists.
The Sets:
The Fifth Sacred Thing is set partly in a San Francisco of the future that embodies ecological balance. The streets are transformed into gardens with running streams, lined by fruit trees and filled with art. Energy is provided by solar panels, solar films and wind generators which are decorated to become works of art.
Garden plants, flowers, fruit trees will need to be grown ahead of time. We will contract with local, organic nurseries to grow the plants, giving priority to businesses in low-income areas. As vegetables reach their prime, they can be harvested to feed crew and cast and replaced as necessary. After the shoot, remains can go back to community gardens to be composted. Remaining plants and trees can be donated to community gardens, school gardens, etc.
(Abundance springs from relationships, close loops, waste as a resource.)
The solar panels, films and wind generators needed for the sets can be live, wherever feasible. They can generate electricity to help power the shoot, feed electricity back into the grid to offset power costs, and at the end of the shoot, be sold to recover their costs or donated to a non-profit for a tax benefit and good will. The cost of a large ‘buy’ of solar panels would most likely be comparable to the cost of labor to fabricate fake panels, and be offset by savings in energy and potential resale, as well as the tax rebates (30% currently) for renewable energy.
(Catch and store energy, stack functions, abundance springs from relationships.)
One of the sets includes an aquaponics greenhouse—an integrated fish farm and vegetable growing system. A real system can be set up for approximately $20,000. It could be built as an educational project with youth from Hunters Point Family or similar organization, designed to facilitate the shoot, and made operational to provide food for the cast and crew. At the end of the shoot, it could be donated back to the organization for a tax benefit to the film company and become an income and food-producing venture for the community.
(Close loops, re-use and recycle, stack functions, abundance springs from relationships.)
The sets are filled with climbable sculptures, murals and mosaics. The Bay Area is a hotbed of art and sculpture, much of it centered around the Burning Man festival and community. Many existing pieces could be rented, at a lower cost than building. Specific pieces might be commissioned and later donated for a tax write-off. The production might partner with Precita Eyes, an arts organization that has created hundreds of mural projects around San Francisco. Murals and mosaics could be created for the film by arts education projects, at similar or lower cost than having them done by set painters. Their ‘look’ would be more authentic and perfectly suit the film—and money so spent would help fund the organizations, creating enormous good will.
(Use local resources, close loops, catch and store energy, stack functions, abundance springs from relationships.)
Materials: Recycling of materials is already standard ‘green’ practice in the industry. The sets will use building materials, masonry, paving, pond liners, pumps, etc. Sets will be carefully deconstructed at the end of the shoot—an opportunity to hire local companies and provide on-the-job training for disadvantaged youth. Materials will be donated to programs such as Habitat for Humanity or to local community projects. San Francisco has an artists’ resource center where odds and ends can be donated.
Some sets might be partly built of recycled materials—for example, the destruction in the Southlands could use a lot of waste chunks of concrete which could afterwards be re-used in natural building projects.
(Re-use and recycle, waste is a resource, abundance springs from relationships.)
Models and props:
We will seek an agreement with the City of San Francisco first, then with other museums and educational institutions for a permanent display of the models of the transformed city used in the film. Possible venues might be a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station—possibly Powell and Market near the Tourist Office, the Airport museum, or an educational institution.
Such a display would be ongoing publicity for the DVD and downloads of the film long after its theatrical run.
Costumes, props and wigs: At the end of production, props wigs and costumes could be donated to high-school drama departments or local theater companies. Some might conceivably be sold on Ebay, offered as prizes for web contests associated with the film, or donated to nonprofits for raffles or silent auctions.
(Re-use and recycle, abundance springs from relationships.)
Energy:
Film production uses a huge amount of electricity. This can be mitigated:
On the outdoor sets: By using real solar and wind generation wherever possible.
At the office: San Francisco has a program that helps to subsidize retrofits for energy efficiency and renewable energy that could potentially subsidize solar panels at the production offices. Rental and lease agreements could be negotiated with this in mind.
Sound stages, special effects and post-production facilities:
Companies could be encouraged and aided to install solar panels or wind generation. Working in conjunction with a program like Hunters Point Family’s Environmental Leadership training, interns could do free energy audits for partner companies and help them find the most cost-effective retrofits and the resources to do it.
However, it is unlikely that every company we want to work with will be in a position to do this. This is one area where we may need to purchase offsets—or create our own. For example, if we can do a huge buy of solar panels at a good rate, systems could be donated to nonprofits giving us a double tax benefit–a rebate on the panels and a tax donation credit.
On location:
The Fifth production will build a portable power system—solar panels and wind generation on a towable trailer that can be brought to location sites to provide power. A backup generator could run on biodiesel or methane.
The power unit could then be used on future productions. When not in use by the film company, it could be rented out or loaned to non-profits for special events. It could be brought to festivals, outdoor concerts and gatherings as good PR for the film.
(Catch and store energy, redundancy, stack functions, abundance springs from relationships.)
Care and Feeding of Cast and Crew:
The company will contract with community gardens, urban farmers, local growers and caterers to provide fresh, healthy, organic and delicious food for cast and crew.
Food will be served on real plates and dishes whenever possible. This creates another opportunity to partner with local artists to design plates and mugs with the film logo or images which could also become a spin-off product to be sold.
When disposables are used, they will be compostable.
Cast and crew will be given water bottles and mugs—another potential spin-off product. Water and other drinks will be provided in large containers, not plastic bottles.
Food scraps will be collected and composted at community gardens, or fed to a methane digester to produce gas which can be used for cooking or energy generation.
The company will build a portable compost toilet/methane digester unit which can be taken on location. It will be clean, pleasant, and odorless—unlike the usual port-a-potty. The methane can be used for cooking or for energy generation and the residues can be further composted and used to grow trees or ornamental plants. This unit will be a prototype that can also be taken to festivals as promotion for the film. The design can be replicated to provide another potential spin-off business—such units would be invaluable in natural disasters as well as outdoor gatherings. The cost of building it would be offset by savings on port-a-potty rentals and servicing.
(Waste is a resource, use local resources, stack functions)
Transport:
Affordable electric cars are on the verge of coming to market. Cars purchased or leased by the company should be electric or hybrid electric—they can be charged by solar panels and their price will be partially or fully offset by savings on gas and fuel.
