If Women Rose Rooted

A Life-Changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

Sharon Blackie

• Publisher: September Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781910463277
• Topic: Développement personnel
• Subtopic: Amélioration personnelle

A life-changing journey from the wasteland of modern society to a place of nourishment and connection. Fifth anniversary edition, with new afterword for 2021.

'Mind-blowing. An anthem for all we could be... I sincerely hope every woman who can read has the time and space to read it.' Manda Scott, author of Boudica and A Treachery of Spies

'This is the core of our task: to respect and revere ourselves, and so bring about a world in which women are respected and revered, recognised once again as holding the life-giving power of the earth itself.'

If Women Rose Rooted has been described as both transformative and essential. Sharon Blackie leads the reader on a quest to find their place in the world, drawing inspiration from the wise and powerful women in native mythology, and guidance from contemporary role models who have re-rooted themselves in land and community and taken responsibility for shaping the future.

Beautifully written, honest and moving, If Women Rose Rooted is a passionate song to a different kind of femininity, a rallying, feminist cry for the rewilding of womanhood;reclaiming our role as guardians of the land.

'Powerful and inspiring.' Melissa Harrison, author of All Among the Barley

1

Reclaiming Our Stories

The ford, Meenderry, Donegal, Ireland

‘Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table.’

D.H. Lawrence¹

It’s not quite dawn in this green, fertile valley; there’s just the faintest glimmer of pink in the sky to the east. The moon is waxing, gibbous, its light silvering the river which winds through the land, soft like the curves of a woman’s body as she stretches out to dip her toes in the sea. A grey heron breaks the silence, shrieking from the banks as I make my way across the narrow bridge, walk slowly up the rising lane. At the crossroads, three hares are sitting quite still in the middle of the road; they scatter when they become aware of me, tails flashing white in the moonlight then vanishing into the dark.

Up I go along the stony, uneven track to the high bog, face to the Seven Sister mountains, silhouetted now against a gradually lightening sky. I wind back along a tiny path to cut home across the fields, but first I have to navigate the ford: a shallow pool in a sheltered hollow through which a deep and fast-flowing stream can be crossed. The ford froths blood-red at the edges with iron precipitates, and I creep down to it carefully, half expecting to catch a glimpse of the bean nighe, the Washer at the Ford – the old woman of legend who scrubs clean the bloody clothes of slain warriors. After all, this morning is Samhain,² the old seasonal Gaelic festival which marks the beginning of winter. And on this night, my ancestors believed, the passage between this world and the Otherworld is open.

Behind the ford is a single, clearly defined hill, a green breast rising from the soft contours of the land. It is crowned with heather, wiry and dormant now, spreading across its crest like a wide brown nipple. We call it a fairy hill, for these are the places which lead to the Otherworld – the beautiful, perilous dwelling-place of the fairy folk: the Aos Sí,³ the people of the mounds. Once upon a time, inside a hill like this, Celtic women were transformed into the wisest creatures in the land.

In the Otherworld, wisdom is largely possessed by women, since they are the ones who hold the Cup. The Queen of the Aos Sí decided one day to bestow that gift on human women too, and so she sent out an invitation to all the women of the land, asking them to come to her great hall beneath the hill on a certain date, and at a certain time. The news was carried on the winds and the waves, by the birds and the fish; even the leaves of the trees whispered of it. Soon, women from all over the country began to set out on their journey. Some travelled alone, some came together; and when the appointed day dawned, the doors to the Otherworld opened.

The women streamed inside the hill – and gasped to find themselves in a beautiful hall which was draped with bright cloths woven from nettles and dyed with the blood of shellfish and the sap of plants. Soft animal skins covered the floors and seats, and a feast was laid out on tables of wood and stone, set on plates of pearly shell. A soft green light pervaded the vast hall. When everyone was inside and the watchers saw no more coracles on the water, no more women climbing up the slope of the hill, the doors to the outside world were closed.

Into the hall then came the Queen, bearing herself with kindly dignity, her face shining with a strange but lovely light. She carried a large golden Cup in her hand, bright with unusual marks and carvings; eight fairy women followed behind, each carrying a golden flagon of sparkling liquid which they used to continually fill the Cup. The Queen passed through the hall, offering a drink from the Cup to each of the women who was present. The Cup held the distilled wisdom of the world through all the ages past, and as each woman drank she suddenly grew wise, and understood many things she had never known before. Some were able to see much, some were able to see little – but every one of them benefitted. And then the women feasted, and the next morning they went back out into the world again, filled with the wisdom and knowledge of the Otherworld.⁴

Here in Ireland, the Otherworld is as real as any other. This is a landscape steeped in stories, and those stories stalk us still. They have seeped into the bones of this land, and the land offers them back to us; it breathes them into the wind and bleeds them out into streams and rivers. They will not be refused.

