Read on for a special miniseries on dangerous women and the Witch archetype for paid subscribers, as well as book and event news – and please bear in mind that this email is likely to be cut short by your email provider (especially if it’s the dreaded gmail …). So please click on the title to go through and read the full thing in your browser.
Dear friends
Although I haven’t always entirely succeeded, I’ve been trying my best, over the past few weeks, to focus less on the rage-inducing news, and more on who we might want to be instead of the helpless, rudderless, storm-tossed creatures that most of us feel ourselves to be right now. To step out of the paradigm, float above the chaos for a while, and remind myself that all my work, for the best part of two decades now, has been about finding ways to tell stories about who we are that are life-enhancing rather than despairing. Such a project necessarily begins with interrogating the stories we carry and how we’re shaped by them, and understanding where those stories have come from – but much more importantly, it’s focused on dreaming into the story we’d prefer to live in, and reflecting on who we might need to become, to be capable of living in that richer, deeper story.
Some aspects of our rapidly shifting cultural mythology are outside our individual control. But how we respond to that newly emerging cultural mythology – how the myth that we choose to live by, our own personal myth, flourishes inside it – is very much within our control. Just because the cultural mythology is growing darker, and just because we can’t see how to change that larger picture, doesn’t mean that we as individuals can’t grow lighter. It’s so important that we focus on the fragments of the story that we have the power to affect and to change. And we all have the power to affect and change how we show up in the world, no matter how dark that world might seem to be. There’s a quote that’s always attributed to Rumi – which almost certainly means it had nothing to do with Rumi, because that’s the way this usually works and it’s telling that I can’t find the original source (anyone?) – that says, ‘If everything around you seems dark, look again: you may be the light.’ Well, whoever said it, it sounds like a good start to me.
All of this is very much the subject of Ripening (if you missed that forthcoming book announcement last week, you can find it here) and you can be sure there’ll be lots more to come on the theme of why women need myth and fairy tales now, as publication approaches in the months ahead. Because – as an article I’m just finishing, born out of our recent discussions from Myth Summer School, shows – even the stories of women who seem on the surface to be powerless and passive still have wisdom to offer us. They show us how to go on in challenging times. How to spin straw into gold. How to make use of the tiniest, stalest crumbs that are thrown our way; how to extract every last drop of power and possibility from what seems on the surface to be an irredeemably constricting situation. In our ancestral stories, it’s not just the strong, feisty women who get to thrive, and it’s more important than ever that we remember it.
In that context of remembering who we are, later this month, I’ll be spending a few days at the invitation of the lovely people at Broughton Sanctuary and some of their friends, in a special ‘Visions for the Future’ gathering at which I hope to come across a few kindred spirits. And shortly afterwards, on Samhain Eve, I’ll be heading up to my regular haunt on the wild western shoreline of Argyll for the week’s solitary retreat that I like to take at this beautiful time of the year. From which I hope to emerge saner, less news-haunted, and ready for a quietly cocooning winter – but also full of plans for next spring and the launch of Ripening.
In the meantime, here are a few things that have lightened the load for me over the past few weeks:
A young heron has taken up residence in the larch tree outside my bedroom window. Every morning, I find her feathery gifts on the ground below.
Damsons in the wood. Finally ripe, and another half-dozen jars of jam for the store-cupboard.
Sweaters, sweaters, sweaters. Even if it’s not properly cold yet, it’s October, and I’m wearing sweaters whether the temperatures call for it or not. Oh, and ridiculously colourful Nordic Socks, of course.
Going to sleep in the dark AND waking up in the dark. I can’t tell you how that settles me. Whatever else is going on in the world, that alone makes everything feel safer and more in balance. Yes, I am that weird person who actually feels safer in the dark.
And in that context, all the constellations that are visible in the sky again when I take the dogs outside for their morning pee around 4.30 am. Special shout-out to my great loves, the Pleiades. And if you want to know what’s in your sky and where right now, this brilliant website and app, Stellarium, which I’ve been banging on about for years, will show you.
As always, I’m wishing for you all the richest blessings of whichever season you find yourself immersed in right now, and all its brightest and most beautiful stories. They’re still out there, waiting for us to pay attention.
Sharon
All this is going on in the sky outside my study window, which looks east, as I’m writing. Impossible to feel alone when there’s a swan, a dragon, a lynx and a lion out there to keep you company. Not to mention the ever-mysterious Hydra …
Dangerous women for dangerous times – a miniseries for paid subscribers
As an antidote to dangerous times, we need dangerous women. And European myth and folklore – including the myth and folklore of my native Britain and Ireland – is, happily, full of them. In November and early December, I have a treat in store for paid subscribers to ‘The Art of Enchantment’. Building on, but extending, some of the ideas I offered in Hagitude and Wise Women, and updating a couple of short courses I ran a few years ago, I’ll be sharing with you some ideas and stories focused on the archetype of the Witch. Over the past year or two, frustrated by the apparent relative dearth of stories about benign witches in European folklore, I’ve been on a quest to see what treasures I can dig out. Where are all the good witches hiding? Well, there aren’t very many but there are some, and now it’s time to share those stories with you, as well as to host an online Myth and Fairy Tale Salon on the archetype of the Witch. You can expect the live gathering on November 29, with associated articles/ story notes sent out to you by email on November 22 and December 6.