After the production, they could be resold. The company might also partner with ZipCars or City Car Share or a similar company that provides car-sharing services in the Bay Area—either to lease cars or for resale of cars.
Trucks and trailers can run on biodiesel—the cost will be somewhat higher than regular diesel.
For short runs and for on-set transport, bicycles can be provided for those willing and able to use them. After production, they could be donated to local programs or resold.
(Catch and store energy, use renewable energy.)
Inspiration and Education:
People will come away from viewing The Fifth Sacred Thing saying, “I want to live there!” We can provide the knowledge and resources they will need to create their own vision of the future. Not in the movie itself—because a movie must above all, be a drama, with the story as the driving force. We can’t stop in the middle to deliver a treatise on rain catchment or how to build a worm bin. The vision of the city will be glimpsed as the context for the action.
But the film will generate enormous opportunities to educate people. We will have a website where people can take a virtual tour of the city, lingering on parts that interest them and delving into the details. On the website, we can provide links to other organizations and resources. Each organization then has a stake in promoting the film.
We can provide short ‘how-to’ videos that can be made, at low cost, by trainees in local youth media programs. The film company can help fund the programs—generating good will and potential tax deductions. The trainees will gain experience, exposure, and connections in the industry.
The website will be rich in interactive experiences: ‘wikis’ where artists can create their own versions of painted wind generators or sculptural play structures, programs that can guide a viewer to design their own permaculture garden or plan their own version of an ideal city. Spin-offs would include a variety of games that could also generate revenue.
The project will also educate and inspire everyone involved in the production and marketing of the film, and all those who hear or read about it, providing a living example of how to do a big, complex project sustainably and profitably.
(Work smarter, not harder, value creativity, stack functions, abundance springs from relationships.)
What’s the downside?
The program will need careful oversight and skillful management.
It will need its own producer and staff.
It will involve the company in more complex relationships and projects than an ordinary film.
It will need legal support to draw up agreements and contracts with a variety of organizations, and experts to negotiate with city and county regulations and permits.
Summary of benefits:
The Fifth Sacred Thing’s applied permaculture program will reduce our carbon load, save energy, and create regenerative resources that will contribute both to ecological health and social justice.
The project will attract high-level talent in every area who will be thrilled to work with us.
The program will save money by saving energy, reducing waste and reducing costs.
It will generate financial benefits by producing income-generating spin-offs and tax credits and deductions.
It will create incalculable benefits for marketing the film. The positive PR will be enormous. Every organization we partner with or link to will have a stake in promoting the film. Youth, artists and activists are great social networkers and will create enormous positive ‘buzz’. Every innovation will be great material for news stories and blogs. By ‘walking our talk’, we will attract not just fans but passionate supporters.
And it’s the right thing to do!
In a triumph of optimism and ideology over observation and common sense, I’ve just hung out my laundry to dry in the cold, dank, near-freezing San Francisco fog. There is a reason I love this place—and there’s another reason I generally do my big travels in the summer, which I’m preparing to do now, today—assuming my laundry dries by then, which is doubtful.
Preparing to go, I’ve been reflecting on the last few weeks, which have been jammed with meetings of various sorts. Not the meetings as in we all get together and decide how to block the road kind of meetings, but Meetings as in “take a meeting with _____”, mostly centered around The Fifth Sacred Thing movie project. So, we went to L.A. By ‘we’ I mean me, Mouse aka Philip Wood, and Paradox Pollack, the three of us being the core team of producers. “Producer”, in movie-land, means many things, but at this point, for us, it’s like being the organizer of an event or an action—a big event. Pulling together the details, the plan, the look and feel of the thing, and eventually, we hope, the money. Never have three people with such funny names and so little money set out to make a major feature film!
Fortunately, I enjoy meetings, first because I’m fascinated by human interactions and power dynamics, secondly, because it’s easier to sit and talk than to sit and write or to carry heavy buckets of compost tea and slosh it about. We met with financial people and green business people (‘green’ as in ‘ecologically conscious’ not as in ‘alien invaders’) and some producers and other people involved in varied aspects of the film business. Then we came back to the Bay Area and met with the San Francisco Film Commission and other producers and potential finance people and our friend in the Office of Economic Development who wants to help us realize our plan of creating legacy projects. We connected with the Burning Man Project which is going to be working with the city to help revive the Market Street corridor with art, and with friends involved with creating games and music and urban agriculture, and looked at some sites for possible sets we could build that could remain as legacy gardens for the community. Really exciting!
In all of this, we’ve found that many people are deeply excited by the project and eager to be a part of it. While my image of Hollywood is of cutthroat, ruthless, cold-eyed greedy business people staring you down and plotting how to do you in—and they do exist!—we’ve found a lot of amazing, creative people hungry to do something with meaning and extremely generous with their time and support.
And our next steps have become clear. We will look for a director—someone who shares our vision and who has the credits and the experience to make investors feel comfortable. To get a director at that level to talk with us, we need to put together the financial package that ultimately we’ll use to attract investors. Films, these days, are sometimes financed by big studios, and we could go try to go that route but if we do, we will give up much control. More often, independents are financed by a complex combination of investors who come in at different times and different levels—who, in fact, must wade through complicated mixed metaphors that somehow combine natural features with the architecture of a hotel, so as to be coming in on the mezzanine level while the waterfall flows, or getting in on the ground floor while not getting left out in the cold—I found myself distracted by wondering what it might mean, say, to come in the lobby of the cloud forest or scale the alpine heights of the balcony or perhaps dive into the swimming pool of the maelstrom or weather the storm of the Grand Ballroom?
Fortunately, I’ve learned in life that often one good phrase can make you sound knowledgeable even if in truth you have no idea what’s going on. To sound knowledgeable about wine, for example, nod wisely and say thoughtfully, “Yes, a great wine is a great interpretation of the soil.”
About film finance, a more rapid, definite nod, perhaps a wink, and say, “We’re getting the guy who makes the waterfall happen.”