Before there was the Word, there was the land, and it was made and watched over by women. Stories from almost every culture around the world tell us that once upon a time it was so. For many native tribes throughout America, Grandmother Spider continually spins the world into being. For the Andean peoples of South America, Pachamama is the World Mother; she sustains all life on Earth. In Scotland and Ireland, the Cailleach – the Old Woman – made, shaped and protects the land and the wild things on it. In these and other Celtic nations, Danu⁵ gave birth to all the other gods and was mother to the people who followed. Women: the creators of life, the bearers of the Cup of knowledge and wisdom, personifying the moral and spiritual authority of this fertile green and blue Earth.

Do you remember those days?

Me neither. Other indigenous cultures around the world may still respect and revere the feminine, but we Western women lost control of our stories a long time ago. The story which I was given to carry as a very young child, the story which both defined me and instructed me about the place I occupied in this world, accorded no such significance to women. In this story, woman was an afterthought, created from a man’s body for the sole purpose of pleasing him. In this story, the first woman was the cause of all humanity’s sufferings: she brought death to the world, not life. She had the audacity to talk to a serpent. Wanting the knowledge and wisdom which had been denied her by a jealous father-god, she dared to eat the fruit of a tree. Even worse, she shared the fruit of knowledge and wisdom with her man. So that angry and implacable god cast her and her male companion out of paradise, and decreed that women should be subordinate to men for ever afterwards.

The stories we tell about the creation of the Earth and the origins of humankind show us how our culture views the world, our place in it, and our relationships with the other living things which inhabit it. And the key consequence of this particular creation myth is a belief, prevalent now for centuries in the West, that women are naturally disobedient temptresses who must be kept firmly in their place. We are weak-willed, easily persuaded to think or do evil, faithless, untrustworthy, mendacious, and motivated purely by self-interest. The story of Eve in the Book of Genesis is the underpinning for countless measures which have limited the actions, rights and status of women. No matter what women might achieve in the world, the fundamental message of the sacred texts of the world’s largest religious grouping, which for 2,000 years have supplied the foundational beliefs of our Western culture, is that men should not trust women, and that women should trust neither themselves nor each other.

When I was a child, this cultural story about who we are as women made me feel small, insignificant, empty. As I grew older, it made me angry. Angry, because it justifies a world in which men still have almost all the real power over the cultural narrative – the stories we tell ourselves about the world, about who and what we are, where we came from and where we’re going – as well as the way we behave as a result of it. Angry, because it justifies the centuries-old violence against women which threatens even in this ‘enlightened’ twenty-first century to spiral out of control. That violence was endemic in my own family. My mother, as a tiny child, picked up a poker from the fireplace and held it up to her father to stop him beating my grandmother. A couple of decades later, at just about three years old, I took hold of my own father by the kneecaps and pushed him, step by astonished step, out of the room to stop him hitting my mother.

Yes, I come from a line of strong and brave women – but I grew up feeling that the world was not a safe place for us. And even though most of the men I’ve known during my life – the men I’ve loved, the men who have been my friends – find this situation just as abhorrent as I do, the story is replayed over and over again at a cultural level. In the United Kingdom, where I grew up, one woman in four experiences domestic violence at some point in her life, and one woman in four experiences sexual assault as an adult. Worldwide, the figures are higher: around one in three.⁶ Political scientist Mary Kaldor has reported that in the ‘new wars’ waged over resources, ethnicity and faith, 80 per cent of casualties are women and children. Rape and pillage, says Kaldor, are the modus operandi.⁷ Today, sexual abuse, abductions, forced slavery and forced prostitution are commonplace, even – especially – in the heart of the fine capital cities of Europe and America of which our culture is so proud. And that’s not to mention the daily harassment in public places, the deeply ingrained everyday sexism that so many of us are conditioned just to take for granted.⁸ This is a world in which the cultural narrative informs us that women don’t matter as much as men, and so it is okay for men to do these things to them.

