Sharon Blackie Quotes

We are not separate from this Earth; we are a part of it, whether we fully feel it in our bodies yet or not.

The world which men have made isn’t working. Something needs to change. To change the world, we women need first to change ourselves – and then we need to change the stories we tell about who we are. The stories we’ve been living by for the past few centuries – the stories of male superiority, of progress and growth and domination – don’t serve women and they certainly don’t serve the planet. Stories matter, you see.

It’s a contract you see, people and the land. You care for it, and it cares for you.

We can possess all the fine goods that our civilisation has to offer us; we can have important jobs, and social status, and tone our bodies on all the latest machines – but without a sense of belonging to the world, we feel empty and our lives lack meaning.

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.

In all the old stories, the geilt is hypersensitive to the sights and sounds of the civilised world, finding them unendurable. She finds other people unendurable too; only alone in the wild, in nature, can safety and freedom be found.

Whilst the Earth Mother finds immense comfort, safety and satisfaction in marriage, domesticity, growing food and children, and enjoys order around her, the Creative Rainbow Mother regularly feels the need to fly free. And if she can’t . . . well, the flip side of her is the Crazy Woman: depressed, unable to touch her power, tied, numb, self-medicating, addicted. Crazy Woman breaks out if we try to spend all our time out in the world, or serving others.’ The

I see someone desperately hanging on to the cliff-edge of control with bleeding, shredded fingernails and gritted teeth, wanting all the while to just let go and scream her tired heart out as she fell.

Long before God the Father, there she was – God the Mother. Where did she vanish to, this great mother goddess? How did we women become so completely dispossessed? It wasn’t that I wanted to replace a male god with a female god; it wasn’t that I wanted to find a religion at all. I was simply looking for some sense that women might have worth. And I found it: there in the old stories of my own native land, I found it. Filled with images of women creating, women weaving the world into being, I took up knitting. Thread by thread, stitch by stitch, I began to knit myself back into being. I had never thought of myself as being a particularly creative soul, but I discovered that creativity was a wide-ranging affair. I simply thought about what brought me joy, and I began to cultivate it. I dug my hands into this strange foreign soil, and I began to grow things. I began to reacquaint myself with the soft animal object that was my body. Slowly, spending more and more time outside, focusing on the wisdom of my senses rather than on what was going on inside my head, I began to weave myself back into the fabric of the Earth. Some

Sometimes, if you have grown up in certain ways, a fear of being seen to fail can outweigh the personal cost of continuing to live in impossible circumstances.

I began to understand why I had always found it so hard to make female friends; why I never trusted anyone else to take care of me – or of anything else, for that matter; why I always felt responsible for caring for everyone and everything. I began to understand why I couldn’t tolerate chaos, why I couldn’t even acknowledge, let alone cherish, the madwoman who lived

It’s no accident that this systematic suppression of the feminine has been accompanied down the centuries not only by the devaluation of all that is wild and instinctual in our own natures, but by the purposeful destruction of natural ecosystems. We long ago turned our backs on the planet which gives us life.

I felt no love for this world, no sense of belonging. I felt separate from it, closed in, claustrophobic. Some days, walking through identical grey suburban streets to school, I felt as if I were being buried alive.

Because enchantment, by my definition, has nothing to do with fantasy, or escapism, or magical thinking: it is founded on a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many-layered world; a profound and whole-hearted participation in the adventure of life. The enchanted life presented here is one which is intuitive, embraces wonder and fully engages the creative imagination – but it is also deeply embodied, ecological, grounded in place and community. It flourishes on work that has heart and meaning; it respects the instinctive knowledge and playfulness of children. It understands the myths we live by; thrives on poetry, song and dance. It loves the folkloric, the handcrafted, the practice of traditional skills. It respects wild things, recognises the wisdom of the crow, seeks out the medicine of plants. It rummages and roots on the wild edges, but comes home to an enchanted home and garden. It is engaged with the small, the local, the ethical; enchanted living is slow living.

She dreams of a night sky from which the stars have not fled in horror, and of wild-pawed, stinking foxes yapping in a moonlit wood. She can see it; she can almost taste it.

Who will listen any more to their long, slow songs; who understands the language of stones? Not these people, for sure. They don't even know that the stones are alive.

Go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.

When the Wind Blows,

If women remember that once upon a time we sand with the tongues of seals and flew with the wings of swans, that we forged our own paths through the dark forest while creating a community of its many inhabitants, then we will rise up rooted like trees. And if we rise up rooted, like trees...well, then women might indeed save not only ourselves, but the world.

