So, here the dog days of summer are, in all their full, frantic flow. Which is the main reason why I find it such a tiring season, and I’m well into seasonal affective disorder mode now. It’s lovely of course to see all the life, and the green and the growing and the flourishing, but I’m exhausted by it already, if the truth be told. Everything is in such a hurry. Birds, in a hurry to raise a brood and maybe, for some of them, to squeeze in a second lot before autumn falls. Plants, in a hurry to flower and seed while they still can. Horseflies (or clegs, as we call them here), desperate to painfully puncture as many humans as they can in the thankfully short period of summer in which they thrive! It all feels like an endless fast and painful race to a still-too-distant finish line.
So July is always the hardest month of the year for me, with its heat and its too-long, too-flat light, and I’m finding myself seriously yearning now for the slowing-down days of autumn. I think that’s why I love stripped-back landscapes: bogs and moors; the vast, empty, wild wastes of the high Pennines here in the far north of England where we live. Your senses aren’t assaulted in such landscapes; there’s nothing here that’s shouty and demanding of your full attention. This land is looking for a lighter, more open, less scattered relationship, and I find that both exhilarating and restful at the same time.
In that context, in our Nostos community this month, we’ve been working through ideas and inspirations from the field of spiritual ecology, and delving into the nature of the archetypal landscapes which make us who we are. I shared a short written piece I’d included in my book The Enchanted Life, in response to a prompt which reads: ‘If you were a place, what place would you be, and why?’ Here’s that piece, written sometime around 2016, when I was in my mid-fifties:
If I were a place, I would be an island. I’ve lived on islands; I know how they are. I know how they get under your skin, and I know how it is that some of them can flay that skin right off you, leaving you naked and exposed in ways you never imagined you could possibly bear. I lived on such an island once: a land of sea and stone. A wild, inhospitable beauty that would break your heart – and it broke mine, for sure. That island shaped me, and the memory of it shapes me still. I’ll carry it with me always, for some places will not permit their forgetting. The island I would be carries the possibility of that wild inhospitality. Its weather would of course be affected by the day on which you approached it, but it would depend much more on the kind of vessel you came sailing in. Come in a simple wooden coracle, and it’s yours for the taking. Come in a pirate ship, or a flashy rich-man’s yacht, and it’ll wreck you on its beaches without a second thought. My island’s edges might be fraught with danger, but its interior would be lush and green. You’d have to scale the mountains to get there – mountains forged from age-old gneiss, carved and curved like the secret folds of an animal’s pale-grey brain. These are dark mountains, not easy to cross, but behind them you’d find the treasure you sought: hidden green valleys loud with tumbling water, and the thick oak forest where the old gods still dwell. Follow the river to the heart of the wood: a woman lives there, in a cottage whose walls are studded with shells. A fox sleeps by her hearth, a raven roosts in a dark corner, and a sealskin hangs on the back of her door. This is the island I would be.
– from The Enchanted Life, by Sharon Blackie (2018)
For a variety of reasons I’ve wondered, over the past year or so, whether that is the place I still would be, almost a decade on. In my mid-sixties, do I still incorporate the lush, green heart of a windswept island? It seems to me that much of that lushness has faded with age – but replaced by what? So I decided to set myself the test of revisiting that same prompt. I haven’t finished the exercise yet, but I wanted to share the first few new and very rough lines with you anyway, while they’re fresh. And to encourage you too to ask yourself that question; the answers are always revelatory. (And to invite you to join our Nostos community, and to engage in many such deep and nourishing conversations and creations!)
If I were a place, I’d be an endless, layered landscape of wild, barren hills. Not the soft, lush green chalk-hills of southern downland, but the vast, empty uplands of the North. Birds of prey would haunt my thermal-ridden skies; roe deer and hares would shelter in the folds of my wide, crumpled skirt. Barn owls would sweep low and silent over me, hunting for voles. I’d invite the sun to sear me and call any passing storm to test my mettle by shaking me to the core. Come, lightning; come, hail. Bring the tempest on. My bones, I think, would be made of limestone: soft enough sometimes to break, but with a good few cackly little tricks still hidden deep in their marrow. Sometimes, my body would be bleak and desolate; sometimes my heart would burst from a sinkhole to rise on a skylark’s song …
Share your versions in the comments if you’d like – and in the meantime, as ever, I’m wishing you all the blessings of whichever season your feet are planted in right now,
New event: in conversation with Marina Warner, on fairy tales
I’m thrilled to bits to be in conversation with the fabulous and brilliant Marina Warner (of whom I am very much in awe) at the Redgrave Theatre in Bristol, on Monday 19 October, 6.45pm. Here are the event details:
FAIRY TALES: SURVIVAL & SANCTUARY
A rare conversation between two of the most influential voices in myth, folklore and storytelling.
Marina Warner and Sharon Blackie come together to explore the enduring power of fairy tales and the stories we inherit. Drawing on their latest books, Ripening and Sanctuary, they will discuss folklore, belonging, exile, transformation and the search for home in a rapidly changing world.
Fairy tales have always helped us navigate uncertainty. They offer a way through the darkness, stories of survival and visions of sanctuary. But who is welcomed, who is cast out, and what new stories do we need now?
Join us for an evening of ideas, imagination and conversation as two acclaimed writers explore the stories that continue to shape our lives.
(I know that lots of you will want to ask me if this live, in-person event is being recorded. I’ve asked the organisers if it’s possible, but I don’t know yet.)
Other live events this autumn
September 2, 6.45pm. SEED Talk, Friends Meeting House, Manchester. Details coming soon.
September 6, 12 noon. Brontë Women’s Writing Festival, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth. Details coming soon.
September 28, 7pm. Topping & Co, Edinburgh. Tickets here.
September 29, 7pm. Topping & Co, St Andrews. Tickets here.
October 10, 1.15pm. Ilkley Literature Festival. Details coming soon.
October 13, evening. Cheltenham Literature Festival. Details coming soon.
October 19, 6.45pm. With Marina Warner, at the Redgrave Theatre, Clifton, Bristol (see above).
November 15 – 20. ‘Nostos’ retreat at Broughton Sanctuary, North Yorkshire. Open to all. Information and bookings here.
If you’re not able to join my Nostos retreat at Broughton Sanctuary in November, I’ll also be participating for a day in this new women’s retreat, ‘Sanctuary of She’, hosted there by the very delightful Paris Tempest and taking place from October 14–18. Find out more here.
Ripening news
Having spent the usual three days of tongue-twisting, throat-destroying hard work recording it (one of these days I will learn to write shorter sentences …), how very exciting to see the Ripening audiobook at the top of Audible’s list of the best audiobooks of 2026 (so far!):
From the Audible editor: ‘Having entered my 40s as the suburban equivalent of a naïve princess, confident that my life would continue on relatively seamlessly, it was a shock when multiple alerts on my life’s control panel started blinking simultaneously. Of course, change is inevitable, but I agree with psychologist and author Sharon Blackie that there are certain moments, especially for women, when transformation is particularly painful, slow, and necessary, and this is when the hard lessons found in fairy tales are so helpful and nourishing. Listening to Blackie’s soothing reassurances on the importance of the work I am now doing has been a balm, and one I will recommend to all the women in my life.’
