My name is Astarte, and I have served my communities as a ritualist and priestess for thirty-seven years. For twenty years, I worked with the Stone Dancers coven on the peninsula. There I was privileged to perform women’s rituals for birthing, coming of age, hand fasting, healing, and dying as well as earth-centered ceremonies. For the last seventeen years in Bonny Doon, I I have facilitated crone circles, continued with ceremonies for all the pivotal times in women’s lives, and  co-led, with two others, a Wheel of the Year ritual group.

I have studied with and been deeply influenced by Deena Metzger, Starhawk, Freyja Anderson, and Seena Frost. My undergraduate and graduate degrees are in English literature. I have extensive experience teaching English literature and composition and creative writing and well as English as a second language. I have facilitated meditation and dream circles. I am a poet whose work centers on themes of connection not only with each other and our associated species but with Mother Earth.