There are times when you need the extremity of rock, the hardness of an old, cold place against which you can measure yourself. There are times when you need to retreat to the wilderness. But there are times when you need the subtle flow of a river, the song of a waterfall and the deep, slow presence of trees. Times when you need to Return. There are times for holding on, and times for letting go.

Whenever I was in the woods, on my own, I would have one ear pricked for the sound of approaching footsteps. I would always make sure that I knew what time sundown was, how to find the path back. I started to carry a pepper spray. I was full of impotent rage. When I saw men jogging through the trees I envied them their freedom, and this is in the full knowledge that men, too, can be attacked in quiet places. But the men I saw seemed to think they were invulnerable, just as I had on that summer day; the women, on the other hand, were more like me, all too aware of how “the great outdoors” can be a dangerous place for a lone female, even in broad daylight.

In 1962, the French philosopher René Guénon suggested that we live in ‘degenerate times’, at the end of a long age during which important spiritual truths have been forgotten, the ancient centres of wisdom have been destroyed and the guardians of that wisdom have been dispersed. At such times, he said, a safe repository for spiritual truth can be found in folklore. He suggested that knowledge which is in danger of being lost passes into the symbolic code of a folk tale, and then is passed on to the people. They will perhaps only be concerned with the stories’ surface meanings – but they will at least preserve them, and pass them down to their children. Then, in better times, people might once again appear who understand the code, and who will penetrate the symbolic disguise to the wider meaning behind.59

Yes, elderhood begins with the often-shattering physical conflagration that is menopause, and it ends in certain death. But we each have choices about how to approach these final decades of our life. We can see them as a drawn-out process of inevitable and terminal decline, or we can see them as a time of fruition and completion.

Because it’s time for us to rise up and take back our role as caretakers and stewards not just of the land but of the children, too. I think a lot of women are doing this now, with more homeschooling, with community projects, with educational projects that operate a little bit outside the norms of our patriarchal education system.

Creation, and so creativity, is the act of giving life, the nourishing and enhancement of life, in whatever way you choose to do it. And when we find our individual creative power, we can harness it and use it to fight for what we care about, to remake the world in our own image. But what might such a creative woman look like, and how might she do such a thing?

It’s not that I don’t appreciate summer: I do. I love it deeply, from the first rich flush of hawthorn blossoms to the last fading mauves of August heather. I love the green and the growing, the treasures of the hedgerows, and the always astonishing abundance of the land which surrounds me. It’s just that I love autumn and winter more. Something opens up in me then – something soft and deep and glowing – which is far too shy to expose itself to the inexhaustible light of summer.

But I always related to the Old Woman. The one who haunted the edgelands, the mysterious shadow in the heart of the darkwood. The exile, the rebel, the one who shrugged off the fetters of conventional society; the one who imagined and cultivated her own vision of how the world should be, thank you very much. At the earliest of ages, I already knew that was the old woman I wanted to grow into. The spirited, unpredictable, not-to-be-messed-with elder. An elder who’s always ready to tell you the often-unwelcome truths about the condition of your life — leavened, of course, with compassion, and a glint of fierce humor in her eyes.

It is a Call to Life – a full, authentic life. It is a Call to rise from the half-sleep of our existence, and take up our part in the great unfolding of the world. To become a Voice of the Wells. We must answer the Call, or forever be lost in the Wasteland. For many women, that Call occurs at midlife. Dante expressed it perfectly, in the opening lines of The Divine Comedy: ‘Midway upon the journey of my life I found myself in a dark wood, where the right way was lost.’ Most women experience major change in these middle years: physical change or professional; social or psychological; changes in our family and our relationships. Our children leave home. We are overtaken by disillusionment and dissatisfaction. We find ourselves unhappy in our jobs, in our marriages. We develop physical illnesses, anxiety or depression. Rage and grief threaten to overwhelm us. We begin to contemplate our own mortality. We question who we are, who we might have been, who we might yet become. We question our spiritual values and our material values. We begin to wonder what we are doing with our lives, what meaning we might find. We open our eyes a little wider, and take in the world beyond ourselves. For the first time, we see the Wasteland for what it is.

