How to Fully Engage with the Rest of Your Life (Sharon Blackie, PhD)

Listen now (58 mins) | "To ask the question, when everything that once defined you is burned away, is stripped away, and that happens at menopause, you can try to hold it off all you..."

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Sharon Blackie is a psychologist whose work focuses on reimagining women’s stories. Throughout her extraordinary career, she’s drawn connections between myths and fairy tales, and the most pressing personal and cultural issues we face today. She’s written several books, including Hagitude, which is about reimagining the second half of women’s lives, and the powerful transformation and rebirth that can happen at menopause. We get into that today, as well as themes from another one of Sharon’s books, called Wise Women: Myths and Stories for Midlife and Beyond.

I think Sharon’s wise perspective is so needed, and for me, it’s really the spiritual and emotional thread that is missing from today’s conversations on growing older. As Sharon says, she wasn’t interested in trying to hold onto—at all costs—a youth that she had already shed. What she wanted was something more—to continue to change, to transform….And to clearly see, as former parts of her identity were burned away…what was really the core of herself…what mattered most to her…and what she could make of all that was left in the next chapter of her life.

MORE FROM SHARON BLACKIE:

Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

Wise Women: Myths and Stories for Midlife and Beyond

If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-Changing Journey to Authenticity & Belonging

Sharon Blackie’s Substack

Follow Sharon Blackie on Instagram

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

ELISE:

This conversation has been, in my mind, at least, has been a long time coming. I think about you all the time in part because I get your newsletter and so you're always on the periphery of my mind every week. But what I'm hoping we can talk about today, because I think that there is a larger cultural story happening here too, and I want to tease it out with you, and I feel like you're the one to lead us through these waters. But here in the states, at least, I have been to my fair share of menopause conferences in my day, particularly in the surge of the last five years when it's really become an internet breaking conversation and just every time I go, I feel so much sadness. Not that we're not talking about this part of women's lives, but the spiritual component, the emotional component is always missing.

It's always typically a series of panels about HRT and hot flashes, symptom management. I mean, I'm sure exactly what I'm talking about. There's no conversation about your work and the sort of crucible of menopause and the way that it is a reckoning or a request for us to become more fully ourselves once we're done with the we've shedded. So I want to talk to you about that. I want to talk to you about alchemy and the way that you describe it and then how that relates to what's, I dunno if you're feeling it as acutely where you are, but what seems to be happening, the alchemical process that we seem to be in the middle of, at least here in the US and at other various points, it feels global. I'm not there yet. I think that's the other thing that makes me a little sad is I'm 45 and I'm walking up to the edge of this big life transformation and I'm excited, and yet I feel like we're all terrified or that the cultural idea that it's this terrible thing that's going to happen. So let's start there with the impetus for so much of your work around these archetypes of what it is to be a woman in midlife and beyond.

SHARON:

I think for me it was getting to 50 and feeling it begin to slide, feeling the furies come on and the hot flushes and what have you, and thinking, okay, this is happening now. And just not being prepared to go away in a corner and become invisible like the culture tells us we should be as elder women. I really thought that I was, if you'll forgive the cliched words in my prime, and I wanted to know, okay, if the culture isn't going to give me a story to live by that's nourishing and inspiring, I'm going to go out and find some for myself. And in those situations, because of my background and my focus on myth and fairytales particularly, I always go back and look at the old stories. If we can't do it properly today, they probably did it properly in the past. And so it was very much this sense of there's got to be more.

I know as a psychologist that these deep periods of transformation are purposeful. We're supposed to change. I'm a great believer in transformation. I think it's the essence of life. If we stop transforming and we tried to hold ourselves back, we're effectively stagnating and killing the life that's ahead. So it was really very much about that to just look and see what else there might be. I was not at all interested in the kind of phenomenon that you describe, which is, oh my god, you've got to 50, you've got to hold onto your youth at all costs. My youth is back there many years down the line. I can't hold onto it. And besides, what would the point be? I need to grow. I need to change some more. What does that look like when it's done properly and beautifully while recognizing the fact that bits of it are really shit as well?

