Sharon Blackie: Re-enchanting the earth through mythology (ep374)
“Story helps us weave ourselves into the land and feel a sense of wonder and awe when we step outside. This re-mythologizing, restorying to me is a really important way that we can find belonging to places from which we would otherwise perhaps feel quite alienated.”
In this episode, we welcome Dr. Sharon Blackie, an award-winning writer, psychologist and mythologist. Her highly acclaimed books, courses, lectures and workshops are focused on the development of the mythic imagination, and on the relevance of myth, fairy tales and folk traditions to the personal, cultural and environmental problems we face today.
Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include how the eco-heroine's journey offers more life-enhancing and community-centered visions for our paths forward, embracing menopause and elderhood as liberating and alchemical, what it means to re-enchant our lives with mythology to find belonging in place, and more.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app, or read on for the episode transcript.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by India Blue
Episode-inspired artwork by Sabrina Gevaerd
Episode references:
Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life, a book by Sharon Blackie
“An antidote to the all-conquering hero”, an essay by Sharon Blackie
If Women Rose Rooted, a book by Sharon Blackie
“Belonging to the Land’s Dreaming”, an essay by Sharon Blackie
“The Mythic Imagination”, via Sharon Blackie
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, a book by Sue Monk Kidd
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Sharon Blackie: I loved mythology, since I was a very small child and I was a lover of fairytales particularly. I was given a child's version of a compendium of—inevitably, in this part of the world—Greek and Roman mythology, when I was very young. I was fascinated by the complexity of it and began to delve more deeply, probably through fairytales, more into the old stories and belief systems of my native countries, which were, particularly, in my family at the time, Scotland and Ireland.
I would say that was the first time that I understood that there was something special about these stories, something very different about myths. They seemed to have some kind of explanatory value, some way of teaching you about how the world is. And as a very curious and slightly intellectually precocious child, I was very excited about that. So it wasn't very surprising that when I began to practice psychology again in my early forties, I turned to story as a kind of classic transformational principle, on the basis that if you can capture people's imagination, you can show them ways of being in the world, that are different from the ones that are failing them. So it seemed to me at the time, like a really obvious combination.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for sharing that.
In your piece titled “The Antidote to the All Conquering Hero”, you talk about American mythologist Joseph Campbell's notion of the hero's journey, and how it's been really influential on society. What are some of the key themes and characteristics of this type of narrative? And how does it both play off of and feed into upholding particular cultural stories and values that may be at the core of the troubled times a lot of people find ourselves in today?
Sharon Blackie: I have a great deal of respect for Joseph Campbell and his scholarship, and the impression that he made on the world. He made mythology more mainstream. But, I am not a fan of the hero's journey. Campbell was very much a man of his time. He wrote this book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he first put forward the hero's journey, in the late 1940s. This was from a pretty patriarchal society, and where there was very much the cult of the individual. And I think we could probably agree that America particularly has that perspective on life, that it is very much about individual excellence, individual glory. My sense is that the time for that is passed.
I believe that our focus on the hero's journey over the past few decades has turned us into a very individualistic society, in which individual glory and the story of the individual is much more important than community action.
It very much feeds into cultural mythology, which tells us that we must always want more of everything, that we must be slaves to the concept of progress, whether that be in terms of our individual trajectory through life, or the economy—everything must always grow, every generation must have more than the previous generation. This focus on the very linear, start-to-finish hero's journey, has actually caused a great deal of damage in our culture.
I also profoundly disagree with Campbell that most of the stories in the world follow the trajectory of the hero's journey. They do not. Certainly in this part of the world, we see a lot more focus on what I would call the post-heroic journey—which is really not so much about individual glory, but about community, about engaging the help of the animals, for example, in all the best fairytales, which are going to sort the grain for you, to help you solve your problem and see the way through. These are not really heroic journeys. One of the things that I am passionate about is trying to persuade people to look back at some of these old stories with a slightly different lens. They do tell us a lot of useful things about ways to be in a world that is evermore challenged and challenging.