I don’t know what it was about menopause, specifically, that caused me all of a sudden to become a gatherer of “found objects.” But now, wherever I went in this bleakly untamed and often inhospitable landscape in the wild western extremes of Ireland, I seemed to hear things calling out to me. I was rooting for something — I didn’t know what. For fragments of myself, perhaps; my life, my loves. For fragments which reflected something of myself back at me — whatever I might be becoming now, at this turbulent, shapeshifting time of my life. And all the fragments I seemed to need came from this new place, from the ancient, uncompromising earth around me: that land which I walked compulsively, day after day after day. I would come home from the woods reverently carrying strangely shaped sticks, from the lough with pebbles and water-bird feathers, from the beach with seashells and mermaid’s purses — as if I were reassembling myself from elements of the land itself. After the deep dissolutions of menopause, I was refashioning myself from those calcinated ashes; I was growing new bones. It’s something we all have to do at this time in our lives; somehow, with whatever tools are available to us, we have to begin to curate the vision of the elder we will become. It’s an act of bricolage. And so now I had become like the bright-eyed, cackling magpies which regularly ransacked our garden: a collector — though not of trinkets, but of clues. I was gathering them together in the safety of my new nest. The clues were there in the pieces; those clues are threaded through this book. Scattered in shadowy corners and brightly lit windows, these objects I’ve selected are so much more than random gatherings of whatever it was that I happened to come across in my wanderings. They’re so much more than mere clutter. They are active choices, carefully selected objects that mirror my sense of myself as a shapeshifting, storied creature. Because the clues to our re-memberings are in the stories, and the stories are always born from the land.

In Classical mythology, righteous wrath was the province of old women. Three very specific old women, in fact: the Furies (or the Erinyes, in Greek). Fragments of myth featuring the Furies are found in the earliest records of ancient Greek culture. These sisters were much more ancient than any of the Olympian deities, indicating the persistence of an older, female-dominated tradition which endured here and there even when later, more patriarchal, mythologies set in. The role of the Furies was to preside over complaints brought to them by humans about behavior that was thought to be intolerable: from lesser misdemeanors such as the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests — to crimes that were very much worse. It was their role to punish such crimes by relentlessly hounding their perpetrators. The Greek poet Hesiod names the three sisters as Alecto — “unceasing in anger,” the punisher of moral crimes; Megaera — “jealous one,” the punisher of infidelity, oath-breaking, and theft; and Tisiphone — “avenger of murder.” They were, he said, the daughters of Gaea (the goddess who personified the Earth), who conceived them from the blood of her spouse, Uranus, after he had been castrated by his son, Cronos. They lived in the Underworld, and like other chthonic deities, like seeds that lie buried beneath the Earth, they were also identified with its fertility. The wrath of the Furies manifested itself in a number of ways: a tormenting madness would be inflicted on the perpetrator of a patricide or matricide; murderers usually suffered a dire disease, and nations which harbored such criminals could be stricken with famine and plague. The Furies could only be placated with ritual purification, and the completion of a task specifically assigned by them for atonement. It’s important to understand that although the Furies were feared, they were also respected and perceived to be necessary: they represented justice, and were seen to be defenders of moral and legal order. The Furies were portrayed as the foul-smelling, decidedly haggish possessors of bat-like wings, with black snakes adorning their hair, arms, and waists, and blood dripping from their eyes. And they carried brass-studded scourges in their hands. In my menopausal years, I certainly had days when I could have gone with that look. I’m happy to admit that the existence of seriously not-to-be-messed-with elder women like the Furies in our oldest European mythology gives me great pleasure. And it’s difficult not to see them as the perfect menopausal role models, because sudden upwellings of (mostly righteous) anger are a feature of many women’s experience of menopause

Whether or not they contain the encapsulated wisdom of ages past, what is certain is that myths, fairy tales and folklore offer us a world imbued with participation mystique – a world in which humans are fully enmeshed. In this world, animals always have something to teach us, trees and plants can save or cure us, wise old men and women are waiting in the dark woods to help us, and a well may be a doorway to another world. Myths and folklore can put us back in touch with the seasons and turnings of the year, and they can restore our acceptance of the necessary cycles of life. They can also remind us that we have a responsibility to future generations, and to the planet as a whole. If we approach myth and story in non-human-centric ways, it places us more firmly into the wider life of the world: our personal story is enmeshed with a greater story of which we’re a part.

Menopause is not a medical condition, it is an earthquake, shaking us to our deepest foundations, wiping out the edifices we've so carefully constructed on what we once imagined to be the solid ground of our life.

The Eagle and the Raven,

I have no intention of being invisible. But I’m quite prepared to be inconvenient.