So many of us today accept this state of affairs as just the way the world is. We’re conditioned to accept it. We get on with our lives and treat it as old news. It’s okay, we tell ourselves: during the last century, feminism was born and so equality is happening and everything is getting better now. And among liberal thinkers in the UK, feminist writer and activist Beatrix Campbell suggests,⁹ the optimistic belief that men and women are on a cultural journey toward equality still prevails. But Campbell argues that not only has this progress stopped, in some cases it has actually been reversed. Even though awareness of the issues which women face is high, even though lip-service is paid to women’s rights, new inequalities are emerging in our culture all the time. We are living, she writes, in an era of ‘neopatriarchy’ in which violence has proliferated, body anxiety and self-hatred have flourished, rape is committed with impunity, sex trafficking thrives and the struggle for equal pay is effectively at an end. It’s hard to disagree with Campbell that a new revolution is needed; the only question is what form it should take.

As I grew older still, I grew angry about other things, too: things that might seem on the surface to have nothing to do with the story of Eve, or the disempowerment of women – but which in fact are profoundly related. The same kinds of acts that are perpetrated against us, against our daughters and our mothers, are perpetrated against the planet: the Earth which gives us life; the Earth with which women have for so long been identified. Our patriarchal, warmongering, growth-and-domination-based culture has caused runaway climate change, the mass extinction of species, and the ongoing destruction of wild and natural landscapes in the unstoppable pursuit of progress.

At six years old, knowing nothing but somehow understanding everything, I sobbed as hazy black-and-white TV news footage showed a bird futilely flapping its wings, slowly drowning in a thick soupy layer of black crude oil which coated the surface of the sea. Another bird landed next to it, sank below the surface, re-emerged for a final few flaps, then drifted into the growing mass of dead bodies lining up along the south-west coast of England. I was watching one of the first major acute man-made environmental disasters, caused by the wreckage of the oil supertanker SS Torrey Canyon – 32 million gallons of crude oil dumped into the ocean, and around 15,000 sea birds killed. The sea burst into huge sheets of flames as napalm was dropped in an effort to burn off the oil. I thought the world was ending. ‘It was just an unfortunate accident,’ people said at the time – but how often have we done it since?

Then there was MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. You couldn’t make it up. You didn’t have to; I grew up in the shadow of it, at the height of the Cold War. Russia and America, each side armed heavily in preparation for an all-out nuclear world war. Each with a nuclear ‘deterrent’ that was supposed to preclude an attack by the other, because such an attack would lead to immediate retaliation and the annihilation of the attacker’s country as well as the attacked. The United Nations website says it all: ‘Nuclear weapons are the most dangerous weapons on earth. One can destroy a whole city, potentially killing millions, and jeopardizing the natural environment and lives of future generations through its long-term catastrophic effects.’¹⁰

We all firmly believed it was going to happen, one day; the government even published leaflets to advise us what to do when it did. ‘Protect and Survive’ appeared in the UK in 1980 after a resurgence of the Cold War and, with nice little line-drawings, helpfully showed how to build your own fallout room, advising that you stock it with tinned food and a radio. It even showed how an improvised toilet could be built from a chair. You might want to do this now, was the implicit message, because when the bomb hits, it’ll be too late. ‘Protect and Survive’ stimulated Raymond Briggs to write When the Wind Blows, a poignant and oddly shocking graphic novel which shows a nuclear attack on Britain by the Soviet Union from the viewpoint of a retired couple. ‘Further instructions’ do not come by radio, as ‘Protect and Survive’ blithely promised that they would; the book ends on a bleak note, as Jim and Hilda Bloggs cover themselves in paper bags, praying in their fallout shelter as death approaches and the room slowly darkens around them.

I was twenty-one when When the Wind Blows was published; I’m fifty-four now and in spite of all the fine work to achieve nuclear disarmament in the past couple of decades, nothing fundamental has changed. ‘Although nuclear weapons have only been used twice in warfare – in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 – about 22,000 reportedly remain in our world today,’ declares the United Nations, in the enormous section of its website devoted to Weapons of Mass Destruction: not merely nuclear weapons, but chemical and biological too. So many ways not only to kill each other, but to destroy non-human life on this planet in the process. I grew up with the knowledge that there were men ready to do just that. Dr. Strangelove might have been funny, but it was no joke. Still, we were just women, and we were supposed to trust their judgement. ‘The men know best,’ said a school friend’s mother after I told her I was joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament because if we didn’t do something abo...