Category: history

People’s Park: Still Blooming – free download!

On By Reclaiming CommunityIn Activism, Bay Area, Freebies & Resources, historyLeave a comment

This classic photo-history, edited by Terri Compost and published by in 2009 Slingshot Collective, is now available from Reclaiming Quarterly as a free downloadable PDF!

Visit our People’s Park webpage for PDF or links to print edition.

People’s Park: Still Blooming shows how a good cause can lead to good rallies, riots, concerts, and lasting friendships. This book reminds us not only to recount our stories and struggles, but to celebrate them too!

People’s Park: Still Blooming is our family heirloom, memories, scrapbook, the story of the courage and hope that freed and tended this sacred piece of earth. It is for us to remember, but mostly it is for the next to come. This book is an attempt to capture the spirit and story of the Park.

​​It was published with the hope that, like seeds, copies will find fertile ground in the hearts of young people and encourage them to try again. We are connected. The land wants to live. Let a thousand Parks bloom.

Numerous Reclaiming folks including editor Terri Compost were deeply involved in People’s Park over the years – we’re very glad to add this book to our website!

Reclaiming’s Oral History – youtube interviews!

On By Reclaiming CommunityIn history, Reclaiming ReportsLeave a comment

We Are Your People! Reclaiming’s Oral History shines a spotlight on the voices of the innovative witches, artists, activists, writers and community weavers world-wide who have co-created the ecstatic transformational cauldron and earth-honoring, sex and LGBTQ+ positive eco-feminist social justice movement known as the Reclaiming Tradition.

Interview #1 – Lauren Liebling and Lou Hart interviewed by Beverly M Frederick

These YouTubes are the beginning of a larger Oral History Project documenting Reclaiming’s first fifty years. It is our intent to use this spotlight to get better acquainted with one another and the elders who walked this path before us and to record these conversations for those yet to come.

To hear about new posts plus classes, witchcamps, and more Reclaiming news, subscribe to Reclaiming’s international googlegroup – email ReclaimingQuarterly@gmail.com to subscribe.

Get A Life: A Memoir by Dress Wedding

On By Reclaiming CommunityIn Activism, Bay Area, Books, history, Pagan Cluster

Get a Life

Get A Life: Chronicles of a Conscious Scofflaw

Get A Life shares Reclaiming activist dress wedding’s journey of engaging in subversive actions and taking chances to build a life of freedom and meaning. The colorful narrative traces his evolution from drug-dealing Grateful Deadhead with self-esteem issues to becoming a nonviolent activist confronting injustice and police over decades in many different facets of the peace movement.

In early activist life, dress became a self-proclaimed witch, embracing the Reclaiming Tradition. And eventually moved to a very different form of action, becoming co-founder of Oakland’s Harborside Health Center in 2006, one of the largest and most respected cannabis retailers in the world.

In 1983 dress was arrested while wearing a wedding dress at an anti-nuclear action at Lawrence Livermore Labs in Berkeley, California. He has been wearing dresses ever since as a personal action against patriarchy, challenging people to think about what it means to “be a man” in our world. Dress writes in depth about how this personal action has impacted others in his life, especially his children and their mother. Also its impact on the Harborside marijuana business as he helped transform the new world of medical cannabis. The book offers a brief critique of the state of cannabis regulation, before outlining hopes for a new venture providing legitimate payments to the industry.

Throughout the manuscript dress notes how imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy has benefitted him and those around him. He explores how depression has affected him as a male in a society that suppresses this possibility. His motivation has always been to improve the human condition and relieve suffering, and his hope for the book is to inspire others to join in this effort.

Website & more information.

Available at Amazon etc.

Reclaiming Cauldron – new experimental journal!

On By Reclaiming CommunityIn Activism, Essays & Articles, Freebies & Resources, history, Pagan Cluster, Reclaiming Reports

Welcome to the first and perhaps only issue of the Reclaiming Cauldron, a compendium of creativity from around Reclaiming. Folks from around our network wrote, photo- graphed, painted, and even helped proofread.

Print edition or free download – 150 pages of writings, artwork, photos, music and video links, book excerpts – and even some funny stuff!

You can download a free copy, or order a black & white ($20) or full-color ($30) print edition at WeaveAndSpin.org/cauldron

Stolen Lives – 2004 SF Vigil

On By Reclaiming CommunityIn Activism, Bay Area, Black Lives Matter, history

Photos from a 2004 vigil outside the SF Metreon called Stolen Lives: Killed by Law Enforcement – a forerunner of Black Lives Matter. Reclaiming folks helped create a living altar.

Click here to see slide show

Stolen Lives was organized by community activists from Hunters Point neighborhoods.

Reclaiming folks including Kevyn, Bill, Starhawk, and others brought potted plants to create a living altar. You can see the Pagan Cluster circled up to the left in the shot below, and creating altars in others in the slide show.

Photos by George Franklin/Reclaiming Quarterly

Youtube – A Brief History of Direct Action!

On By Reclaiming CommunityIn Activism, Bay Area, climate justice, Freebies & Resources, history, Youth

DA-YT31-Cop&Hippie

Direct action has a long and honored place in American history – from the revolution itself through abolitionists, suffragists, union organizers, civil rights advocates, feminist and gay rights activists, and on to today’s vibrant climate and social justice organizing.

Click here for A Brief History of Direct Action

Join author Luke Hauser for a profusely illustrated 25-minute journey through our past. We’ll focus especially on organizing from 1980 to the present, with sections on the 1980s anti-nuke movement and 2011’s Occupy actions.

Originally created around 2000, the show has been updated with a revised text and many new images. Co-created by Groundwork and Reclaiming Quarterly.

So make a big bowl of popcorn, pull up your beanbag chair, and get ready for a journey through our history!

Photo by Janet Delaney

Drawing Down the Moon – Audio

On By Reclaiming CommunityIn Books, history

Book-DrawingMoonAudio

Margot Adler’s classic survey of Neo-Paganism (1979, second edition 2006) is now available in audio format. The reading is crisp and a bit dry – like a radio reporter.

Audiobook – Drawing Down the Moon

Print format

Adler, a National Public Radio reporter, interviewed people from many traditions and tendencies to paint a picture of an emerging Pagan and feminist spirituality. The accounts and interviews are informal and easy to skim.

Originally published on the same date as Starhawk’s Spiral Dance (Samhain 1979), Adler’s book serves as a sort of backstory to groups like Reclaiming, Spark, CAYA, and other millennial communities.