But here in the contemporary West, we don’t really do elders: instead, we have “the elderly.” The connotations are quite different. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary online, “elderly” is nothing more than “a polite word for ‘old.’” The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary informs us that “elderly” can also mean “old-fashioned.” In Lexico, the Oxford online thesaurus, the word is associated with synonyms such as “doddering,” “decrepit,” “in one’s dotage,” “past one’s prime,” “past it,” and “over the hill.” It doesn’t paint a pretty picture; these are not exactly the adjectives that most aging women would aspire to embody. But the aging woman has had a particularly troubled history in Western culture. The last convictions might have taken place in the eighteenth century, but in many ways we still haven’t quite recovered from our demonization in the witch trials. Older women, when they’re not rendered completely invisible, are still trivialized and marginalized, and often actively ridiculed. “Little old ladies,” we call them here in Britain; “old bats” (if we think they’re crazy), or “old bags” and “old trouts” (if they don’t live up to our expectations that old women should rarely be seen, and certainly should never be heard).

It’s interesting, nevertheless, that there are very few European folk and fairy tales with older women as their main protagonists. I have found no stories that clearly teach us how to transition into a rich and meaningful elderhood, or which hold up a mirror of clarity to the nature of our life journey at this time. But still, there exist many different kinds of archetypal old women who play pivotal roles in the stories: characters who pull the strings, weave the webs, test or advise the heroes and heroines. These elders are usually presented as wise — though they manifest their wisdom in very different ways. What, then, is the nature of an elder woman’s wisdom, and how might myths and fairy tales offer us insight into the ways that each of us could uniquely embody it?

In the lands where my feet are firmly planted. Although a lot of attention has been paid to the question of whether ancient European cultures honored a “Great Mother” goddess, in these islands we were actually honoring a Great Grandmother. Her name in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland is the Cailleach: literally, the Old Woman. There are traces of other divine old women scattered throughout the rest of the British Isles and Europe; they’re probably the oldest deities of all. How thoroughly we’ve been taught to forget. Today, we don’t see these narratives as remnants of ancient belief systems — rather, they’re presented to us as folktales intended merely to entertain, as oddities of primitive history, the vaguely amusing relics of more superstitious times or bedtime stories for children.

unshackled by the ferocious cleavings of menopause, I was able to smash through a lifetime habit of insisting on piecing together what was terminally broken. I allowed the process of Nigredo to occur. I faced my dead parts, and let them burn away. The truth is, by the time we reach menopause, we’ve all lived with too much loss; we’ve all been broken open. We’ve accumulated too much pain. Menopause is the time to transform it. To stop trying to stitch ourselves back together again into the same old pattern. To put away that darning needle, blunted by our persistent and insistent repair work. To step into the crucible, and let it do its work. We can’t mend everything. We can’t. And, sometimes, we simply shouldn’t.

What would it mean, instead of being an elderly woman, to be an elder woman? Because to be an elder implies something rather different — it implies authority: “a leader” or “senior figure” in a tribe or other group, says Lexico. According to Merriam-Webster, a person “having authority by virtue of age and experience.” The Cambridge Dictionary tells us it’s “an older person, especially one with a respected position in society.” So how do women transition from becoming elderly to becoming elder?

Because in contemporary Western society, to be old is rarely to be thought of as gifted and wise. We see old age as a time of loss, of decay; we focus on holding aging and death at bay. We find the process embarrassing, verging on distasteful. It’s not something we really want to hear about, and yet the media is full of it, and all of it negative. We’re constantly flooded with stories about the “burden” that old people place on health services, and with news about Alzheimer’s disease, designed to strike horror into all aging hearts. There are endless exposés of appalling conditions in care homes; stories about older women being preyed upon, scammed, and even raped; stories about the impossibility of finding or even holding down a job once you’re over fifty and are effectively written off by a culture which prides itself on productivity rather than quality. Where are the stories of empowered and fulfilled elders? Where are the stories of the ways in which they can bring meaning and hope into the lives of the young? Where are the still-thriving lives?

This lack of cultural recognition and support for the process of becoming elder is why so many people with aging bodies insist on trying to live as though they were still approaching midlife. It’s why so few of us investigate the rich possibilities of growing older, or undertake the necessary inner work that prepares us for a passage into a more conscious and meaningful elderhood. And even if we can bring ourselves to talk about the biological and psychological dimensions of aging, more often than not we back away from discussing the existential — or spiritual — dimensions. We avoid the only question that it makes sense for us to ask now: What is all of this life for? Why are we still here; what do we still have to offer? But we don’t much talk about spirituality in this post-Enlightenment culture which respects and rewards only rationality. We live in a society whose power systems value only the material, and which dismiss, become vaguely embarrassed about, or actively ridicule the spiritual. Elderhood is a passage that ends in death by design, and we don’t much talk about death, either. So many taboos to overcome; so many strong feelings which arise.