Kamea Chayne: I wonder about the dynamics between storytelling and culture, and whether we might see them as feeding into one another. So, for example, that the dominant narratives in a society helps to shape its cultural values, at the same time that the preexisting cultural values guide the types of stories that people tell and popularize. So if it has this relationship of reinforcing one another, I would question how difficult it would be to disrupt this cycle.
Sharon Blackie: Possibly. I also think, though, that it is really important to look back at some of the old stories through a different lens. So if I could just give you one example…
Campbell wrote a lot about the Grail mythology. He wrote it from a particular perspective, and he positioned the Grail quest as a hero's journey. So you have this knight, usually Perceval, who goes off on a quest to find the Grail castle, and attain, for himself, the Grail. And this sounds very heroic, doesn't it? So he's a knight, and along the way he has some toing and froing with other knights, the odd battle. He makes himself into a really good, well-qualified, competent knight, and attains the Grail. You can see how it would be easy to see that as the hero's journey, looking at individual power and individual glory.
But if you go back to the old stories and read them properly, and if you understand the old Celtic literature and oral tradition from which they emerged, that's not what is happening at all. Because Perceval does not attain the Grail by being a fine knight, by swashbuckling, by killing either other knights or dragons. He attends the Grail, because when he finally gets to the Grail castle, and sees the wounded Fisher King, whose wound seems to be associated with the fact that the land has become a wasteland, he finally asks the compassionate question of the King, what ails thee? And it is very clearly and obviously, without question, the asking of that question, which attains him the Grail.
That's nothing to do with individual glory—that's growing up into a compassionate human being who has looked at the world, who understands that there are issues with it, and who wants to make a difference in it. That is more than just about his own self. So I do think that we have, because of our penchant for individuality, for more, for progress, we have tended to look at those old stories and only pick out the bits that seem to fit that narrative. But actually, most of the narratives are very much more complex.
Kamea Chayne: So it very well could be either an intentional interpretation or biased lens or illusion as well. I think about how in the dominant Western culture people celebrate self-made millionaires or self-made billionaires. But everybody knows that behind these people who achieve something that a lot of people would view as “great success", they never do this alone. They need community. Oftentimes, it's accomplished through the hard work of a lot of other people within the company and so forth. So even that story should be challenged, with something that is much more centered on everyone and everything and every element that made that reality possible.
Sharon Blackie: Indeed. And if you go back to the old fairytales, you find that very, very clearly.
The fairy tale heroine, for example, never manages it alone. She always has a little bit of help from the wise old woman in the woods. It's always the mice that help her sort the grain and complete the tasks that are necessary for her to go on, or a little doll that her mother gave her, that's in her pocket. She never does it alone.
The other thing that we really need to do is to start asking ourselves whether self-made millionaires is what we want to be in the world. They don't seem to be, many of them, particularly functional or happy. And, of course, it's killing the planet.
Again, we look back to the old stories for the wisdom that tells us how to be. There's a beautiful old story in the Irish tradition, and wider throughout Britain actually, called the story of the Glas Gaibhnenn, which is basically the cow of plenty. Briefly, it’s this cow who has milk for everybody who needs it. Anybody who needs milk can take a bucket of milk from this cow freely, until one day somebody comes along with a bucket and a sieve, and milks the cow through the sieve into the bucket. So the cow has no idea, because the sieve is always empty, that this is [happening], and the person takes bucket after bucket after bucket. When the cow figures out what's going on, she effectively flees, and the cow of plenty is never seen in the land of Ireland again.
These old stories tell us something very profound about the values that we need for the world that we are facing today.
Kamea Chayne: You’ve touched on this, but as an antidote to this hero's journey, to offer alternate visions of what we could realize and embody, you've written about the eco-heroine's journey, particularly through your book, If Women Rose Rooted, what lack of acknowledgment or imagination, especially about the role of women in the typical hero's journey, did you hope to speak to, and what does it mean then to move into what you call the post-hero journey?
Sharon Blackie: Campbell's journey was very much based around stories in which there is a male protagonist. It was always a hero. Famously one of his students, Maureen Murdock, who subsequently wrote a book called The Heroine’s Journey, asked Campbell where the woman was in all this, can the woman take to take this journey? He said, no, that the woman effectively was the place that the hero was trying to get to. Well, neither Murdock nor I think any woman after her, and certainly not me, find that satisfactory.