ELISE:

Yeah, no, and you write about this so potently, but the way that our culture is engineered for youth and for fertility and sexiness and this idea that to move on and to maybe let's call it a deeper beauty or a different beauty, is a death sentence. The cloak of invisibility. I welcome that for one, I'd rather live than be looked at. And two, just to raise it as this is how we've been oriented, maybe not of our own conscious choosing and what does it look like when you are not performing your beauty and vitality and sexiness for the world and are instead fully embodied in your own power? You have that incredible Ursula Le Guin quote about how this is the time when we actually, I'm butchering it, but when we give birth to ourselves right this third age,

SHARON:

Yeah, we become pregnant with ourselves, I think she said. Which is a lovely thing, isn't it?

ELISE:

Yeah, it's so beautiful. So going back to what's in the fairytales, I chafe sometimes when people talk about, oh, it used to be a matriarchy because we don't really have evidence of dominance based oppressive, matriarchal cultures. We have matrilineal cultures at various points. So I don't like that. It's like, no, no, no, I don't want that. I don't think any of us actually want that. We want an affiliative balanced. I want a world actually where gender is not so consequential. I think it's in some ways the least interesting thing about us. Maybe that's not fair, but certainly there's evidence all over our culture of the veneration of women and of older women. So can you talk a bit about what you found?

SHARON:

Yeah, I work with both myth and fairytales. And for those of your listeners who might not be right up to speed with the terminology, myth is kind of a top down story. So it's given to us by the higher echelons of society, whether those are religious or social, to tell us how the world is, how it was created, what our job and it is, fairytales are part of folklore, which is bottom up. So these are the stories of the people that say, this is how we live, these are the challenges we are facing actually in real life. And I love the way that the two intersect, and they do intersect very strongly when it comes to older women because both myth and fairytales in the European traditions portray older women as really valuable, really diverse, a whole bunch of different qualities, not just one way of having a meaningful.

And so I love the fact that wherever you look in our traditions, there are stories of powerful older women in the stories of Britain and Ireland where my kind of heritage is from. It was an old woman who created and shaped the land. It wasn't a man of any description. Now, I know that these old myths are a little bit essentialist. We can think about whatever we mean by female and male, but they're talking about women and they're talking about men. So that's the language I'm going to use. And these old women or this old woman, one particular old woman called the Calliach, which in Irish and Scottish Gallic literally means old woman. She is the creator and shaper of the land. She's been there since the beginning of the time. She says things like when I was a young lass, the ocean was a forest full of trees. So she's been there creating and shaping the land, standing up the wild things, protecting life on this planet, often from humans. And I grew up not hearing about her.

And yet the folklore is everywhere. There are place names named after the Calliach. There are stories about her in every kind of little village or every region, particularly in Ireland and to a lesser extent in Scotland. And it's like, how did we lose this? And I think part of the reason is that these old stories are betrayed for us as entertainment for kids. They're not portrayed as they would be, let's say in Native American culture as cosmology. And that's I think what I have tried very hard to do over the past few years is to raise these older women and younger women, plenty of them who are powerful too, up to the level of cosmology to remind ourselves of where we came from. You are quite right, but you don't see very much in the way of matriarchy. But you do see in Celtic countries particularly, you see greater equality of women in those days, the ability to own property, the ability to get recompense if they were raped, the ability to divorce if the husband mistreated them, the ability to be a priestess, to be a barred, to be an astronomer, to rarely perhaps to be a queen like Buda.

And so there were these women, and we have forgotten them. We don't really take them seriously. And it's important to me because I think if we have a sense of lineage, if we have a sense of this is where we come from, we come from a tradition that valued women. And it's only very recently that we've lost it. And so these old stories that show us all of these different ways of being a really interesting elder woman come from a culture where it was just accepted that you would be,

ELISE:

Yeah.

SHARON:

So why not go back and see if there's anything we can learn?

ELISE:

Maybe these are different. But I'm thinking too of even old wives tales, right? It's in the naming of what this type of literature is. And yeah, they're foundational. So when you look at the dearth of these archetypes in our current culture, the invisibility of older women, obviously there are some incredibly visible, I even hate if you think about what is it, maiden mother, some people talk about queen crone, which the etymology is carrying, right? But this archetype of this older woman, what do you think are the modern implications of her invisibility? I want to believe that the restoration of her somehow rebalances the world, but maybe that's too grand.

SHARON:

I dunno whether it's too grand. It's hard to predict how these things will turn out. But if we don't accept our power and how interesting we are as older women, then nothing is going to change for sure. So we've got to start somewhere. And that's what I tried to do with Hagitude, which is the first of two books I wrote about older women in European myth and folklore. The second one was Wise Women collecting together a whole bunch of stories and even nursery rhymes with powerful old women. And really what we see in these stories, I use the word hag rather than crone. Now, nobody loves either of 'em. I suspect me, I do love the word hag. In European mythology, crone is very old. It's very, very old. So a crone is someone who's at the very far end of elderhood, whereas hag has a broader time frame.