Translated, that means a big, big chunk of our Kickstarter money will go to the financial package. An experienced line producer will cost out the movie from the screenplay—in a low-budget and a dream-budget version. A professional agency will project a Return On Investment (I could do that myself for free with Tarot cards but it doesn’t carry the same weight), The Guy/Gal Who Makes The Waterfall Happen will figure out exactly what to offer people who invest, when each tier of financing comes in and when each gets paid out—the waterfall—and the lawyers and accountants who can put it into watertight contracts. In the end, at least half of the $65,000 we’ve raised so far will go into the packaging, plus other fees for lawyers and contracts. Not very sexy, but it’s got to be done, and done by those horrendously expensive entertainment lawyers who do it all the time, know the slippery rocks and the treacherous rapids—otherwise we risk drowning in the torrent as our vision gets swept away.
As for the rest of the money, about twenty per cent goes to Kickstarter fees and money they require us to set aside to fulfill our rewards. Some will go to getting an assistants for Mouse and Paradox who will work a few hours each week, and to enough of a pittance of a stipend that they can—if not quit their day jobs—at least make the movie their prime time occupation. I’ll get an option payment, which will allow me to:
Choose One Only:
A) Fix the leaky roof.
B) Replace the rotting deck.
C) Set aside 3-4 months in the winter and spring to write the sequel.
Reader, which would you do? Here’s a hint—the roof only leaks when it rains, no one forces you to walk out on the rotting deck, but if a sequel is ever to be written, sooner rather than later is the time to do it.
The rest will go to pay for more art. We want to include a few storyboard illustrations of key scenes in the movie, and before we go to investors, we’ll update our video.
When we crunched the numbers, we realized that our original Kickstarter goal was too low. We’re grateful to have reached it, and it’s probably just enough to let us squeak by, but in reality we need more to keep the project moving forward in a way that’s sustainable. That’s why we’ve upped it to our real goal of $100,000. And we are deeply grateful for anything you can contribute to that end.
Because we are committed to openness and transparency, we want you to know how the money will be spent. When people hear “film” they think “big money”, and in time, if we’re successful, that will come. But that time is still far away. We’ll be crammed into the cab of my ’95 pickup (running on 99% recalled veggie oil biodiesel!) for a long time before we get into the limos—and in truth, we don’t really aspire to the limos. We aspire to change consciousness and to make the world itself more resemble our vision of what it could be. To have many sorts of resources to pour into those efforts will be really, really wonderful!
I feel this Kickstarter money, that so many people have given to us in good faith, is a sacred trust. It comes from the community, and it should eventually go back to the community, to help us leave a legacy of jobs, internships, training, gardens and the infrastructure that will be needed to sustain the gardens. If and when the big bucks come, I commit to seeing that at least as much money as we’ve raised here—and hopefully, even more—goes back to social, environmental and community projects.
Thanks to all of you who have given us your trust. That means a lot! We now have a short time left and a big goal to reach, so please do continue to help us spread the word. We need to rebuild momentum after the relief of reaching our funding point. For those of you who’ve thought—‘sure, I want to give them something’ and haven’t yet, now is a very good time!
Miracles do happen. The laundry is dry—time to pack it up and get on the road!
Again, huge gratitude to all of you. The adventure continues…
Lammas morning—I woke up and saw that during the night we’d reached our first funding point on our Kickstarter campaign for The Fifth Sacred Thing movie. Yesterday, I’d posted the update below on our Kickstarter page—hoping that we’d hit that landmark on Lammas, and we did! Such good magic!
“August 1, Lammas, one of the eight key Celtic Pagan holidays on the Wheel of the Year. Lammas, traditionally, was the beginning of the harvest, when the early crops are coming in and the summer fruits are ripe. In Ireland, it was Lughnasad, the festival of the sun-God Lugh. “Lammas” comes from “Loaf-mass”—the loaf made from the first-harvested grain. It was a time of fairs and feasts, of hopes and fears, when the grain is ripening in the fields but not yet brought into the barn.
“Here in northern California, Lammas generally marks the beginning of the driest, most dangerous time of the year. We are midway through our long dry season, with all the moisture burned out of the grasses and the trees beginning to thirst. A spark, a careless cigarette butt, a bottle of water left in the field that serves as a magnifying glass can start a fire that will rage over thousands of acres. Water tanks are running low, springs dry to a trickle, and rain is still weeks away.
“For that reason, I chose Lammas as the date of the Uprising, and its anniversary, in The Fifth Sacred Thing book. “In the dry time of year, the dangerous time, the risk time, an old woman climbed a hill…” so begins the story. “Like most people in the southern part of the city, she called the season El Tiempo de la Segadora, the Time of the Reaper. The hills were dry, the gardens dependent on the dwindling waters of cisterns, the rains still weeks away. A time of ripening, but not yet of harvesting, when nothing was certain.”
“Incidentally, I was originally going to call the novel The Time of the Reaper. Bantam thought that sounded too much like a Gothic novel or horror film, and someone in their editorial offices suggested The Fifth Sacred Thing. Thank you!
“As I look at Kickstarter today, I realize we may well reach our first funding point on Lammas—or very shortly thereafter. A first harvest, indeed!
“Lammas is also a time for gratitude, and I am deeply thankful for all the wonderful support we have been receiving in so many ways. The movie is far, far from its ultimate harvest point, and our funding point on Kickstarter, we hope, will not be an end point but an important marker—and a moment of huge relief as after that, we know that we will actually be getting all the funds that people pledge! But what a powerful first harvest! Thank you all so much for being part of this wonderful adventure! May your own harvests be abundant and your endeavors yield sweet fruit!”
No one was up at my house when I saw the good news, except for fifteen-year-old Kore who was subjected to a sequence of ecstatic hugs and eventually fled to go rouse the parents. I called my good friend Donna—good news needs to be shared!
“Well, now you must really be terrified,” she said.
“I was,” I admitted. “But fortunately our Lammas ritual this weekend focused a lot on letting go of the things that get in the way of your dreams.”
I should say that I had nothing to do with planning the ritual. That’s the wonderful part of collaborative organizations—in Reclaiming, over the years, I’ve been able to step back from many roles and let other people take them on. The gift is that you often get something you don’t expect. Were I planning the ritual, I probably would have focused on something different. But for me, having a chance in ritual space to connect with a few people to share our dreams and name what might keep us from them, and consciously let go of the outcome—oooo, I resisted that, but it was good for me.
