I don’t think it’s ever taken me so long to get through a book. Not because If Women Rose Rooted by Sharon Blackie is boring, but because every single page asks me to slow down, reread, reconsider, sometimes mark paragraphs with a question mark, sometimes scribble a HELL YES in the margin (yes I am one of those people).
It’s not a flawless book, but why should it be? As the subtitle clearly states, Blackie was on a journey. She was in the process of evolving, and in huge ways I would say. She is, I am, you are – we are evolving. I think it’s important to remember that we are all works in progress and to stop holding women to insane standards of perfection.
This book gave me so much. I’ll focus on 2 major things for this post…
One reason I loved this book…
It defines “feminism” in a way that really resonated with me. Kinda like Agnes Varda, a film director, did when I was in university. Somehow, I managed to convince my advisor that I needed to take a French Film and Feminism course. And yet how disappointed I was when I realized that almost all French ideas about feminism were about women becoming like men, walking men’s paths, putting on a suit and fighting up the stairs that lead to men’s offices, trying to achieve things that had been previously only achieved by men. I understand the value of this, don’t get me wrong. But this sort of feminism didn’t interest me. I was more interested in who women were and what they could do – creatively, intellectually, culturally, etc. – that was different.
And then came Agnès Varda. A New Wave woman who was, I believe, the very first female film director in France. And her creativity was roaring with femininity. Not the ‘dolled up’ femininity our culture likes to emphasize, but the divine femininity that has been reduced to mere mythology, but which still smolders within. The feminine that, embodied within us all, is extremely creative and regenerative and relational, that speaks of an essence deeply rooted in nature and myth.
“The role of a woman is not to prove that she can do all that a man can do or knows how to do. On the contrary, the role of a woman is to do what she feels she should do as a woman. And if she wants to do things that are different from what men do then all the better.”
Agnès Varda
I gobbled her films up, her documentaries, listened to all of her interviews. And though that was about 2 decades ago, I remember one interview in particular, Varda talking about creating with her intuition – trying to listen to and follow her intuition moreso than all the normal filmmaking protocols. She talked quite a lot about her feelings too. Gasp! Dreaded words, right? Feelings! Intuition! Nature within! The nerve to create a film titled Women Are Naturally Creative in an era when the entire world had been created in man’s image. And yet Varda became successful, which gave those like me a glimmer of hope, a boost of confidence in those women stirring within us as well.
But life went on, I entered the workforce and gradually I became disillusioned with feminism once again. At least as it’s defined in my industry, aka: women being recognized only to the degree in which they achieve like men. And at this point, I had no clue what true femininity was anymore. Though I often felt frustrated, maybe even numb as I went through my days, I don’t think I really understood why.
And then I found this book.
It begins with 30-year old Sharon weeping in her car in the parking lost of the multinational corporation where she worked. Not only worked, but succeeded. Is this what a nervous breakdown feels like? she wondered. Why did she have to muster up all of her energy and hold back all of her tears just to walk into corporate offices and sit through meetings all day? Why did corporate insights and business talk feel so far removed from her reality?
“As always, the stories show us the way. The old stories, the ones which tell us that women are the land, the body of the Earth. The old stories, the ones in which the Earth is sacred, and so women are sacred too: the force of creation, the givers of life. The stories in which women are the bearers of the Grail, the keepers of the cauldron of inspiration and rebirth…
We can reclaim that image in each of us: the creative, ecstatic, powerful feminine that each of us embodies in our own unique way. Lacking it, it is no wonder that we are grieving, alienated, imbalanced – that we cannot find a way to belong to a world which denies us permission to be what we are, and which teaches us to cover up not just our bodies but our feelings, our dreams, our intuition.”
Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted
At the time, I was pregnant with my first child, and everything was about to change in ways I could not yet comprehend. I would soon question the cultural narrative that had shaped the very core of my being. I mean, part of the narrative had already crumbled – the story of man being given domination over all, including women, by some untouchable god “up there” worshiped inside of buildings so far removed from the Earth; the story of disobedient woman bringing downfall and punishment, pain and separation. Those stories that put the bodies of women and the body of earth at the mercy of men had already disintegrated for me.
But on the verge of motherhood, and therefore on the verge of meeting the wildly intuitive part of me for the very first time, I was about to discover the degree to which the western narrative still held far too much power. Perhaps I dismissed the male gods of the Bible, but I still lived in a world that had been shaped by male philosophy and principles.
But If Women Rose Rooted is not at all about motherhood. In fact, its author, Sharon Blackie, never had children.