Anger, then, once examined, contains the potential for profound discovery, for a deepened knowledge of the self; working with it and through it can provide the inspiration for change. Recognized, it can be transformed, and once it’s been transformed, it can be harnessed. It’s a creative force. It shows us that we’re still alive, still breathing, still caring, still invested in the world. Rebecca Traister, author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, writes: “In the fury of women comes the power to change the world,

The period of disarray I lived through in the run-up to those choices is typical of the chaos that so often confronts women during menopause. At this time of our life, one way or another, and whether we choose eventually to go with its flow or insist on resisting its tide, chaos is going to come knocking at our door. As someone with an unreasonable need for control over my own life, I’ve always feared chaos; but chaos, it seems, was precisely what I needed in order to break free. Insight into the strong medicine that chaos brings comes from the word’s origins: it is derived from the Greek khaos, referring to the void which was said to exist before the cosmos was created. Chaos, then, contains the seeds of new life, the seething potential out of which an entirely new universe might be born. As Nietzsche said, “One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”14 Chaos is the beauty of uncertainty; it unbinds us so that it can create us anew. In his book Timaeus, Plato declared in this context that chaos also incorporates the concept of chora: it is “a receptacle of all becoming — its wetnurse, as it were.” For me, this time was nothing if not a time of becoming. An old story had been consumed, and the ingredients for a new story were just beginning to assemble in the mixing bowl.

I’ve found it possible to understand, and to empathize with, people who are radically different from me. Several

ever since the groundbreaking work of Carl Jung in the first half of the twentieth century, most depth psychologists have argued that the journey into elderhood is a spiritual passage above all, and that the purpose of the second half of our lives is to grow into the person that we were always meant to become. Jung believed that aging fulfilled a necessary function, saying: “A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own …”3

As a culture, our failure to understand or embrace aging is also related to the fact that we are increasingly and profoundly cut off from nature, and thus from the natural cycles and rhythms of our human life. And yet the old women in our old stories, without exception, are forces of nature, and of the ancestral Otherworld which is so beautifully entangled with this world. There are no twice-removed, transcendental star-goddesses here; no twinkly fairy queens, reluctant to sully themselves with the dirt and mess of physical incarnation. Our old women are the dark heart of the forest, the stone womb of the mountain, immanent in the living land itself. They’re elemental beings: storm hags, fire keepers, grandmothers of the sea. They show us how to live when everything we thought mattered to us has been stripped away; they teach us how to stay rooted in the face of inevitable death. They teach us how to stand firm in the face of all the culture’s bullshit, and laugh.

In her passionate and meticulously argued book The Change, Australian feminist writer Germaine Greer suggests that society’s aversion to menopausal women is, more than anything, “the result of our intolerance for the expression of female anger.”5 But why do we find women’s rage so unacceptable, so threatening? It is for sure an attitude which is deeply embedded in the culture. Several studies conducted over the past few decades have reported that men who express anger are perceived to be strong, decisive, and powerful, while women who express the same emotion are perceived to be difficult, overemotional, irrational, shrill, and unfeminine. Anger, it seems, doesn’t fit at all with our cultural image of femininity, and so must be thoroughly suppressed whenever it is presumptuous enough to surface. One of the saddest findings of these studies is that this narrative is so deeply ingrained that it even exists among women — and we internalize it from an early age. Soraya Chemaly, American author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, writes: Studies show that by the time most children are toddlers they already associate angry expressions with male faces … Girls and women, on the other hand, are subtly encouraged to put anger and other “negative” emotions aside, as unfeminine. Studies show that girls are frequently discouraged from even recognising their own anger, from talking about negative feelings, or being demanding in ways that focus on their own needs. Girls are encouraged to smile more, use their “nice” voices and sublimate how they themselves may feel in deference to the comfort of others. Suppressed, repressed, diverted and ignored anger is now understood as a factor in many “women’s illnesses,” including various forms of disordered eating, autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue and pain.6 We hide our anger by refusing even to use the word — instead of saying we’re utterly furious, we talk about being “annoyed,” “upset,” or “irritated.” We take refuge in sarcasm, we nurse grudges, or we simply withdraw. And as a consequence of these actions and attitudes, anger is an emotion that, more often than not, makes women feel powerless — not just because we’ve been made to feel as if we’re not allowed to express it, but, accordingly, because we’ve never learned healthy ways to express it.

today. In the lands where my feet are firmly planted. Although a lot of attention has been paid to the question of whether ancient European cultures honored a “Great Mother” goddess, in these islands we were actually honoring a Great Grandmother. Her name in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland is the Cailleach: literally, the Old Woman. There are traces of other divine old women scattered throughout the rest of the British Isles and Europe; they’re probably the oldest deities of all. How thoroughly we’ve been taught to forget. Today, we don’t see these narratives as remnants of ancient belief systems — rather, they’re presented to us as folktales intended merely to entertain, as oddities of primitive history, the vaguely amusing relics of more superstitious times or bedtime stories for children.