You can be a hag at kind of midlife. And the reason why I like the word hag is when it shows up in the stories, the woman who is called a hag is always in the story for herself. She's not in the story because she's somebody's wife or somebody's mother or grandmother. She might be, but that's not why she's in the story. She is in the story because she has some essential quality of character or knowledge or wisdom or power that is required to keep the story moving on. And I love that. So hag to me has this positive connotation, and that's what I think women can learn from these stories, that no matter how many relationships we have and we're still navigating and that are important to us, it's time. By the time we get to midlife and beyond, it's time to be in the story for ourselves and to bring out all of the kind of gifts that we have gained along the way.

ELISE:

So interesting, just even thinking about Carol Gilligan's work and studying young girls and the way that girls see themselves as relational always and the way that girls tend in the research to struggle with their own individuation, whereas in men, boys, the way that we condition them culturally, we condition them for growth and individuality and they can struggle with relationship. So it's so interesting to think that the hag potentially represents the reconciliation of those two forces, the growth and individuation of going and finding your gifts and living your individuated life along with what it is to be a relational woman that she's in some ways complete or

SHARON:

Whole. Yeah, that's exactly right. So these hags are, they're almost the end product of different paths of individuation. I mean, clearly individuation is a very personal thing. It's our path to wholeness, whatever we conceive of that as being. I see it as a product of our calling in the sense that James Hillman would've post Jungian psychologist, American, very wonderful, would've used the word, which is this idea that each of us comes to this world, comes into a physical incarnation with a particular gift to offer, with a particular thing to be or to do, not necessarily grandiose, just like a different flower in the garden. And so individuation to me is finding your calling and each of these old women in each of these stories, the diverse array of them is beautiful. Each of them has found their calling. Each of them has found their unique gift.

Some of them might be literally weaving the world into being in a fairly grandiose kind of way. Some of them might just be the kind of nice old women that you want to live next door to who are going to take care of you and to persuade you that actually there's something to live for. Growing old is okay. Some of them are tricksters, they're truth tellers, they're wise women, they have deep sight, they're mentors to young girls. There's a diverse array of possibilities there that I think we've probably forgotten about. But they're all there and encoded in the old stories.

ELISE:

When I think about the fairytales that I grew up on, the popularized grims fairytales, although I feel like my parents gave me an original, I read some of the original not sanitized ones, and they're quite, they're great. They're great in those, particularly the ones that I feel like have been popularized in America, typically the old woman is baking Hansel and Gretel, she's snow white's evil stepmother. It's always interesting how it's a step, right? Even though I think originally it was the mother, it was then assigned as a stepmother. There are male bad characters, but most of the older women are the witches who are trying to steal youth or destroy. Is that fair? I'm trying to think of positive examples.

SHARON:

Well, that's the interesting thing, and that's what I found fascinating when I embarked on what was effectively, well, it's still going on. It hasn't finished yet. So a good six years, maybe seven now research project to really delve into these old stories, musty old folklore collections from all over Europe and to look for the older women. And it isn't actually true. I mean, you are quite right. There are plenty of witches, there are plenty of evil old women, but there are also plenty of really great old women. So in Wise women, for example, I think I collected the 33 different stories, a very diverse, interesting, sometimes a bit you wouldn't want to mess with them, but always working for the positive old women. And since then, I'm still finding them. I've got at least a good dozen more older women who are really, really interesting. And these are the women that I'm talking about. The fairy godmothers are often older. I mean that's a positive character. We forget that we think of the Disneyfied version with the kind of tutu and

Wand and what have you. It's not how it was. She was an older woman. There are wonderful stories from Britney of Water Witches, a character called The Grow Act who can be serious, depends on how you behave to her. But there's a beautiful story where she rescues a young girl who's clearly got a mother who wants to do her harm, and she brings her into her cave and protects her and lets her grow to adulthood in the comfort of the Grow Acts cave. And then when she dies, she leaves the cave to the young girl so she can come out at her own pace. And there are lots and lots of stories like that where the old women just see exactly what these girls need in order to grow, even if it's as simple as which husband they need. And there are so many stories where they really are shaping the world for the better. So it's curious to me that we remember the witches and the evil ones so vividly or that those are the ones that have been told because I guess they're exciting and including in Grims loads of stories in grims of interesting older women. They just don't get the airplane.