So the hero's journey, I don't think, is particularly well-suited to female psychology, and to what most women want out of the world. So Maureen Murdock had a stab at it back then. And again, it was very much a book of its times. What I wanted to do, in If Women Rose Rooted, was look at the kind of heroine’s journey we needed for the world today, in the situation that we [find] ourselves in—a time of considerable environmental and ecological catastrophe.
When I went back and looked at the old stories of my land, Ireland, other Celtic countries, Britain, you find that women are very much associated, in those old stories and in the mythology, with the land, they embody the land. They are the voice of the land and the moral sense of the land and of the other world that is entwined with it. So in these oldest of stories, it is women who understand what must be done in the world to keep it in balance and harmony.
So my eco-heroine’s journey in If Women Rose Rooted, was to take inspiration from those old stories and say to women, if we were that once in our old mythologies, the ones who recognized what was necessary for fertility, for balance to happen in the world, how can we be that again? How can we reclaim and reimagine those old stories in a way that teaches us how to be now, and to take back some of that power that we had?
Kamea Chayne: A part of that also entails moving into or moving beyond the idea of heroes altogether, this one savior who will enter the scene to resolve the problems. I would love for you to talk more about what you see as significant about the narrative of the post-hero journey, that might offer guidance for the troubled times that we're in right now.
Sharon Blackie: I think my eco-heroine's journey was a post-heroic journey. A form of it. And I'm not a great fan of one size or one model fits all. So to me, there are various possibilities in the post-heroic journey.
The definition of the post-heroic journey is that it's not a heroic journey. It's not about individual glory. It's not linear.
The hero's journey very much has this concept of a beginning and an end. And if you look back at the old stories, they are much more cyclical, almost more spiraling.
You don't go from A to B, you often find yourself circling around to the place where you began. It's not really complete circle, because you've picked up some wisdom along the way. Perhaps you're spiraling out...
There is [an] aspect of it that it is very focused on community, on the fact that everybody needs someone to help them through their own individual journey through the world, through their own individual transformation. If we want to transform the world, there isn't a single one of us that can do it alone. We cannot individually save the world—most of us can't make a huge impact on it [alone]. We do that [with] others.
It's not even the human community that is important here. It's the wider community of life on this planet and the other-than-humans. The old stories of these lands tell us about animal wisdom and how it's different from human wisdom, and how sometimes it's better because they see things or they sense things in ways that we don't. So a post-heroic journey is about community.
And above all, about balance. Because all of those old stories, particularly if we look at the Irish tradition, are about keeping the world in balance. And when people fall out of balance with the land and begin to take too much or what is not theirs, then you always find serious consequences. The world will become a wasteland, or become flooded, completely inundated and drowned.
And it is usually the women who help understand, what is necessary to bring the world back in balance. All of these stories are what I would think of as post-heroic stories because they offer us values that we need today, to set our very broken world back in balance.
Kamea Chayne: Your new book, Hagitude: Re-imagining the second half of life takes a lot of these themes that we just discussed further. You talk about what it might mean for those who've gone through menopause, or women in general who are crossing over the midpoint in their lives, to reclaim these mid-years and beyond, as liberating and alchemical.
As you. Beautifully, write, “There can be a perverse pleasure, as well as a sense of rightness and beauty, in insisting on flowering just when the world expects you to become quiet and diminish.” What are some of the mythic figures who've inspired you to rethink the place of women in their mid to elder years, to offer alternative narratives to the archetype of the hag? And how would you leave this reclamation of elderhood into the post-hero journey itself?
Sharon Blackie: If you look at European old stories, both myths and folktales, you very rarely find an old woman as the main character. The old woman is not the heroine or even the hero, but the old women are always pulling the strings behind the scenes, and they have various really critical roles in the old stories—without which the stories cannot progress.
As I began to look into these stories and gather them together, and look for elder women characters, I began to notice that there were different sets of archetypes, which offered up different kinds of roles that elder women played in the stories. I thought to myself, well, this is wonderful, because it gives women inspiration as they enter the elder years of their life, for ways of being, ways of living, that are meaningful and which also reflect their own particular unique skills.