Take this story from the southwest of Ireland. One day, a parish priest visited the Cailleach’s house to ask how old she was. He thought, as such men do, that he was a fine fellow, and very clever; he’d heard that she claimed to be as old as time, and he wanted to catch her out. Well, the old woman replied that she couldn’t quite remember her exact age, but every year on her birthday, she told him, she would kill a bullock, and after she’d eaten it, she would throw one of its thigh bones into her attic. So if he wanted to, he could go up to the attic and count the bones. “For every bone you find up there in that attic,” she said to him, “you can add a year of my life.” Well, he counted the bones for a day and a night and still he couldn’t make a dent in them. His hands, they say, were shaking as he pulled at the door handle and left.

There are, of course, fundamental differences between anger and aggression; the one doesn’t lead inexorably to the other. Rage, properly explored, can be a great teacher. Properly expressed, it can be a great healer — because all rage hides a wound; all rage emerges from pain.

From the outside, looking at a woman objectively, there’s no obvious single transition point which marks the beginning of this odyssey. Menarche, the first occurrence of menstruation and a gateway to adulthood, is easily identifiable; pregnancy, a gateway to motherhood, is even more visible. But the features of menopause — that final, great biological upheaval in a woman’s life — aren’t nearly so obvious from the outside and are often deliberately concealed. To add to the complexity, the passage lasts for a much longer period of time. Usually, it starts during our “midlife” years. Perimenopause, sometimes called “menopause transition,” kicks off several years before menopause itself, and is defined as the time during which our ovaries gradually begin to make less estrogen. This usually happens in our forties, but in some instances it can begin in our thirties or, in rare cases, even earlier. During perimenopause, the ovaries are effectively winding down, and irregularities are common. Some months women continue to ovulate — sometimes even twice in the same cycle — while in other months no egg is released. Though four to six years is the average span, perimenopause can last for as little as a year or it can go on for more than ten. Menopause is usually declared after twelve months have passed without a period. In the US, the average age at which menopause is recorded is fifty-one years, though around one in a hundred women reach this point before the age of forty. Four years is the typical duration of menopause, but around one in ten women experiences physical and psychological challenges that last for up to twelve years — challenges which include depression, anxiety, insomnia, hot flashes, night sweats, and reduced libido. Sometimes, these challenges are significant; at their most severe they can present as risks to physical or mental health, and women need help to manage them.

Cleopatra the Alchemist, who is believed to have lived in Alexandria around the third or fourth centuries CE, is one of four female alchemists who were thought to have been able to produce the rare and much-sought-after philosopher’s stone. She is a foundational figure in alchemy, and made great use of original imagery which reflects conception and birth — representing the renewal and transformation of life. She also experimented with practical alchemy (the forerunner of modern chemistry) and is credited by some with having invented the alembic, an apparatus used for distillation. Her mentor was Maria the Jewess, who lived in Alexandria sometime between the first and third centuries CE; she is similarly credited with the invention of several kinds of chemical apparatuses and is considered to be the first true alchemist of the Western world. In 1964, the great surrealist artist Leonora Carrington painted Maria, depicting her as a woman-lion chimera with breasts exposed and hair wildly flailing around her, as she weaves magical gold-summoning spells. Actually, female alchemists in Greco-Roman Egypt weren’t uncommon, though they were mostly preoccupied with concocting fragrances and cosmetics. In fact, it was a collective of female alchemists in ancient Egypt who invented beer, setting up an unsurprisingly booming business by the Nile. This is all a far cry from the popular image of an alchemist: that of a lavishly dressed and usually bearded man in a medieval laboratory, bending over a fire and surrounded by all manner of arcane contraptions, trying to turn lead into gold.

It’s not surprising that these old myths and stories of Europe that I’m offering up should be populated with European women. Although migration has been a major force throughout human history, most of these old folktales have their roots in poor, often rural communities in which travel — either in or out — was much less of an option, and in which there was much less diversity than we experience in our world today. But that doesn’t mean that they exclude others. These stories offer up wisdom which is accessible and relevant to all women who are now rooted in these lands — whatever their skin color or ancestry. It’s a wisdom that’s accessible and relevant, in many different ways, to all those who identify as women.