ELISE:

No, we are fascinated. It's a cultural fascination that I think goes to what we were talking about earlier of these caricatures of women who are obsessed with youth and beauty and what's been taken from them. And there are the Disney versions, but maybe there are fewer stories in our culture now than when I was a kid when that was a big form of our entertainment, I think. But it confirmed older women are a threat. They will want to steal or take what's yours, et cetera.

SHARON:

But it has changed over time. You can see it within stories. So look, everybody knows the story of Little Red Riding Hood, but there's an English version of that called Little Golden Hood. And basically her granny is a witch. Her granny is called a witch. And in the story, her granny is called a good witch. And when little golden Hood goes calling her granny is away at the market selling her herbs. She's a herbalist, she's a wise woman herbalist. And she comes back just as the wolf is about to eat little golden hood. She's got her sack, which is empty now that she took a herbs to market in. She captures the wolf in the sack and she throws him down. Well, and that's the good witch and a good granny who knows that story. I've never come across anybody that knows that story, but we all know Little Red Riding Hood with a passive little princess and a granny that gets eaten up. And we all know the bad witches, but we don't know the good witches.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, I love it. It's such an essential restoration. So I want to ask you a bit about alchemy. It's one of those things that obviously it's ancient and young writes about it all the time, but I feel like in your book is one of these, but in the last year or two years, I don't know if it's synchronicity, but it's just emergent. I was just reading Francis Weller, his new book is coming out and Alchemy is one of its core metaphors. And anyway, it's just every week I'm like, oh, here's talking about Negredo after not hearing about it for 30 years. So it feels like it's pressing into our consciousness as potentially the most fitting metaphor for this time that we find ourselves. Weller calls it the long Dark. I think that's a really beautiful description. And you write about it so stunningly in the context of this individual midlife transition, the burning of menopause being actually an accurate description of what happens as you go into the forge and come out burning off everything that's not helpful and not essential and coming out anew. Can we talk about it sort of on that individual transformation and then maybe we can talk about it culturally?

SHARON:

Sure. It's a complex area, and Jung particularly made it even more complex as he was, as he likes to do as he typically did. But sometimes it can be very much more simple than that. And it really did seem to me that when I went through menopause, and it's not just the fact that physically the hot flushes, you do feel as if you're burning stuff away. That whole process of the negredo, which is the core part of alchemy, where the material, whatever it is, is burned back to its core self for want of a better word. So you have all of these wonderful processes of calcination where you're burnt back to the bone. And what I wrote about that in Hagitude is to ask the question when everything that once defined you is burnt away, is stripped away, and that happens at menopause, you can try to hold it off all you like, but it'll get you sooner or later that happens when it's all stripped away.

What's left? What is the core review that's left? And how then do you use that core to build the next part of the alchemical process, the next part of the transformation of your life? And we are taught, maybe if people even think of it in our chemical terms, it's like, oh my God, it's all gone. It's all gone. It's all burnt away. Bugger, here I am. And we're not really taught to take the metaphor on. It's like, okay, you are burnt back to the core for a reason so that you know who you are. So that when all the structures that supported you are burned away, gone, the beauty for example that you've been talking about, the youth, the fertility, when everything that you thought to find you is fading away, what's left? What's left that matters. And that's the exciting bit to me. And that's what culturally we're not taught to look at.

And you were talking at the beginning about all of the conversations around menopause today, which me to distraction precisely for the reasons that you said, because it's all based on holding onto those things. They're going, they're supposed to burn away, they're supposed to be a new phase. It's exciting. There are decades of life left by the time we get to menopause if we're fortunate, but increasingly so in the world today, what are we going to do with them? What are we going to become? And it does all relate back to Jung's idea about the kind of purposes of the different parts of our lives. So his perspective was that the first half of our lives is very much more outward focused. We're developing a persona, we're looking at how we relate to the world face on to the world. It's a kind of heroic journey, if you like.

And then the second half of life is more of a turning inwards. It's okay, what on earth am I doing here? What is all this for? Who am I? Why am I here? What can I do? And it's what I call a post heroic journey. It's about something quite different. It's a kind of spiritual turning inwards. Now, I think everybody goes through that, but for women, because menopause punctuates that journey right back in the middle of it, you've got all this physical cataclysm happening, you really can't avoid it. Some women do try to avoid it and try to hold onto the last minute. And I always think of that as a really sad thing. They haven't fully lived what we can be the potential for the second half of life. And it's not that you have to let yourself go, whatever that means. It's just that your focus is somewhere else. Other things have become important.