I don’t let go of the sense of responsibility I feel—to all the people who have given their support and good will and hard-earned money to this project. I feel a great determination to do all that’s within my power—and perhaps a bit beyond—to make it the movie, and the larger project, that can help propel us into the positive vision of the future we want.
But there are many things beyond my control that could get in the way. The most likely being that the Republicans and Democrats between them will utterly destroy the economy in the next week. A tsunami could wash away San Francisco. Another earthquake could hit. A giant asteroid could crash into the earth. The rapture might actually happen this October. The sun could burn out way ahead of schedule. We could make the movie and everyone could hate it.
So…take a deep breath, and instead of focusing on the worries, let go of the outcome. Move ahead without fear, but with joy and gratitude. Enjoy the harvest as it comes in.
We will continue to raise money—it’s amazing the amount of money it takes to put together the proposal for the investors whom we hope will provide the next tier. But now we know we can move ahead with some key facets of the project, and that we have some resources to lay on the table. Thanks to all who have been supporting us in so many ways.
And great gratitude to the Reclaiming ritual planners, and to all who offer ceremonies and spiritual support to your communities.
A blessed Lammas to you all!
Reclaiming has groups in many areas who offer rituals, classes, and camps:
http://www.reclaiming.org/
Website for The Fifth Sacred Thing movie:
http://fifthsacredthing.com/home/
Kickstarter Page:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fifthsacredthing/the-fifth-sacred-thing
Facebook for the Film:
http://www.facebook.com/TheFifthSacredThingFilm
Facebook for the book:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Fifth-Sacred-Thing/109374575747760?ref=ts&sk=info
Fifth Sacred Thing Book:
https://starhawk.org/writings/fifth-sacred-thing
This summer has been a whirlwind of teaching permaculture and working on making a movie from my novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing. But a few days ago I took a break to attend a performance of Guys and Dolls put on by SF Arts Education, in which my fifteen-year old Goddess-child Kore was singing and dancing. SF Arts Ed runs a wonderful program where students from middle schools and high schools put on Broadway musicals, complete with singing, dancing, and a full jazz orchestra. We had balcony seats behind the stage, so I was looking down on these bright and beautiful young people of all different backgrounds and ancestry, reflecting the multicultural nature of San Francisco itself. They are a talented bunch, but I also know how hard they work, how much time they rehearse and the discipline they develop. What a gift it is to have such wonderful youth growing up in our city!
Weighing on my mind were the terrible murders in Norway, where Anders Behring Breivik blew up government buildings and then went on a shooting rampage at a camp full of young people. His avowed intention was to somehow defend the purity of Norwegian and Christian culture against Moslems and others who in his mind are undesirable. He apparently fantasized himself as some sort of modern-day crusader.
Breivik is clearly insane—meaning, far off the spectrum of consensus reality. Unfortunately, there are many others who share his views if not his eagerness to commit mass murder. When news of the bombing first surfaced, the media leapt to the conclusion that Muslims had done it. Racist commentators bleat their poison over the airwaves daily, and solemn pundits intone that somehow in Europe, ‘multiculturalism has failed.’
I was pondering all this, watching the wonderful dancing and the songs from a day when multiculturalism meant Jewish gangsters on Broadway encountering Salvation Army missionaries. A Broadway musical, I thought, must be the most quintessential American art form, if there is such a thing. I considered whether these youth whose ancestors came from Europe, African, China, Japan, Central and South America, the Pacific Islands, India, and probably some other places I haven’t listed might not benefit from doing something more ‘multicultural’—the Ramayana with African drums, perhaps, or Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow iss Enuf.
But the jazzy music caught me up in pure enjoyment. And then suddenly it struck me—Guys and Dolls is multicultural. Along with every other Broadway musical, as well as jazz, gospel, blues and rock & roll, it owes as much to Africa as to Europe in the rhythms and patterns of its music. That fabulous tap dancing started as Irish clogging way back when. The form of storytelling with music and dance goes back as far as humankind recounting the hunt around the communal fire.
“Western culture” itself is multicultural. Breivik blew up his buildings with explosives invented in China. He counted his dead in Arabic numerals.
The media is full of strident voices telling us greed and prejudice and self-righteous, self-justifying bile are not only okay, they’re patriotic! Breivik’s horrific murders were a clear message about where that thinking leads—to the death of innocents.
We need strong voices now to raise up a powerful countercry, to say that all of us have value, that we’re here on earth to take care of one another, to proclaim that every difference of background and culture and perspective is a gift. We need a vision of how we might live in such a world—for if we can’t imagine it, how can we create it?
That’s why I’ve thrown myself so deeply into the project of making my novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing, into a movie. In the book, I envisioned a society that truly valued diversity. It’s one vision—not the only vision—of how ideals of justice might play out, and the huge support we’re receiving for the project shows how hungry people are for a positive vision of a future here on earth.
But truly, I don’t just want to make a movie. I want to make a different world. The movie is a vehicle toward that end—one vehicle, maybe not the best but the one that seems to lie before me right now. I’m enormously grateful for all the help and support we’ve been finding along the way. But I don’t want people to wait for the movie. Now, today, do something to nourish and strengthen your own vision. Now, today, do something to counter the voices of hate and greed and doom. Every heritage includes great beauty and great pain, and we will need to draw on the wisdom and experience of all of them to weather the storms ahead. Shout out the truth—that we all count. We are interconnected, interdependent, and when we get good at it, a multiplicity of rhythms will move our feet in a joyous dance, and a chorus of voices harmonize in exultant song.
Some simple things to do:
Pat Buchanan, on MSNBC, stated that Breivik may have been right about a Crusades-like conflict between Christians and Muslims. CREDO is circulating a petition to get the network, which is trying to position itself as a counter-voice to Fox News, to deny him a platform. Sign the petition at:
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/fire_buchanan/?r_by=24909-2190680-HCRZxNx&rc=paste1
Oppose John Boehner’s plan to take money from seniors, the poor and the middle class to support big business, big oil and big money.
http://act.aflcio.org/c/18/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=2592
You can support The Fifth Sacred Thing movie by backing our Kickstarter campaign:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fifthsacredthing/the-fifth-sacred-thing
The Fifth Sacred Thing website:
http://fifthsacredthing.com/home/
Like us on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/TheFifthSacredThingFilm
A Tale of Two Movies!