At its best, anger is a perfectly rational as well as an emotional response to threat, violation, and immorality of all kinds. It helps us to bridge the gap between the dreary unendurable which seems to exist now, and a more beautiful world of vivid possibility which stretches ahead of us into the future.

Well, you can either see menopause as a possible ending or you can see it as a possible beginning. Arguably, it should be a bit of both. The ending of one phase of life, but also the beginning of a whole new journey — a challenging but ultimately fertile journey across the threshold of elderhood.

Menopause, like all times of transition, is a time between stories, when the old story fades and a new story is waiting to emerge. Its invitations are manifold. It’s a liminal time, when we hover on the brink of profound transformation. During this period of intense physical change, it’s also necessary to turn inward, to embark upon the inner work of elderhood — the work of reimagining and shaping who we want to be in the world, of gaining new perspectives on life, of challenging and evolving our belief systems, of exploring our calling, of uncovering meaning, and ultimately finding healing for a lifetime’s accumulation of wounds. Menopause is the threshold place we occupy before that new expedition to the country of elderhood properly begins: the waiting room in which we quietly sit and meditate on the unknown that is to come. The trick to navigating that space is not to push too hard, but to let the new story emerge in its own time, and to sit with, and perhaps even learn to cherish, the uncertainty.

menopause is the “most wonderful fucking thing in the world. And yes, your entire pelvic floor crumbles and you get fucking hot and no one cares. But then — you’re free! No longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts. You’re just a person, in business.” When Fleabag replies that she has been told the whole thing is horrendous, Belinda responds: “It is horrendous, but then it’s magnificent. Something to look forward to.”17

If Western culture teaches us anything about elderhood, it’s that it’s supposed to mark the end of all meaningful stories, not the beginning of a new one.

I’ve searched for myself, and the stories I might inhabit, in books.

But in order to benefit fully from this time between stories, it’s necessary to let go not just of action, but of attachment to outcome. The Tao Te Ching asks: “Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water becomes clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?”15 Knowing when to gather together our resources and go all-out to change a situation seems easier somehow than recognizing instead when to sit quietly and surrender to its momentum. But the best of all strategies is simply to stay present, because the only certain way through uncertainty is through it.

menopause is a call to autonomy: a response to the need, perhaps for the first time in our lives, to define ourselves and our own path. It’s a time to reclaim ourselves and tell our own story, in our own unique voice. For many women, then, menopause is a time when we pull back a little from our relationships and begin to evaluate who we imagine ourselves to be outside the frameworks set for us by others. Often, this leads to periods of intense longing for time alone. I loved my husband and valued our marriage, but throughout menopause I struggled with a serious yearning to live by myself. I couldn’t seem to reconcile the two desires: to live with him and to live without him. Because I’ve always understood that solitude is more than just a luxury: at certain times in life it’s a necessity. It’s a prerequisite for deep change, for freedom of thought and imagination.

Hagitude: hags with attitude. Like the Cailleach, and all the other feisty, aging women of European myth and folklore who we’ve so thoroughly buried — just as we’ve relegated the aging women of contemporary life to the shadows. They’re the inconvenient ones, the invisible ones. The overculture would so like to pretend they’re not there.

But really, why should the Cailleach matter now? Why should the other fierce and shining old women of European myth and folklore who populate the pages of this book matter? Why should any of these old stories matter? Aren’t they just ancient history? Nice to know, but irrelevant to our infinitely more sophisticated lives today? Well, they matter because the ways in which we think about aging depend on the stories we tell about it. How we think about aging women depends on the images we hold of them. And the images we hold of aging women today aren’t healthy. Truth is, there is no clear image of enviable female elderhood in the contemporary cultural mythology of the West; it’s not an archetype we recognize anymore. In our culture, old women are mostly ignored, encouraged to be inconspicuous, or held up as objects of derision and satire. But our old mythology and folklore tell us something very much more interesting: that it hasn’t always been so. In our more distant past, as of course in many indigenous cultures today, female elders were respected and had important and meaningful roles to play. They are the ones who hold the myths and the wisdom stories, the ones who know where the medicine plants grow and what their uses are. They serve as guides for younger adults; they’re the caregivers and mentors for the community’s children. They know when the community is going to the dogs, and they’re not afraid to speak out and say so. When they do, they’re listened to. Their focus is on giving back — on bringing out, for the sake of Earth and community, the hard-earned wisdom which they’ve grown within themselves.

but at the age of fifty, rage seemed to have taken up residence at the back of my throat, hovering on the threshold of speech, always ready to make a break for it. It didn’t take much to trigger.

