Years later, she becomes a well-known writer and teacher of ritual and magic workshops, but when her mother dies of cancer, Maya begins to question her 'open, bisexual, long-running affair' with Johanna and her relationship to nature. Having dropped out of high school after being disciplined for indulging in LSD and making out with her best girlfriend, Johanna Weaver, Maya falls in love with an impulsive alcoholic and helps build People's Park in San Francisco. Most of the novel is devoted to Maya's account of her life so far, and the key emotional, spiritual and political impressions and awakenings that will open her up to become a great ecofeminist leader in the next century. Maya literally carries her personal baggage in her backpack, which contains her dead mother's ashes, as well as letters and journal entries from past and present lovers. Traveling through the landscape of memories helps Maya reclaim her past and foreshadows the miraculous events readers of The Fifth Sacred Thing know her to be capable of in the future.Įarnest and too long, Starhawk's prequel to The Fifth Sacred Thing tells the story of 38-year-old Maya Greenwood's pilgrimage to Nepal. Eventually she emerges, stronger and wiser, infused with the wisdom of the earth and the spirit of the goddess. She finally gathers the strength to break free and seek her own true path, which takes her from the streets of Manhattan to the mountains of Mexico. At rest stops in tiny Tibetan villages, she reads diary pages her lover Johanna has tucked into her bag-the diary Johanna kept throughout their shared youth during the Vietnam era.In vivid flashbacks to those radical days, we accompany the young Maya as she awakens to the summer of love, joins the anti-war movement, and enters into a relationship with the abusive, alcoholic Rio.

Everest and finally lay to rest her tumultuous past. The culminating factor has been her mother's death, and now Maya embarks on a trek in the Himalayas, intending to sprinkle her mother's ashes at the base of Mt. Walking to Mercury takes readers back to the 20th century and powerfully dramatizes the forces that shaped this extraordinary woman.The book opens and closes with the middle-aged Maya struggling with a profound personal and spiritual crisis.

In The Fifth Sacred Thing, readers fell in love with Maya Greenwood, the 98-year-old writer who led Northern California's successful 21st century rebellion against a racist, totalitarian regime of the South.

Walking to mercury starhawk