ELISE:

Yeah, the recollection of all of that energy that maybe you are spending on that external persona or that external image, it seems like an opportunity to collect it back to yourself and share it in a more powerful way. And I love our hero's journey, the midlife journey, this undulating, I think many of us feel like we're on a spiral, right? We're going through an chemical process maybe every year even, or every five years or 10 years. And this certainly is a big one. And this is where I think the lack of veneration for second half of life women, we don't lack in veneration for second half of life men. I don't think maybe you would disagree, but it's also that turning point I think, of knowledge into wisdom, right? At that point, you have lived metabolized information into something that's maybe a little easier to share or definitely more valuable.

When you think about our world now, knowledge is available at our fingertips or we're outsourcing it to generative ai, right? Why know anything, why collect any bit of information anymore? But it feels even more important because of that. And I feel this acutely being still on this first half of life theoretically, although maybe not, who knows? But I'm turning to all the elders in my life, particularly when at this moment that feels so chaotic and uncertain and full of fear and recognizing that is the bedrock of life. A, but b, I want to be with people who are like, I have seen this. We have been here before, we endure through these periods. And you just don't get that in youth, right? Unfortunately.

SHARON:

No, that's absolutely right. And I think one of the problems that we're facing is because there is so little cultural emphasis on bringing wise elders to the table, there is this sense that, okay, I'm 20, I know it all, I'm going to do it myself. And that's not a good thing because the energy of youth and the innocence, if you like, and that sense of belief in the possibility of changing the world is absolutely critical. So is that kind of tempering wisdom, which just understands all the stuff that's been done before isn't going to work anymore, all of the things that might actually have a chance at making sense. And again, that's one of the reasons why I love the old stories and particularly fairytales in this context and folktales, because we do know from lots of academic research that in most places, not all, but in most places, fairytales were very much the province of women.

And so they were told in domestic situations with older women telling them to each other as they worked, as they were doing the weaving or the spinning or whatever it was, but also passing them down to the younger women. And I think the point of that in the context of the times that we're facing is what they were telling these younger women is that life is often really hard. All times are potentially catastrophic. Your journey out of your home, your path as a young adult will probably begin with some kind of catastrophe, some kind of severance certainly be embedded in some kind of lack, but look at what's possible if you build the community, if you put the work in. And that's absolutely critical in these old stories. You've got to put the work in the apprenticeship, and if you build the right qualities of character that make the world thrive, rather than make the world shrivel up and go away from you, and it's such a powerful set of stories. It sounds crazy to say it. It's all in fairytales. It's like, well, sorry, I'm crazy. It is.

ELISE:

Thinking about, I don't know if this is a craze in the UK or if you're clocking what's happening too, which I always find offensive and also amusing, but this push, have you heard about the trad wife trend, this push? Yes. Yes. This nostalgic return to the traditional structure of the traditional wife. And this is so fascinating to me because when you think about June Cleaver, leave it to Beaver, there was this period that was only a decade where there was this post-World War II image of domesticity. And what's happening here is even more like, let's go back to the 18 hundreds and where we're making our own sourdough, which great bake all the sourdough you want, but they're idolizing a time or veneration for a time when I'm like, it was really actually incredibly difficult. You're LARPing your live action role playing lives in a way that is so offensive when you think about how difficult life was. Just thinking about you talking about these old women talking about catastrophic times and incredibly hard dark times churning butter wasn't maybe a privilege, right? It's so interesting. What do you make of that? I mean, sure, I'd like to go to Ren fair and know how to do these things, but I'm so grateful that I get to do different things with my time.

SHARON:

Yeah, it's really strange because I grew up, well, I was born in 1961, we're fighting with everything. They had to break free of some of that shit. And the idea that people have kind of forgotten what that was all like is just perplexing to me. And again, I think it's because they don't value the wisdom of people who've been there. They think they know it all, but it's not that some of these values of taking care of a family, your kids and cooking, I love to cook myself and all the rest of, it's not that they're not valuable things to do, but if all of that is put on women, then you don't get women's work in the world outside. You don't get women's perspective on art, on creativity, on politics. And boy, we need women. We need the kind of female relational qualities, whichever gender they come associated with out there in the world, as well as in the home.