I’d been storing up rage like ancient magma, and I was all set to erupt.

because studies also show that we women often hold anger in our bodies. Unacknowledged or actively repressed, anger takes its toll on us. Numerous psychological studies have unequivocally shown that women who mask, externalize, or project their anger are at greater risk for anxiety, nervousness, tension, panic attacks, and depression. A growing number of clinical studies have linked suppressed anger to serious medical conditions such as high blood pressure, heart disease, gastrointestinal disorders, and the development of certain cancers.

It is a well-known fact, and one that has given much ground for complaint, that after women have lost their genital function their character often undergoes a peculiar alteration, they become quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing, petty and stingy, that is to say that they exhibit typically sadistic and anal-erotic traits which they did not possess earlier during their period of womanliness,” Sigmund Freud declared in 1913.8 Well, you can argue that he was a man of his time; the first couple of decades of the twentieth century weren’t exactly known for their respect for women’s finer qualities. But unfortunately, the nonsense didn’t stop there. “The unpalatable truth must be faced that all postmenopausal women are castrates,” pronounced American gynecologist Robert Wilson in a 1963 essay;9 he then elaborated fulsomely on this theme in his 1966 bestseller Feminine Forever.10 This frighteningly influential book, it later emerged, was backed by a pharmaceutical company eager to market hormone replacement therapy. “Once the ovaries stop, the very essence of being a woman stops,” psychiatrist David Reuben wrote in 1969 in another bestseller, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask.11 The postmenopausal woman, he added, comes “as close as she can to being a man.” Or rather, “not really a man but no longer a functional woman.” Half a century on, has anything really changed? Sadly, I don’t think so. It might not be acceptable in most circles to write that kind of thing anymore, but menopausal women are too often the butt of men’s jokes for me really to believe that the attitudes themselves have shifted. They’ve just gone a little more underground. So if these are the stories men are telling about us, where are the stories we’re telling about ourselves? Unfortunately, they’re not always very much more helpful. A surprising number of self-help or quasi-medical books by female authors toe the male line, enjoining women to try to stay young and beautiful at all costs, and head off to their doctor to get hormone replacement therapy to hold off the “symptoms” of the dreaded aging “disease” for as long as possible. Their aim, it seems, is above all a suspension of the aging process, an exhortation to live in a state of suspended animation. And although more women are beginning to write about menopause as a natural and profoundly transformational life-passage, in the culture at large it is still primarily viewed as something to be managed, held off, even fought.

Myths and stories such as these help us not only to understand life as it is, or was, but to dream life as it ought to be. We perceive, explain, and make sense of the world through stories. They are the stars we navigate by, and that’s why storytelling is a universal human phenomenon, a vital aspect of communal life across all cultures and throughout the entirety of our known history. Stories teach us everything we know, and their lessons are deep and rich. Stories can reveal to us longings that we never knew we had, fire us up with new ideas and insights, and inspire us to grow and change. The characters in stories are great teachers too: they are role models for our development, helping us to reimagine ourselves. Helping us to unravel who we are and to work out who we want to become.

But as a folklorist and mythologist too, I firmly believe that story is our primary inspiration — an ancient, much-neglected tool which helps us conjure up sharply honed images of who exactly it is that we might want to become if we are lucky enough to grow old. Because stories are spells; they change things. When they hook us and reel us into their magic, they change us. It’s stories that will save us, in the end. Not just the stories we read or tell, or the stories we want to be in, but the ones that live inside us and the ones we live inside. The stories we invite in, those that we choose to inhabit.

The Tao Te Ching asks: “Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water becomes clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?

But we don’t much talk about spirituality in this post-Enlightenment culture which respects and rewards only rationality. We live in a society whose power systems value only the material, and which dismiss, become vaguely embarrassed about, or actively ridicule the spiritual. Elderhood is a passage that ends in death by design, and we don’t much talk about death, either.

What follows after Trickster’s intervention, of course, depends on many things — among them, the specific qualities of the Trickster who happens along in the story we are living through. And although we don’t always get the Trickster we imagine we might want, we mostly get the Trickster we deserve — because Trickster is often, in Jungian terms, the one who also reveals the cultural Shadow.

The wind at dawn has secrets to whisper Don’t go back to sleep! Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

If women remember that once upon a time we sang with the tongues of seals and flew with the wings of swans, that we forged our own paths through the dark forest while creating a community of its many inhabitants, then we will rise up rooted, like trees.