Walking to Mercury [Paperback]

Starhawk (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1998

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 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. 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. Everest and finally lay to rest her tumultuous past. 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. 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. Eventually she emerges, stronger and wiser, infused with the wisdom of the earth and the spirit of the goddess. 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The word mercury conjures many images--the messenger god, the planet that rules over communication, the liquid metal that defies attempts to be held--images that form the backbone of Walking to Mercury, a story chronicling the early life of Maya Greenwood. Readers familiar with Starhawk's fiction may remember Maya as the 21st-century rebel leader who was introduced in The Fifth Sacred Thing . In Walking to Mercury, a younger Maya treks through Nepal carrying the ashes of her mother on her back as she searches for a reunion with her sister. Along the way, she finds messages (through the pages of her best friend Johanna's diary, in letters from her former lover Rio, and in notes from her elusive sister) that raise spiritual mountains rivaling the peaks of the Himalayas. She struggles with her past and hopes to find out why the power that once pounded through her like a drumbeat has fallen silent. However, like the metal mercury, the answer to her troubles continually slips through her fingers. While eco-feminism plays a supporting role, the star of Walking to Mercury is everything that Starhawk has to tell us about being human. As Maya discovers, no matter how independent one is, one's life is inextricably entangled with the lives of others--parents, siblings, friends, lovers, and even strangers who nudge us in one direction or another (sometimes imperceptibly) despite our best attempts at isolation. Starhawk permeates every step of Maya's journey with emotion, and pulls no punches, hitting us with everything from grief to ecstasy. There is no padding to separate us from the story, but Walking to Mercury is no stark, utilitarian piece of minimalist fiction. This is life, with all its bitterness and all its magic. --Brian Patterson

From Booklist

When spiritual leader and ecofeminist Starhawk turned to fiction in The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993), readers embraced her vision of a future in which power is redefined and women's realities are celebrated. This prequel focuses on Maya Greenwood, a rebellious centenarian in the previous book. Enlisted in revolutionary politics during the '60s, Maya lived underground for years after and discovered herself as a witch and a ritualist. Starhawk recounts Maya's life in flashbacks and through journal entries and the letters from her two lovers, fiery Rio Connolly and earthy Johanna Weaver, which Maya reads on a trip to Nepal to find her estranged sister. Nepal serves as a framing device for Maya's probings of the past, especially the secret that Rio is the father of Johanna's child--a secret the women have kept from Rio, but which has driven them and him apart. The resolution of this and other estrangements is the core of the book. Despite Starhawk's warning against such an interpretation, her fans will probably read the strong-willed feminist witch Maya as a stand-in for the author. They will, no doubt, also find, once again, Starhawk's vision of the union of personal life, spirituality, and politics to be invigorating and inspiring. Patricia Monaghan --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Bantam (July 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553378392
• ISBN-13: 978-0553378399
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #856,278 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Starhawk is one of the most respected voices in modern Goddess religion and earth-based spirituality. She is the author or coauthor of twelve books, including the classics The Spiral Dance and The Fifth Sacred Thing. Her latest is The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups, forthcoming in November 2011.

Her web site is http://starhawk.org, her blog "Dirt Worship is at http://starhawksblog.org, and her Facebook page is http://facebook.com/pages/Starhawk/165408987031?v=wall.

She is a cofounder of Reclaiming, an influential branch of modern Pagan religion http://reclaiming.org.

Starhawk is a veteran of progressive movements, and deeply committed to bringing the techniques and creative power of spirituality to political activism. She travels internationally teaching magic, the tools of ritual, and the skills of activism. She directs and teaches Earth Activist Trainings, http://earthactivisttraining.org, which combine a permaculture design certificate course with a grounding in spirit and a focus on organizing and activism.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful, wonderful book, May 26, 2002

By 

Elen Hawke "Elenhawke" (Oxford UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Walking to Mercury (Paperback)

The Spiral Dance has to be one of the inspirational books of the last century, and Dreaming the Dark continued with the same evocative quality. Then I read The Fifth Sacred Thing and decided that, interesting though it was, it didn't delineate Starhawk as a gifted novelist. How wrong could I be! Walking to Mercury is one of the most lyrical yet gripping books I've ever read. I found it impossible to put down. Every sentence is carefully crafted, every word a jewel strung together with a luminous spirituality. The way Starhawk contrasts and yet draws parallels between the hippy, drug oriented anti war climate of sixties and seventies America and the soaring purity of eighties Nepal, the Goddess pagan culture and Tibetan Buddhism is nothing short of brilliant. There is not a weak section or mundane sentence in the whole book. I shall now go back and read and enjoy The Fifth Sacred Thing with fresh insight.
Elen Hawke author of In The Circle, The Sacred Round and Praise to the Moon

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A bit disappointing, November 27, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Walking to Mercury (Paperback)

I have been an admirer of Starhawk's work since I read The Spiral Dance in 1987. Although largely ignored by mainstream progressives, her work does a great deal to extend the revolutionary ideals of the '60's and '70's into spirituality, psychology and culture. I have great respect for her as an author and leader.

However, I feel her greatest talent for communicating her message lies in non-fiction rather than fiction. The poetry and lyricism of her ideas and insights come through much more clearly.

To be blunt, although the magic comes through in bits and pieces, the book is also a more or less stereotyped visit to '60's activism. I also felt there was a lack of depth to the character development. Sure, there's a lot of "action," plot, but a real sense of knowing, or perhaps caring, about these people was missing for me.

Also, given that Starhawk is also a '60's activist who has become a leader and visionary of the Goddess revival, it's hard not to see Maya as a thinly veiled version of herself. Evidently Starhawk doesn't want this, but if she didn't want Maya to be taken as a stand-in for her, she would have been better off creating a character with a different history. It was harder to take Maya as a character with a life of her own, when I couldn't help but feel this was all too strongly filtered through Starhawk's own life.

I do tend to agree with the "Gen X" reviewer who was exasperated with the characters' self-centeredness. For one thing, I didn't like the vision of relationships with no fidelity or commitment. Johanna's statement "I'm not a one-woman dog" just seemed cold and selfish to me. Where's the love?

Well, I realize this all sounds negative, especially next to those glowing reviews. My advice is still to read Starhawk's earlier, non-fiction work. You'll have a much more powerful sense of what the novels are trying, often with less success, to say.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better than Fifth Sacred Thing!, April 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Walking to Mercury (Paperback)

I'm sure I'm in the minority when I say this, but I liked this better than The Fifth Sacred Thing. That book was about a future utopia/dystopia, which was entertaining, but this book was about the here and now, which made it so much more relevant. This book is all about personal transformation, evolving spirituality, dealing with disappointment, overcoming hardship, and the realities of families and friends. I loved the juxtoposition of time, and her descriptions of Nepal were so beautiful and vivid that I felt as if I'd actually visited the place by the time I was finished reading. Brava!