And if we're saying, okay, all of those female qualities, the qualities that we associate with a female are just about being at home and in your family, then it's going to be the Handmaid's tale. You're going to let the powerful men, as they have done all the way up until now rule and effectively ruin everything. And it makes no sense to me. We don't have the tread wives in quite the way that you do in America, which is very exotic to most of us. It's not very different from the 1970s, 1980s kind of small holding trend, which was a kind of back to the earth. Well, I've done small holding, crafting in the kind of wilds of Scotland, for example, and it takes up your entire life. There is no room for creativity. You have to look after the animals all the time. You have to tend to fields all the time. But there is literally no time for anything other than survival. And yes, that's how our ancestors lived very often. And it was very wonderful back in the days when that was what had to be done, but it doesn't have to be done now. And I do think, again, to stress this, where will lose women's voices from the wider world. And boy, we'll be sorry if we do.

ELISE:

Yeah, I think there's something different too about feeling, oh, my gift is to, or my heart's desire is to go and live off grid and cultivate land and garden. That's beautiful. I mean no judgment really. And there's a difference between that. And then slapping hashtag trad wife on it, again, it puts that within the relational bucket that that's your role as a wife and mother. I think that's what for me definitely takes it over the edge. And then the marketing of that, again, nobody's talking about in the context of come we're going to turn this into a regenerative farm. I mean, those stories exist obviously all over our culture. I love those stories like Apricot Farm, I mean amazing. That's a great service to the world. This is very different. It's this marketing of sort of an anti ERA idea of femininity.

SHARON:

It's saying that's women's role in the world and it's not leaving room for the diversity. And that's what I find objectional about it. For some women, that's absolutely who they are. That's who they should be allowed to be. That's absolutely terrific. But there is this kind of moral superiority that comes attached to it, I think, which is that if you're not doing that, then you're not a proper woman, whatever that means. And I find that very, very offensive, particularly for women who can't have children or choose not to for very good reasons. It's just we have to allow the diversity. And again, that's what the old stories tell us. We think that life was very confined and in many ways it was. But even within a working class, peasant based society, there were all of these diverse ways of being a woman and an older woman or the fairytale heroine, the younger woman who's just sitting out on the journey. And it's important, I think, to recognize that even then there was the possibility of following your calling, of following your own star.

ELISE:

I wrote a book about, there's one chapter about the rise of patriarchy and it touches on some of these themes. Obviously it's really complicated and it's in different periods at different points, but what do you credit as this? Is it just stories being lost over time or do you feel there was some emergence that shut this down? Was it industrial? What do you credit this to?

SHARON:

First of all, and for all of the beauty of many of its teachings as an institution, Christianity wanted only to wipe out women's power and women's diversity and to associate women with the home and with domestic situations and never to have influence in the social sphere. So that came in very early. But yes, I do believe that industrialization was absolutely a huge thing of it. The so-called enlightenment did for us in so many different ways because it took away the focus on community and the diversity of community that's possible in a village setting, even a kind of peasant working class, village setting. And it put it all into a mill or another workplace. And so you came back to your community at the end of your working day and you were too knackered, too tired to do anything with it. Whereas before all of your work was in some way embedded in the community, whether you were there as an artist or a poet or a laborer or a farmer or whatever, it all came out of the village.

Now you're checking people out of the village, you're plunking them in an artificial workplace environment, and then by the time they come back, it's just not there anymore. You can also see it very, very strongly with television and electricity. And it's not to say that these are bad things, but they had some negative consequences. You see that very much in Scotland and in Ireland, in the Gallic environments, the Irish speaking environments where practices like the Calliach where you would go in the depths of winter to a neighbor's house, everybody would gather around somebody's fire so that everybody didn't have to keep their fires going. And you'd tell stories and you'd sing songs and you'd get to know your neighbors. And as soon as the television came in, and it is known, this is not a theory, this is known. People say it, everybody stayed at home and watched that box. So I think there are a number of big things like that that have made shifts and those would be the three biggest for me.

