11 Quotes by Sharon Blackie

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.