Our Kickstarter campaign for The Fifth Sacred Thing is going phenomenally well. We are 80% toward our original funding goal—with 25 days left to go! Thanks to everyone who has been showing us such fantastic support!
Now, we’re shifting gears. Our campaign really has two goals—first, of course, to raise the money we need to move the film project to the next level. Last weekend we had some very successful meetings in L.A. with a few key people who are willing to be our advisors around film financing and navigating the creative edges of the industry. The good news—assuming our Kickstarter campaign succeeds, as we feel sure it will, we’ll have what we need to move on to the next phase—due to your wonderful support, and, if I can say it, our own hard work over quiet years of crafting the screenplay, the visuals, and many other pieces.
To convince a top-level director to join us, to draw in investors and financing, we need three things. The first is a great story—which hopefully we have. The second is money, which we will have at least some of. The third, however, is popular support. Investors today are looking for things that already have a following—novels, comic books, sequels to sequels—even more than big-name stars. Every Like on our Facebook page or sign-up to our mailing list helps. But what is most convincing: people who actually kick down some cold cash and show their support.
So—would you be willing to help us in this way? Go to our Kickstarter page and become an active backer, for even as little as dollar? As I write, we have almost 800—we’d love to get over 1000. If everyone on this list gave even the price of a cup of coffee—hopefully organic, shade-grown and fair-traded, of course—we’d be in the top echelon of Kickstarter projects as far as numbers of active backers.
Thank you so much! And as a special treat, this coming week until August 15, our distributors will be live streaming Signs Out of Time, the documentary I made with director Donna Read on archaelogist Marija Gimbutas. Although I haven’t made a feature film yet, I have worked on a number of documentaries and Signs is dear to my heart, and a good introduction to the Goddess who is such a core figure in The Fifth Sacred Thing as well. Here’s the information:
Watch SIGNS OUT OF TIME online for free when you become a member of the Alive Mind Cinema community. Join and after your registration is validated via e-mail, login to the site and go to the Members Screening Room. Select SIGNS OUT OF TIME from the pulldown menu and enjoy.
Signs Out of Time, a film by Donna Read and Starhawk, examines the life and work of world-renowned archaeologist Dr. Marija Gimbutas. Drawing from her extensive knowledge of mythology and linguistics, Lithuanian-born Gimbutas uncovered the life-affirming and goddess-worshiping civilizations of pre-historic “Old Europe.” Weaving together footage of Gimbutas herself, as well as interviews with her supporters and critics, Signs Out of Time reveals a visionary scholar whose theories challenged the “establishment” of her time and influenced a generation of scholars, feminists, and social thinkers.
Thanks so very much! Your support has been a great gift already!
Blessings, Starhawk
Summer Solstice—a magical time, a time of transformation. From midwinter to midsummer, the life forces are burgeoning, pushing forth into form, struggling to manifest. The sun grows higher, stronger. But at Solstice, the shift occurs. The tide turns. Life has blossomed forth—now it begins the slow preparation to dream again. Fruit slowly swells and ripens, sheltering the seeds of what is yet to come.
Here’s what Witches and artists know: There’s the visible, material world—and then there’s the World Behind the World, the Otherworld, the Underworld, the Dreamtime, where manifestation begins.
When we stir the waters of the Otherworld, still waters ripple and tides shift in the world of Day and Night. When we want to change the living world, we first plant seeds in the dreamtime. We can do it with ritual and magic, with the power of a concentrated mind. We can do it with art, with poetry, fiction, music, songs, movies. All cast their own spells—for a spell is merely energy focused through imagery, to make something happen.
So the Solstice-tide, the several days when “the sun stands still” at its highest point in the sky, seems like an auspicious time to launch our spell to manifest that fifth sacred thing which weaves the worlds together. Yes, I’m talking about the movie we intend to make of my novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing.
But I won’t lie to you—we are casting a spell. We believe the world needs a powerful vision of a positive future here on earth. Once we might simply have told the tale around the fire. Two decades ago, I wrote it as a novel. Now, as the world becomes ever more visual, we want to make it a film. We want fourteen-year-old boys in the mall to get excited about a world of flowing streams and gardens, that honors earth, air, fire and water. We want all of us who have been working so hard to bring us through these challenging times to catch a glimpse of what we’re working toward—and to wrestle with the story’s central question: how do we defend a peaceful world from the forces that will contest it without becoming what we’re fighting against?
Stir the brew, add a pinch of this or that, light the Solstice fires, and the sun descends into the Dream. Our spell is woven of contemporary threads—the web of the internet is where we begin to weave. So at this time, we launch our website: And we’re also launching our Kickstarter campaign, to bring in that material manifestation we call money to get us started on the road.
We invite you to join us. On the website, we’ll begin to develop resources both for making the movie and for making the vision manifest. Come sign our mailing list and you’ll get updates as we go along. You’ll see the art we develop in process and have a chance to post your own ideas of what that future might look like.
And please come check out our Kickstarter page. There you’ll see the video that shows some of our inspirations for the movie we hope to create. Watch it, and if you’re inspired, you can donate some material wealth that will help us move the project to the next level—and get cool stuff in return! Most of all, help us spread the word. Share the links, post them to your own networks, and together we’ll weave the dream.
A blessed Solstice to you all!
Another Gaza flotilla is forming up in the Mediterranean, and the Israeli authorities are trying every possible avenue to stop it—from pressuring the companies that insure boats to lawsuits to threats of violence against its passengers.
Why is the flotilla needed? Hasn’t Egypt opened the Rafah border?
One of the frustrations around the issue of Palestine is how often what governments say diverges from what they do. Israel says it has relaxed controls on goods and foodstuffs and necessities of life entering Gaza—what actually happens is that a few more brands of cookies get in but materials necessary to rebuild the four hundred homes and eighty public buildings destroyed in Israel’s military assault of 2008-9 are still kept out. Egypt says the border is open—but trying to get in or out is still an ordeal and decisions are quite arbitrary and unpredictable as to whether a student succeeds in leaving to pursue her education or whether a sick child is able to leave to get medical care. Read Ramzy Baroud’s account on Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/baroud06172011.html
What is the flotilla bringing that so scares the Israeli authorities? Medical supplies, cement for rebuilding, an ambulance and a mobile hospital—the cargo is checked and rechecked and certified and the passengers are committed to nonviolence. No, it’s not really the cargo that’s a threat, it’s something else the flotilla brings—light. By openly challenging the blockade, the flotilla makes visible the prison walls that surround Gaza and shine the light of truth on the complicity of the United States and international community in allowing the Israeli authorities to continually violate international law by imposing a collective punishment on an entire people.