There isn't just one way to be an elder woman in the old stories. There are many ways.
If we look at menopause, we have all kinds of wonderful archetypes. Most of us, I think, who enter menopause—almost every woman I have spoken to—experience some form of intense rage that just seems to be one of those things that happens. The question is, how can you, given that that is going to happen to most of us whether we like it or not, channel that rage in a way that is useful and functional?
You have the wonderful example of the Furies in Greek mythology: old, decidedly haggish-looking women, who were the face of righteous wrath, I suppose. And they went out there, and—well in the stories, because you always have to—punished people who had committed great wrongs. That was rage turned into righteous wrath, which is a good kind of transformation.
You have the wonderful character of the witch, who particularly has been reinvented over the past century, where we look at the witch now as an on-the-edges, kind of mystic, who's very much in tune with the land, and with herbs, and with the other world. She is a more benign character than some of the witches in our older stories.
[And] you have the character of the alchemist. A lot of alchemists were women back in ancient Greece and Alexandria. We have this image of the alchemist as an old bearded man, [but] many of the early groundbreaking alchemists were women. This idea of alchemy… that we are burned down to the essence of [ourselves], is something that I do believe happens to every woman, if she gives that space [for that] to happen during menopause. So the alchemist is a lovely archetype.
And then when you move into elderhood, there’s Baba Yaga, the dangerous old woman of Slavic mythology; there are fairy godmothers, mentors to younger people and sometimes to people of their own age; there's the wise woman in the woods who has the deep vision; there are tricksters and truth-tellers. There are all of these wonderful ways of being in the world, where elder women are interacting with the protagonist, the hero or heroine of the story, in ways that are encouraging them to transform, in ways that are useful to the world, not just about their own individual glory. These stories, to me, do in that sense, feed back into the idea of the post-heroic journey.
Kamea Chayne: There are so many inspirations there and ecofeminism is a theme in your work that I want to pull out here. Ecofeminism draws parallels between the subjugation of the land and women and femmes in a male dominated society.
And these are metaphorical explorations that do not perfectly translate here. But I think about the discourse around climate change and how our planetary body is nearing the threshold or a tipping point of no return. And of course, growing wiser, going through menopause and crossing into elderhood are beautiful parts of the storyline of life. And I do not mean to say that the stresses and imbalances that the planet is experiencing can be interpreted with that same lens of honor and celebration. Though I try to not separate human civilization and human culture from the Earth, because, as you acknowledge as well, we are in constant co-creation of place and our future.
I wonder if you may have used the analogy of menopause, to think about our place collectively and this sort of liminal time of uncertainty, where clearly change is coming, whether we welcome it or not. Change is both happening to us, and calling on us to change, and where these symptoms of our planetary distress are also sort of calling us into collective contemplation and reflection of where we are right now and what we wish to become.
Sharon Blackie: One of the things that I write a lot about is the old concept of calling.
This arose in ancient Greek times, in ancient Greek philosophy and indeed religion, where the idea was that each one of us, every soul comes into this world with a particular gift, or a particularly unique way of being in the world that only we can bring. It is mostly represented as a gift, if we do it properly. This whole concept of calling is about finding that gift that you have, that way of being, which can only ever enhance the world, even in what might seem to be very small ways. It doesn't have to be some grand saving the world thing. It can just be some piece of beauty that you bring.
Carl Jung argued that it is the second half of life in which we really come into a sense of our own calling and begin to properly embody that gift in the world. For women, it seems to me that menopause is the turning point at which we break free of all of the shackles of that younger, busy, building part of life—which is very necessary and wonderful in its own way, but we begin to break free of expectations of others. We begin to look at the ways that relationships have, or haven't, served us.
I really do see [menopause] as a time when we are in the alchemical crucible: the vessel in which whatever substance is held in it is burned away to the essence of what it is, burned back down to the bones, if you like.
It's only in that process of disintegration that we can begin to look at ourselves and ask what is our essence. What is the gift that I bring? What I'm trying to argue in Hagitude, is that we need to let that process happen in menopause, even though it's very painful and often very uncomfortable. It is a necessary dissolution, burning back to the bone. But then we come out of menopause, and we ask, how do we find our calling?
