Anne Hill - Circle Round: Raising Children in Goddess Traditions

Our goal for Circle Round is to support families building their own spiritual tradition, by bringing you celebrations, explanations, activities, and the experiences of other families. Our definition of family for this book is broad: loving people who join together in the hard and important work of raising children. Children and families need love and support. We hope you find both in the pages of this book.

In our practice of Goddess traditions, celebrations and rituals come from our creativity and our needs. The rituals in this book are examples, not liturgy or dogma. Our goal is for you to enjoy inventing your own family traditions. But as realistic members of our busy society, we know that most families have little time for creating new celebrations and we offer ours to share. This book is not meant to add more obligations to families, but to create nourishing energy that everyone can draw upon for renewal.

We have aimed for explanations clear enough to be read aloud to young children or read independently by older children. You may also wish to paraphrase our discussions in your own words, or use them to sharpen your own thinking. You may disagree with our ideas, and may sometimes tell your children, The women who wrote this book say thus and such, but I believe.

Three of us wrote this book. Although in general Starhawk wrote most of the stories, Anne and Diane most of the rituals, Anne most of the music, and Diane most of the crafts and recipes, we each had input into the whole. Just try to stop any one of us from expressing an opinion! We are all involved in raising children, both our own and others. Because our views are so intermingled, we didnt sign each segment, but where a writer refers to a personal experience, her name appears in parentheses, so our readers get a sense of the variety and diversity of our homes.