When I was a child growing up in the ‘50s, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, my family would respond to every world event by asking, “Is it good for the Jews?”
I’m now a Pagan and a priestess of the Goddess, so perhaps I’m not the best person to answer that question. However, more and more Jews inside and outside of Israel are disavowing Israel’s policies. Gideon Levy, a columnist for the major Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, writes of “the terrible international damage Israel inflicts upon itself as a result of its violent behavior. How simple (and just ) it would be to allow these well-intentioned people to reach their goal; in contrast, how idiotic, violent and unnecessary it would be to release the commandos once again, to go after them.”
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/israel-has-no-right-to-stop-gaza-aid-flotillas-1.368463
Rabbis from Tikkun’s Michael Lerner to Rabbis for Human Rights, organizations that include Jewish Voice for Peace, J-Street, Jews for Justice for Palestine and many more, have all spoken out for the human rights of Palestinians as well as Israelis. Many of the passengers and organizers of the flotilla are Jews.
As for me, I believe anyone whom Hitler would have killed as a Jew is still a Jew, and I was raised with some core Jewish values I still hold dear and that inform my approach to Pagan spirituality and all of my actions.
The first is that real religion is rooted in justice. And justice is uncomfortable. True justice is not blind—it means facing those truths we often don’t want to see.
The second is that the role of religion is not to comfort but to prod. True prophets do not congratulate us on our righteousness but rather point out our hypocrisies and challenge us to peer through our blind spots. They call us to account.
The third is that the divine transcends tribe and nations, that justice is for all, not ‘just us’.
The Israeli response to Gaza, the irate comments, the lawsuits, the near-hysteria in the face of the flotilla is predicated on an inability or unwillingness to see the people of Gaza and the Palestinian people as a whole as human beings, invested with human rights, beloved by God/Goddess or whatever you call the great creative spirit of the universe, and possessed of the full spectrum of human differences. Just like any other people, they include good ones and bad ones, the compassionate and the cruel, the peaceful and the violent, the innocent and the corrupt.
More and more, Israeli policy equates ‘Palestinian’ with ‘terrorist’. It sees acknowledges no differences, and treats anyone who speaks for the human rights of Palestinian people as if they were aiding terrorism. But such a policy cannot bring about real security for Israel. Not only is it morally wrong, it’s stupid. By erasing the real diversity that exists within the Palestinian community, it locks Israel into rigid, ham-fisted policies that engender more rage and hatred and lose the respect of people of good will around the world.
A strategic policy would recognize those differences, work with them, forge alliances and shift conditions to favor peace. A moral policy would make Israel look good by actually doing good, not by making cosmetic changes on the face of the same old policies. Instead, Israeli authorities attempt to look good by aggressively defending the prejudices embodied in their policies, by manipulating media and screaming that all critics are enemies. That’s not good for Israel.
By calling for justice, by shining a light on the continued abuses in Gaza, the Free Gaza Flotilla is acting prophetically. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. There’s no greater discomfort for people who see themselves as good than to face the pain and abuse their own actions have caused. It hurts, it stings—our natural reaction is to yell and scream and silence the accusers. But if we do, we lose all chance of truly deepening our humanity and living in accord with our integrity. That’s not good for the Jews, or for anyone.
It’s long past time to end the siege of Gaza, to allow children to receive medicine, students to pursue their education, families to rebuild their homes. That’s the path of righteousness and the path of peace. The Gaza flotilla is courageously showing the way. For information on how to support the flotilla, see:
http://www.freegaza.org/
I woke up this morning and somehow in the night I’d turned sixty! I guess if you escape dying on the barricades, car accidents and fatal diseases, it happens.
Sixty seems old. I remember when I asked my grandmother, a genuine old person, just how old she was—she said, “Sixty.” But they say sixty is the new forty, and I hope so because I don’t feel old. I know a lot of people my age are starting to retire but I feel like I’m just getting started. (And that’s probably a good thing, not having saved any money to retire on anyway.)
 This is how I feel this morning, waking up sixty years old! But mostly I woke up feeling happy. In sixty years, I have actually learned a thing or two and one of them has to do with happiness—that it’s a process, not a destination. I’ve achieved a fair number of things in life, and received a lot of wonderful things, but what makes me happy is being in the middle of something exciting where I get to work for what I believe in. I love the second and third drafts. The first draft is painful and exhausting—building the architecture of a story, molding the characters and the world out of your own etheric energy. But by the second draft, the story is set, the world has an existence and a reality of its own, and you can just enter into it and enjoy making the improvements.
So now I’m in the second or third draft of life. When you’re in your twenties or thirties, you’re always agonizing over who you are and what you’re going to be. By sixty, life has a pattern. There’s some things I’m just not going to be in this lifetime, and I have to let them go. It’s too late to have a child, or even to adopt one. That’s a big one. I’m not going to learn to do aerial dance, or ski.
But I do have wonderful friends, a loving partner, amazing and talented stepdaughters and Goddess-kids, and I get to do marvelous, exciting things. Write books. Teach permaculture woven together with magic and organizing in Earth Activist Trainings—one starting next week in Quebec! Work with youth and elders in the inner city to grow food in community gardens. And the newest, most exciting project at the moment, the long-time dream that at last is coming day by day more into reality, is making the movie of The Fifth Sacred Thing.
Ever since I posted here and on Facebook that the movie was underway, I feel like I’ve been getting love-bombed with messages from so many people about how much the book has meant to them. I’ve had to keep myself grounded by remembering that there are significant crews of people out there that think I’m Scum of the Earth. (The Pope, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior, not a few editors and critics, lots of people who think The Fifth Sacred Thing is hippie drivel, just to name some). It all balances out – but at the moment I’m basking in the sunlight of praise from so many people who tell me that something I’ve done in those first sixty years has made a significant difference to their lives. Thanks to you all for your posts and comments and good wishes! They mean a lot!