Nor is it an attempt to make men the enemy. This is not ‘the future is female’ and men are left out of it. For all of her railing against patriarchy (of which there is plenty), Blackie never advocates for merciless matriarchy. But for a balance of the masculine and feminine principles so that both can express themselves naturally and fulfill their unique roles, so that neither become unhealthy, monstrous versions of themselves.
What patriarchal religions like Christianity had massacred in the world, patriarchal systems like Capitalism maintain. Day in and day out. And women are fighting to become part of it, rather than reclaiming who we are meant to be.
“It is easier by far just to go with the system, because this world values women who do: women who stick to the rules, women who do not rock the boat, women who do not push for more. In becoming what we are not, we are cut off from the source of our own creativity, from the wild mystery and freedom which makes our hearts sing.”
Sharon Blackie, If Women Rise Rooted
So if you want another book with a vision of the world staying basically the same, but with more women running it, this may not be the book for you.
This might be the book for you, however, if you want a book that imagines the world with us coming back into our bodies, back into the wild knowing that has been feared and suppressed for thousands of years, back into the rhythms and cycles of nature, back into the traditions and tales that once sustained native cultures around the globe for centuries, including Blackie’s native culture, the Celts.
“The particular path I found myself on was also deeply inspired by those Celtic myths and stories which showed me a way of belonging to my own native lands, and which offered an image that I hungered for of what it might be to be a woman.”
The second thing I loved about this book…
The telling of ancient Celtic myths. Every single chapter begins with a Celtic myth. They’re all beautiful, but several are just breathtaking. And it is through the re-telling of these old stories that I began to understand the goddess-centered world we once inhabited.
I think it’s very difficult for us to imagine the world as it was some centuries ago. It feels almost unreal – maybe unnatural. That is the hardest part, right? Being able to even acknowledge that the human systems we have today are not normal or “natural.” Acknowledging that the paths women have been pushed onto are not normal or natural either. And thus why we can oftentimes feel exhausted, dispirited, haunted by memories of who we once were and are still meant to be.
“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.”
You see, this journey Blackie takes us on is not a familiar one. It’s not the Hero’s adventure, which we know by heart now. It is the Heroine’s journey. Do you know it? I certainly did not grow up hearing it.
“This book is a journey back to the ground of our own belonging in the world, a retrieval of our life-giving feminine wisdom and the regrowth of the roots that nourish it. Our own roots, which reach down into the soil, push down into the crack in the rocks, drink from the groundwater that flows down the mountains. This is not a journey which takes places in our heads. It is a journey which takes us out of our heads and weaves us back into the shimmering web of life – lief, with all of its beauty and its chaos, its caresses and its stings, its dangers and its blessings. In this journey, we learn to get our hands dirty – to thrust them into the fecund earth and plant the seeds of the world’s new becomings. We learn to listen again to the stories told to us by the land in which we walk. These stories are a gift and a terrible burden; there is joy and abundance; and then, in the passing of a cloud over the sun, there is sudden loss and a grief which is almost to heavy to carry.
Carry it anyway; we were built for it, we women. It was always our role to carry these stories, just as we carry life, and it must be so again, now that the world calls out in its agonies for us to rise up and speak the truth. Now that the Earth calls out for us to speak again with its voice. The stories are everywhere still: listen, and you will find them….
We do not do this alone. We do not do this without the world, which listens in its turn as we tell the stories back to it. The world does not see that we are ‘other’, that we have made ourselves separate or superior. It sees only a dog-violet, hears the clattering fall of winter rock, feels a woman’s hand on the bark of a tree. The world is listening to you; you are in this world and of it and it is in and of you and wherever you go carry this gift with you.
The wild woman awakens. That’s exactly what this book did for me. Like Agnés Varda did in university, Sharon Blackie’s book gave me some much-needed courage. And this time I’m determined to stay awake, to stay wyld.
As a review on the cover states:
“This is an anthem for all we could be… I sincerely hope every woman who can read is given one, and has the time and the space to read it.”
So please, take the time and space to read it if they aren’t given to you already.
Featured title image is via Adriana Meunié (@adrianameunie_textilework) for her new sustainable fashion project ÓDEMINUÍ (@_odeminui_). I’ve featured Adriana’s textile work before in the post around handcraft and embodied knowledge, and I’m thrilled to see her evolving now. Everything she does is absolute gold.
All other black and white images throughout this post are by Elena Heatherwick, a London based photographer who you can also follow at @elenaheatherwick.