When I talk in Hagitude about finding our inner hag, that isn't just some storybook picture that we are drawn to—it's what kind of older woman most reflects our calling, our unique gift, our unique way of being in the world.
And I think all of these older women, all of the things that we can be, in these old stories, are for the benefit of the world. For us, yes, for our own personal growth, which is important, too. But they all result in some positive transformation of the world, particularly the old stories of Ireland and Scotland, where we have a character called the Cailleach, literally the old woman, who is, in a sense, the creator and shaper of the land, but also embodies it, and is shown in the old stories to be the guardian of the wild places and the wild creatures, and the one who holds the balance and tells humans when they've taken enough.
So all of the all of this stuff that happens to us during menopause and in that transitional period, I think better equips us—if we're open and aware. That's why I wrote the book, to become something that can enhance the world and help us find a way through these challenges that we're currently facing.
Kamea Chayne: I want to go into grounding these myths and stories in your piece “Belonging to the Land's Dreaming”. You write, "Re-mythologising our places is not just an interesting intellectual exercise, but an act of radical belonging. Like any other species on this planet, we badly need to be grounded; we need to find our anchor in place, wherever we might happen to live. Stories can be our anchors."
This certainly brings me flashbacks to my conversations with Dr. John Hausdoerffer on becoming placelings, and Sophie Strand on rewilding mythology. I would love to go deeper with you here and invite you to share about the key elements of re-storying the Earth, and also the significance in doing so at a time when I feel like the climate crisis is, in a sense, a relational crisis, reflective of the dominant culture’s collective states of disassociation and disorientation.
Sharon Blackie: This issue of place and belonging has been something that I have been working with and writing about for a very, very large number of years, and it still grounds all of my work, because it does seem to me that increasingly, we have divorced ourselves from all places, and increasingly people find themselves in places for work or whatever it might be, that they don't much have a relationship with, that they don't much like. They find themselves floating above their places, and longing for other places where they're not at.
So most of my work over the past at least two decades has been about encouraging people to find ways of belonging to the place where their feet are planted now. This concept of re-storying is interesting, and I think it helps us do that. Let’s take America, for example. I have a lot of people from North America who relate to this work, particularly because a lot of people feel that their feet are planted in land that is storied by other peoples—by Native Americans, for example. And that their stories are back in a place where their feet aren't planted—back in the old country, for example. And how do they do that?
To me, [finding belonging to a place where your feet are planted now] is very much about finding the stories in the place where [you] are.
I lived in a part of Ireland where there were no stories of the Cailleach, the old woman who had created and shaped the land everywhere else in the country. Everywhere in Scotland where I had been living, she had become a cultural icon to me, an inspiration. And I couldn't find any stories about her. I felt really curiously discombobulated, because I had always lived in places where there were place names named after the Cailleach, mountains named after the Cailleach, stories, or little local legends told about an old woman called the Cailleach. There was nothing here.
One day I was walking along the river where we lived, and there was a heron in the woods behind our house. We startled a heron who took off from the river, and screeched as she went. And in this part of the world, herons are gray. And it looked for all the world, like an old hag or a witch, with gray hair streaming behind her, shrieking as she took off on a broomstick into the sky. And I thought, there is my old lady. There is the old lady archetype in my landscape. I called her Old Crane Woman. She was part woman, part bird. Building a relationship in that way, in that imaginal way, with an actual other-than-human being who inhabited that landscape alongside me, made me feel rooted again and linked again to a place where I was finding it a little bit difficult to settle.
So this whole concept of looking at places… A crow, for example, we all know what a crow is. I'm very familiar with the crow as a physical bird. I know its habitats, I know its nesting behavior, I know its calls. The physical aspect of a crow is just a thing of beauty to me. But whenever I look at a crow, I see another layer. I see an imaginal, mythic layer, where I remember all of the shapeshifting women in our old stories who turned into crows. Goddesses like the Morrigan, in the Irish tradition, who took on some of that tricksterish wisdom that the animal has. The body is a very unstable site in our old stories. It's very fluid.