ELISE:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think for many of us, it's so gradual. It's imperceptible. I was just talking to a friend who grew up with me in the same smallish town, and we were reminiscing about knowing the people at the bakery and knowing the bookseller. And yeah, again, these gifts that we are cultivating that are then shared with community, I think were more obvious before big box stores and what's happened across the world. And yes, I agree. Everything you said clocks for me. And what's so interesting about Christianity is that in those years after Jesus, before Christianity, that 400 years before it was codified and became the religion of Rome, women were so prominent, they were written out of the Bible, their gospels were deemed here. Many names were changed, right? But it was the women who were hosting these circles in their homes and were the patrons of the church.

And it's really interesting. And I, as someone who is spiritual, I think about that. I think almost about that Shakti being buried or being put away for this phase of history and this emergence of the archetypal masculine and overextension. I think we can agree at this point of the masculine element or energy. And I wonder, are those seeds coming up for the restoration and the rebalancing? Is that what's happening? Do you have any sense? I like to think that we're all creators of this world and that we chose to be here at this time and that we are in this process of transformation, which you're describing and that we are supposed to deliver our gifts. So when you take that long view of history, do you think there's a reason that we've lost the hag and the crone and that there's some sort of restoration that's coming? Can you ascribe it to anything when you think about a longer pattern?

SHARON:

I do think that cultures are like individuals in the sense that they go through transformations. It's a really complicated issue. I think that particularly in the past few decades since the end of the Cold War, we have what people call the 30 year peace dividend. It's a little bit longer than that now and the end of history theory, which is that it can only ever get better. Things can only ever get better. This sense of the linearity of progress, I think was always the wrong model, and that also came out of the enlightenment, this sense that there's only one way forward. And unfortunately that sense of there's only one way forward. There is only progress became attached to there's only one way forward. There's only one way to do it properly, which is an uber liberal or an uber progressive or in some places the opposite to kind of uber right wing.

It's an attachment to a particular model of history that's very, very linear, and we've gone for it and gone for it and gone for it. And it doesn't work like that. It doesn't work like that. Time is cyclical in all the old stories and all the old mythologies. You have this sense of ages. And what I like to do really is just think back and okay, what is the spirit of the age in an archetypal sense or a kind of mythical sense? What's the spirit of the age? What is it? What is it about? How is it going to shift? I think modernity springing from the kind of enlightenment and the focus on rationality and science is the only way of knowing has been the spirit of the age, and it has had us firmly in its grip and now everything is breaking and everything is breaking because that was too simplistic, a paradigm that said, there is only this one way to be.

And I think we're beginning to understand that. And I think the age is disintegrating. And I think that's what happens when you get into any situation as an individual or as a culture where it's stagnating or where it's breaking because the cultural mythology is taking you down the wrong route, then you're going to have that alchemical process. You're going to have that nedo at a cultural level. And we're all part of it. We're all in it. And to me, the question that we each have to ask ourselves is, okay, what am I doing when everything that wants to find our culture is stripped away? What do I want to be? What do I want to preserve? What do I want to take forward? And a lot of it is about preservation. I think just preserving the wisdom, preserving the stories, preserving the values, the things that matter, very simple things like a tree or birds and species, and just think, okay, what can I do to protect, to witness, to create in the context of, and it's that belief. I think we have to find some sense of belief that this isn't the ending of everything. The collapse model has its values, but it feels like an ending and it's not. It's cyclical. It feels like everything is collapsing, but something's going to come out of the ashes. What's the core of who we are as a species, as a culture within a species? What do we preserve and then we find our own ways of doing that.

ELISE:

Hagitude is such a powerful book. I think if you are approaching midlife and in any way or on the other side of it, it is a gorgeous read and she does such a good job of connecting something that is individual to something that is also so universal or collective. I'm just going to read one part to you. She writes that letting go is hard. Of course it is. It needs time, it needs tenderness. It can be hard to relinquish our with society's view of youth as the owner of beauty. Hard to turn our backs on its cult of sexuality. But we must, no matter how long we try to postpone the inevitable, our body's ultimate trajectory leaves us no choice. Often that necessary surrender to the inevitable gives rise to a time of deep grieving. And it should, because menopause is an ending of sorts, and it is natural to mourn an ending, but it is also a new beginning.

It is above all a transformation. The late author Ursula Leguin expresses this idea beautifully. “The woman who is willing to make that change must become pregnant with herself at last. She must bear herself, her third self, her old age.” Chills. If you like today's episode, there are several ways to support the show. I produce it myself, so this helps me to continue to make it. First, please rate and review the show on the platform where you listen and consider sharing this episode with a friend. That's how it grows. It is so helpful. Second, please support my sponsors who make this show possible.