In the meantime, a reminder that our next Myth & Fairy Tale Salon will take place next Saturday, October 11, at 16.00 UK time.
Image by Arthur Rackham. I like the flying cats best.
Announcing the Wise Women paperback, a 99p Kindle deal – and an updated version of Old Wives’ Tales
I’m delighted to say that the Virago paperback edition of Wise Women was published on Thursday. You can get your copy from all the usual suspects, and if you’re outside of the UK you might want to try Blackwells, whose prices have international shipping included.
Or if you prefer yours as an e-book, Amazon (UK only, I’m afraid) has a special Kindle deal on Wise Women, for the month of October only. Get your copy here for just 99p.
Last October, to celebrate publication of the original hardback edition, I produced a bonus booklet for paid subscribers which contained five additional stories that I’d uncovered since handing the manuscript in, along with a commentary on each. These stories both complement and extend the stories in Wise Women. I’m happy to say that an updated PDF of Old Wives Tales, which contains three new stories as well as the original five, will be sent out to paid subscribers on Saturday October 18. I’m also happy to say that there are a few fine and feisty women from my north-of-England homelands in this selection.
All-day workshop at Alternatives, London on Saturday December 6 – early-bird discount about to expire!
I’m delighted to be heading back to a wintry London with the lovely people at Alternatives to offer a daylong workshop on ‘Calling and the post-Heroic Journey’.
Among the earliest recorded European beliefs is the idea that each of us is born with a ‘calling’: that we came into the world – to this particular place, at this particular time – for a reason. That we all have a hidden but innate vision which expresses who we truly are: a kind of concealed invisible potential. To express this calling is to allow ourselves to uniquely express one mode of being, one unique way of embodying what it is to be human, one facet of the creative life force of the universe. In this workshop, we’ll delve deeply into the concept of calling, and work with ways of revealing and remembering what it is that we’re here for.
I’m so looking forward to this one; full details and tickets – £95 for early birds till 9 October only, and £125 afterwards – at this link.
‘An evening with Sharon Blackie’ at Westwood Books, Sedbergh
It’s autumn, so it must also be time for me to settle down for an evening at my lovely local bookshop just down the road in Sedbergh: Westwood Books. This year, I’ll be there on Friday October 10 at 6.30pm. The event isn’t focused around a particular book, though it’ll for sure draw on themes from Hagitude and Wise Women. And given that we’re approaching Samhain/ Hallowe’en, I rather suspect that a witchy story-theme might just emerge here too …
You can purchase tickets here, and the £5 cost can be offset against the purchase of any of my books. Which I’ll be there, of course, to sign.
Reading recommendations
For the past few days, I’ve been utterly engrossed in the remarkable and awe-inspiring Helm, by one of my very favourite British novelists, Sarah Hall. Unlikely as it might sound, the main character of this novel is a wind. But not just any wind: the decidedly tricksterish Helm – Britain’s only named wind, which happens to arise on Cross Fell in the Cumbrian North Pennines, just a little way to the north of where I live. Here’s a fragment from a Guardian review of it:
Antic, needy, angry, curious, millennia-old Helm, who gives and takes, fascinates and awes, is feared and loved, and loves in return; who absorbs violences, propitiations, yearnings, and who is now beginning to feel “a bit wrong”. There has been so much change, over so many millennia, but this is different. “It’s complicated. Hard to put Helm’s fingers on it.” It isn’t that Helm is old, more that “Whatever is wrong … feels insidious, sneaky, infectious. The surprise disease on the routine tests. Some kind of weird intimate growth you find accidentally and go, Jesus, how long has that been there? A toxic waft when you’re asleep. Lights out.”
In other words, as she always seems in some way to do in every one of her novels, Hall is foreseeing the loss of Helm as a consequence of climate change. It’s sad, then, but it’s also astonishingly beautiful. An elegy to a vanishing world, and to a tricksy old easterly wind that’s haunted this beautiful Eden Valley for ever and a day.
Here’s the publisher’s description:
Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind – a subject of folklore and wonder – who has blasted the sublime landscape of the Eden Valley since the very dawn of time.
This is Helm’s life story, formed from the chronicles of those the wind enchanted: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate it, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish it, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture it – and the farmer’s daughter who fell in love. But now Dr Selima Sutar, surrounded by measuring instruments, alone in her observation hut, fears the end is nigh.
Vital and audacious, Helm is the elemental tale of a unique life force – and of a relationship: between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other.