And so I think that these ways of looking at are places, whether they're places that we love or places that we're not entirely comfortable with… story helps us weave ourselves into the land, and to feel a sense of wonder and awe when we step outside. So this re-mythologizing, this re-storying, to me, is a really, really important way that we can find a way of belonging to places from which we would otherwise perhaps feel quite alienated.
Kamea Chayne: And this metaphor works so well, [because] increasingly, people are becoming [systematically] uprooted, and our awareness and consciousness are also often being held up, “in the clouds”, by the Internet these days, especially as Big Tech is driven by the attention economy and constantly strategizing how they can capture and hold people's attention. I think about this metaphor of our consciousness being up in the clouds, and now to think about how we can reroot ourselves and our consciousness in place through a lot of these stories, that are tied to place.
Sharon Blackie: Yes, I agree with you. I think it is very much a question of finding ways of rooting wherever our feet are planted. Wherever we happen to be, whether it's for the short term or whether it's for the long term, and taking no notice of whether we like the places, on the surface. Because if we don't do that, we are constantly, as you put it, living in the clouds, we're living some kind of virtual reality, not the reality of the places that we’re rooted to.
And it can be very powerful. I grew up as a child, during the first ten years of my life, in a very strange place, a kind of post-industrial edgeland in the far north east of England, where we had beautiful dune-covered beaches, but when you looked out down the land from those beaches, you could see smoking chimneys of steel works and chemical works. And for most of my life, I thought that was so ugly. I couldn't get to grips with it. And then I started to think about actually how I had been as a child—traveled back there, and found the same kind of magic.
What I did when I was a child is, I looked at those towers, and I visualized the smoke coming out of the industrial towers as dragons. There were dragons in those chimneys, which were kind of pitchfork-shaped contraptions, in some of the steel works. I would think that there were devils there carrying pitchforks. And somehow that ability to see a story, even if it was quite a frightening one to a young child, it was about finding the magic, and the awe, and the wonder, in places that we’re inclined to think of as aesthetically unpleasing.
Kamea Chayne: So re-mythologizing entails both learning the myths and stories tied to place, where we are, so we can deepen our intimacy with our unique landscapes and communities. And also the other element you talk about is allowing the stories to have fluidity to constantly adapt and change.
To me, it's become quite clear that all of the systems that the dominant human societies have created, whether it's knowledge, economy, politics or infrastructure and so on, are becoming more and more immutable, locked in and homogenized, while also being more and more rooted in universalized abstractions rather than the much more diverse and dynamic living world. So I've been curious to consider whether the planetary distress we are facing is also a symptom of this friction between the calcifying ways of the dominant human civilizations, and our greater shared planetary body, in which we learn that change is the only constant.
Sharon Blackie: Absolutely right. I think that is very much the case.
We have a terrible fondness for dogma.
And dogma restricts us from doing what I believe is the entire point of life, which is to transform and to change. I have no fear of transformation. I've always believed that that was what it was about life. (I wonder sometimes whether that's because as a child, I grew up with all of these stories in which things were always shifting their shapes.) I think that's what we're here for. We're here to grow and to transform and to try things out that might be better.
Unfortunately, I think it's particularly a religious phenomenon, to be honest. I think that the great monotheistic religions that write down rules and regulations for living, which might have been entirely relevant in a desert country two thousand years ago, for example, but really are not functional now—nevertheless, because they were written down, they “must be” adhered to. We can't possibly change these great old texts and ways of being in the world.
And so I think as a culture, we find it very, very difficult to really love our transformations which are so necessary. The world transforms itself every year through the seasons—it dies and it's reborn. It's a natural process of life. And yet we have managed to think ourselves into such terrible rigidity. That's another reason why I believe that these old stories are some of our greatest teaching and learning tools. They show us this cyclical, constantly shapeshifting transformation that we undergo, that the world undergoes, that other-than-humans undergo, throughout their lives. It's one way of breaking through that stagnant imagination that we run the risk of growing up with, all of us through our education systems as well.