And this week, some wonderful things have happened. So many people have ‘liked’ our Facebook page—a thrill to see the numbers climb! I’ve seen the design for the website, which is beautiful, and will be up next week! Kickstarter approved our campaign to raise funds through their website, and we’ve decided for symbolic and magical reasons to launch it on the Solstice, June 21. Watch for it!
Earlier, I wrote about my long struggles with the screenplay. This week, I got some feedback from a friend who is currently a hot action screenwriter in Hollywood. I quote: “It’s frickin’ great!” Yes! I’ve been working a long time for that!
I don’t believe that making the movie will make me happy. I’m happy making the movie. Ever since Philip Wood got involved as producer two years ago, I’ve been happy working on it, knowing there was someone else who shared the vision and who was confident in taking on all the producing pieces I didn’t want to do. When Paradox Pollack joined us last fall, he brought a supernova of positive energy into the mix. Between the two of them, they seem to know every creative artist and musician in the known universe, and so many of them have said, “Yes, we want to be involved with this!” Now we also have two amazing women on the team—Alli Gallixsee, who shot our Kickstarter video and is coordinating the social media. One thing I love about Alli is that every time I write something, she tells me it gives her chills or makes her cry. Praise is good! And Jen Zariat, who seems wired into the electric energy of the internet and who knows all kinds of mysterious things, like which fonts make a movie poster look like a big, blockbuster movie!
Photographers wait to shoot in the ‘golden hour’, just before sunset, when colors are more intense and faces glow with warm light. Sometimes in writing, it’s in the later drafts that little things snap together, small inspirations happen, just the right image surfaces that brings the whole project into focus. Writing The Fifth Sacred Thing, I didn’t have the title until someone at Bantam suggested it. When they did, on the last revision, I found the imagery all came together in a whole new way.
I’m looking forward to lots of those moments in these later drafts of life. I know that terrible things are happening all around us, the world is still going to hell in spite of my best efforts, that there will be more protests to go to and more losses to face. But there’s a certain class of people that are happy as long as they see some good piece of work in front of them that they can do, and I’m one of them. I hope it will be a long time yet before I type “Fade out.” And in the meantime, I’m going to go ice skating—just to prove I still can, and meet friends, look at art, eat cake and enjoy the golden light of these lingering days.
Dia de los Muertos—2004. Election day. I left home around 6 pm to march in the procession through the streets of San Francisco’s Mission District. Kerry was in the lead. I walked with poet Francisco Alarcon to the beat of the Aztec drums, following the cut-paper standards that Juan Pablo Gutierrez creates each year, We blessed the four directions as the Aztec dancers spun, and thousands of people carrying candles, dressed as skulls and skeletons or simply in black, paraded past fabulous altars.
Dia de los Muertos—the mix of ceremony and celebration, the Latino tradition that now draws in people of all races and religions and cultures—to me it’s the essence of the vibrant life of the city that inspired me to write The Fifth Sacred Thing many years ago. I wanted to imagine a world where the values that were most sacred to me—balance with nature, justice, respect for our human diversity, art and pleasure and love—were the basis of society. What would it look like, feel like? How would we live in that world? And how could we defend it against those who still put their trust in brute force and violence?
As I walked, I began to have a bad feeling, as if the tides of fate were shifting, and not in a good way. When I got home, Bush was in the lead. I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach—not so much because of who was winning but because of what the whole nasty process with its lies and attacks and voter suppression, if not outright fraud, said about who we are and what our future was likely to be. And a little voice in my head said, “Maybe it would be a good political act to get your book made into a movie.”
I’d often thought of getting the book made into a movie—practically everyone who has ever read it has said, “This would be a great movie!” But selling books to the movies is a process fraught with dashed hopes and broken dreams. Most of the time, it means the writer sells the rights and loses all control. Rarely if ever does the writer of a novel write the screenplay—partly because it Is a whole different skill set.
I’d had a couple of options on the book at various times that never turned into a movie. But now I decided I wanted to write the screenplay myself. After all, I had spent a year in the graduate film department at UCLA, and won a major writing prize. Okay, that was in 1972, but still. Besides, I had that magic thing so many writers want and don’t have—an agent in Hollywood. Never mind that every time I sent him a draft of the screenplay he responded with, “It’s not working—but I’m no good at giving feedback, I can’t tell you why.” I got lots of helpful comments, mostly on the order of, “Have you thought of getting a real screenwriter to do it?” But I am nothing if not persistent. My mother used to tell me that when I was just learning to walk, she watched me one day trying to cross a threshold, tripping, falling, getting back up, tripping again, falling, over and over. Perfect preparation for writing the screenplay—although perhaps simply beating my head against the wall would have done it.
Just when I had about convinced myself the whole thing was an addictive obsession more than a creative project, my stepdaughter Juliana put me in touch with a friend of hers that she said had always dreamed of making the movie of The Fifth Sacred Thing. Philip Wood–known to his friends as Mouse–had been working in film and music production in the Bay Area for many years and was starting his own production company, Yerba Buena films. We met, and I liked his vision for the movie.
He actually liked the screenplay. We talked, we negotiated, gradually we began to scheme, and over time and a few more drafts, somehow “He wants to make this movie” shifted to “We’re making this movie.” If I wanted to have some impact on how the movie turns out, I needed to be part of it, and Philip was willing to have me.
Then, in October, an old friend posted on my blog that he had finally read the book and was possessed by the need to make it into a movie. I knew Paradox Pollack as what I thought of as The Mysterious People in Black who would show up at 3 AM at our New Year’s Eve parties and do contact improv in the attic long after I went to bed. He’s an actor, circus performer and dancer who had moved from Bohemian San Francisco scene and been working in Hollywood doing movement choreography for big, feature films for the last six years, including Star Trek, I Am Legend, and Thor. (We call him The Guy Who Taught the Gods How to Move). <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X98ZM_aQC0>.
When he came on board, our pace revved up. Now, besides doing the dull and necessary things like getting legal and financial structures together, we started to get art, costume ideas, visuals to help shape the look of the future. And the movie has begun to generate its own magic—all kinds of amazing, creative, incredible people have said, “Yes, I want to be part of this!” “Use my art”, “Play my music”, “How can I help?”