Kamea Chayne: As we recognize the importance of place-based knowledge, storytelling and awareness, I think our “crisis in form”, as Dr. Bayo Akomolafe names, can also be seen through how the dominant cultures tend to value “formal” accredited education coming mostly from inside of sheltered classrooms, validated by standardized exams, over informal, non-uniform education, coming from everchanging community dynamics, ways of the land and beyond, and how dominant institutions tend to value knowledge acquired through controlled and fixed settings, using lenses of objectivity and separation, over knowledge that cannot be universalized or generalized, that is much more place-based, relational and context-dependent.
As we ponder ways to reorient ourselves towards collective healing and thriving through becoming more deeply rooted in place and time, it feels pertinent as well to rethink what counts as formal education and credible knowledge, and what has otherwise been excluded from those validations.
Sharon Blackie: Nevertheless, we do need some of that formal education. It's not a question of one or the other to me. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are some forms of knowledge that have come through very formalized scientific processes that are intensely valuable to us and to the planet. I think we have to also be able to honor those systems, whilst recognizing that they're not enough.
And I have railed against the fact on many an occasion that when I was a child, I was taught when I went to school that imagination was bad. That you were allowed to be imaginative in some ways, but not other ways. So you could be imaginative if you were writing an essay in English literature or if you wanted to think about a scientific experiment. But if you were imaginative in a story-based way, if you made up stories, then you were making them up. They weren't “real”.
I think that the Western focus on the imagination, increasingly, as an unreal, slightly perverse faculty is also a great part of our problem.
Because all of the old cultures had this idea of an imaginal world, the Sufi traditions, the ancient Greek traditions. You can see it in the old Celtic traditions—this idea that somewhere between the world of the intellect, our thought processes, and the physical world is this symbolic, metaphorical imaginal world, which is as real as those two, and that it is only really by interacting with this symbolic imaginal world that we can change the physical world. The intellect has to pass through the symbolic and the imaginal in order to have a significant impact on the physical world.
So the Romantics were very fine, I think, particularly people like William Blake, in bringing forward, the power and the necessity of the imagination. This is one of the things that we could usefully teach kids in school, that, alongside formal educational systems, the power of the imagination, whether it be looking at the world mystically, or engaging in an imaginal way with a crow or with a heron or with a tree—all of these are skills and practices that we could usefully add to our education systems, too, to be able to transform the world.
Because if we can't imagine a better world, and if we can't imagine ourselves as better in the world, then nothing is going to change. It all starts with the imagination. It all starts with the ability to imagine transformation.
Kamea Chayne: The most enriching conversations for me are usually ones like this that leave me with so many more things to ponder and think about. So thank you so much for everything that you've stirred up and inspired within me.
I'd love to welcome you to share anything else that is on your mind right now that you wish to leave with us, and any calls to action or deeper inquiry that you might have for us.
Sharon Blackie: Two things that I would encourage people to do.
One is to go out there and just talk to anything that you pass by. Go out into the world and converse with it. Talk to the crows, the trees, the flowers. By entering into relationship with the places with the world around us in this way, we keep them alive. And we keep ourselves alive. Just being in the world, reacting to the world as if it were as alive, as animate as we are, is a daily practice that I pursue.
And the second thing would be, finding our calling and our unique gift, which I think is one of the most important things that we can do, particularly as we approach the second half of life… It's what makes you feel good about yourself and about the world. Calling is never a painful thing. I think it's always about a real passion. And you can tell a passion by what makes your body feel good.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Sharon Blackie: The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, which is also one of the most beautiful titles on the planet, by Sue Monk Kidd, which revolutionized my way of thinking about the Divine Feminine at a very, very important turning point in my midlife.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Sharon Blackie: Talking to crows. I got ahead of myself there, but going out into the world and acting as if everything around me is a neighbor and a friend.
Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration at the moment?
Sharon Blackie: It's always stories. It's finding the stories. It's finding new stories of new places that have been important influences in my life, to help me come to understand why they were such important influences, whether that be the place I was born, places I've lived but I haven't quite got to grips with, or places I've just visited that have had a big impact.
Kamea Chayne: Sharon, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It has been an incredible honor to be in conversation with you. What final words of wisdom do you want to leave with us as green dreamers?
Sharon Blackie: I would like to just briefly quote D.H. Lawrence in a very beautiful poem that has had a big impact on me. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” And that to me is just, the philosophy of life.