For me, the contradictions inherent in this project are huge. I’m far more at home on the barricades protesting corporate greed than inside a meeting room trying to raise staggering amounts of money. The average cost of a big feature with special effects is something like 100 million dollars. I have to practice saying it without either laughing or flinching. How could I possibly get involved with the money forces on that scale and keep any shreds of integrity? How could we justify the amount of energy and resources it would take?
Well, what if all those resources could be used to help create pieces of that future we want to show in the movie? What if we applied permaculture principles to the making of the movie itself? I wrote up a Green Plan for the production, thinking of all the ways we could not only make the production itself set a whole new standard for ecological filmmaking, but also generate resources that could be left in the city afterwards and provide a platform that could inspire people to start building that beautiful world back in their own home towns. People loved the vision of Avatar so much that many of them dressed up in blue and went out to the woods to play Pandora. Well, The Fifth Sacred Thing is a bit like Avatar on Earth—and if people like the vision they’ll see, they can create it right here, and we can provide blueprints on the website! And the Green Plan, it turned out, was inspiring to some of the people who can help us make it happen—from Green Businesses to a fan of the book who now works in San Francisco’s Department of the Environment.
So, where are we now? We’ve got structures for the legal and financial stuff, although there’s always endlessly more of those to put in place. We’ve got artwork, character drawings, wonderful support from major artists who will allow us to use their work and images. We have that screenplay—finally down to the size it needs to be! We have a letter of interest from Olympia Dukakis, who is my dream choice to play Maya, the old woman/storyteller. Within the next couple of weeks, we’ll have our website up and already our Facebook Page is up. Please check it out and Like it if you can!
<http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Fifth-Sacred-Thing-Film/178087115570253>
We’re just about to take that big leap, from the The Fifth Sacred Thing movie project being my Secret Dream to becoming a Big, Public Dream. Really scary—on so many levels. But as we say, “Where there’s fear, there’s power.” And it’s so, so exciting!
What we don’t have—yet—the major financing. But—we have a plan! To get together the full packet of legal and creative stuff that will allow us to go after the financing, we need seed money. So we’re going to start with a Kickstarter campaign—there will be updates here, on our Facebook page, and you can also go onto my website and sign onto my mailing list. Kickstarter is a website for crowd-funding creative projects. If we can raise at least $50,000, and hopefully more, on Kickstarter, that will get us a big step forward toward pulling together all the pieces we need to go after bigger funding. And equally important, it will show potential investors that there is big support and interest out there for this project. The more we can put together, the more likely we can attract financing from people who will be excited by our vision, and who will want to support it and augment it. (As opposed to what usually happens, where the financial people want to control the vision and generally change it.)
I feel so much responsibility to everyone who loves the book. It’s terrifying to think that we might disappoint people. We could fail to make the movie—most movie projects are stillborn before they ever get made. We could make a lousy movie! But I so strongly believe that the world needs a positive vision of the future right now. I can’t think of any movie that projects a positive vision of a future here on earth. How can we create it if we can’t envision it? A friend confessed to me the other day that she and everyone she knows thinks it’s already too late, that we’re past the point of no return. I don’t believe that. I believe that the earth is resilient and creative—and we are agents of that creative force called to reinvent our way of life right now. If we can give people some hope, some direction and some inspiration, it seems worth all the risks and the work!
Besides, I so want to see those Four Old Women tear up the streets!
You can order the book, and the prequel Walking to Mercury, on my website:
https://starhawk.org/writings/fifth-sacred-thing
https://starhawk.org/writings/walking-mercury
So many of you were generous in supporting our work this year in Bayview Hunters Point, teaching permaculture and organic food production to young adults and elders from public housing. I’ve been wanting to share these pictures for a while–finally I have enough of a break from writing deadlines to upload them. Thanks to all of you who donated so abundantly to Earth Activist Training– http://www.earthactivisttraining.org/donate.html. Your support has made all of this possible!
 Taking a break at the Adam Rogers garden. We were working with two gardens–one at Adam Rogers park which had gotten very overgrown with Bermuda Grass. The garden is worked by at-risk middle-school age girls from the Girls 2000 program run by Hunters Point Family www.hunterspointfamily.org.
 A moment of joy in the garden! We’ve had two volunteer days this year so far–one with folks from Earth Activist Training and Hayes Valley Farm, and one organized with a bunch of civic action groups coordinated by Public Allies.
 Planting seedlings.  Digging up the Bermuda grass and rolling away the turf was hard work!  Victory over the Bermuda grass--for the moment! Charity is too shy to let me take pictures of her, but when I loaned her my camera she got great shots of her friends. She’s got a good eye–and it was the first time I’d seen her smile! Kids respond so well to the chance to be creative. Here’s some of her shots:
 Torrie and Chezless  The girls are great! LaDiamond is the coordinator of the Adam Rogers garden–and sometimes she brings her boys who are 3 and 5.
 LaDiamond--our coordinator.  LaDiamond's boys.  Brothers! Most of the time, however, the course met at the Alice Griffith Garden in the Doublerock public housing development. We did most of our hands-on projects there–and some of them are shown here in earlier blogs. But we also took field trips–like this one to Hayes Valley Farm, an amazing community garden project built on an old Freeway offramp. Miss Jackie, who coordinates the Doublerock garden, especially liked the raised beds and the great greenhouse. Hayes Valley Farm has also started lots of seedlings for us.
 Jay from Hayes Valley Farm and Miss Jackie.  Tiajuana and Mystique in the Hayes Valley Farm greenhouse.  Lots of seedlings at Hayes Valley Farm! We made a cob bench at Doublerock–I couldn’t get any of the guys to take off their shoes and stomp the cob…
 Stomping cob with shoes, covered with a tarp! But LaDiamond did–she got down, dirty and barefoot!
Artist Charles Dabo came and talked about growing up in Senegal, his education and traditional rites of passage.
 Charles Dabo, artist and educator.  Got Grease! And then there was our trip to Got Grease–where they collect used grease from San Francisco restaurants and prepare it to be made into biodiesel, which now runs our busses!
 Vats and vats of grease.... And all the students did designs…it was great to see them focused, creative, and learning…everyone was proud of their designs! Again, gratitude to all of you who have helped to support this program! Blessings, Starhawk
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