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Sharon Blackie is a former neuroscientist and a psychologist with a profound understanding of mythology and folklore. She has a new book out, called Ripening: Why Women Need Fairytales Now. And I was so excited to have her back on Pulling the Thread to discuss.
Today, Sharon shares some particularly resonant fairytales—the kind of stories that stick with you, and even reshape your thinking. We talk about why—when Sharon was still practicing as a psychotherapist—she specialized in narrative therapy and used fairytales in her practice.
Sharon explains some common misunderstandings about fairytales, and also offers some medicine in the form of story that I think many of you will find useful.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
I feel like the book sets itself up because obviously we come to you for fairy tales. We come to you for the archetypes of being a sort of “woman” or the feminine. And we come to you to make sense of cycles and who we are at different stages of our lives and the stories that we tell or that we relate to that give us a context or set the stage for who we are. And you obviously, this is one of your many zones of genius, but you start the book talking about, and I think we know this, but I don’t know, there’s a way in which you said it that really landed for me, which is how desperately we need story in order to make sense of who we are and the linearity of our lives. Absent that, we’re just what? A jumble?
SHARON:
I guess. No, really. I mean, I think obviously you can go to the opposite extreme with that and just literally be making it up. There is always the danger of self-mythologizing, but that’s not really what I’m talking about with ripening. I’m talking about particularly all of those times where we know something needs to shift in our lives or that something is shifting like it or not. And we can’t really imagine exactly what it is. And I have found certainly as I kind of look back at my own life that fairytales in lots of ways have mapped it. The particular stories and images from particular stories at particular times in my life have really shone very brightly and made sense of what’s going on or what I’m about to become in a way that words really can’t always do. And that’s what I love about fairytales.
They’re not very wordy. They’re full of images and visual stuff. And I think that’s one of the reasons why they lodge with us in such a deep way.
ELISE:
It’s so interesting because just thinking about my childhood and we had many volumes of Grimms. We had the annotated, the short, highly graphic version. We had the full one. We had many and I loved them and I even did my ... I was a double major in college in English and fine arts, which is funny because I’m a terrible photographer, but there’s just an amazing arts program at Yale. It was like my therapy. Anyway, but I did my college thesis on essentially archetypes and fairy tales.
SHARON:
I didn’t know that about you.
ELISE:
I know. Isn’t that funny? And my English thesis was on John Milton and Andrew Marvell and the Garden of Eden and the Loss of Innocence. And then of course, when I was writing on our best behavior, I’m like, where is this coming from? And I’m like, oh, this is a lifelong thing for me. I just took some detours. But do you feel I feel like woman of a certain age and obviously Disney turns many of these into blockbuster movies or few and a very different version of them, but do you feel like kids and youth today are being raised on these stories in the same way that we were?
SHARON:
I don’t. I think they’re being raised on versions of the stories that aren’t always functional and it’s not just Disney. I mean, I think when I was a kid, Disney was still terrible. Even in the ‘60s, it was terrible. I mean, it just made everything saccharine and sweet and stories like Snow White, which you’ve got some real grunt in them in the original Grimms, right? It’s just like, this pretty little girl singing along in the woods with a bunch of little bearded all ... It’s just silly. But I’d already read the stories, so I didn’t really take that seriously. But nowadays, Disney is trying to make every fairytale heroine a hero. It’s just like they’re just trying to be the men. I mean, in a behavioral kind of sense to be swashbuckling and chopping off heads left, right and center and just trying to say, okay, in order to be a good fairytale heroine, you must act like the hero and you must follow the kind of the hero’s journey.
And certainly on the stories that I was raised with, which included grims. I mean, there’s some amazing stories and grims, but also include an awful lot of really feisty heroines from Scottish and Irish stories. That’s not what was happening at all. These heroines didn’t need to take a hero’s journey. They were perfectly fine sorting out the world by themselves. And that’s to me what was missing in the ‘60s from Disney. It’s what’s missing today from Disney. And now, of course, what we’ve got is fairytales subverted into romanticy, which I’m sure has lots of very beautiful elements to it. I have no clue actually, but I’m sure it does. But it’s just again, that’s not really what this was for.
ELISE:
Yeah. I mean, you write about too, I think a lot about developmental psychology and those models for boys and girls and Carol Gilligan’s work and Naobi Way’s work and how it butts against Erickson and Kohlberg and these distinctions. And then of course, there’s Campbell, as you mentioned, and the hero’s journey and the way that it has been historically split, where women hold relationship, nurturance, love, care, the home, and then boys have to go out into the world and individuate and grow and how terrible that’s been for our culture. But you write about how even when in fairytales, when girls are out, I guess some of them are women, she will always require and gratefully and graciously accept the help of others, ants, birds and mice, a helpful witch or a wise old woman in the woods. The gift, the superpower of the fairytale heroine is relationship and she will only ever make it through to the happy ending of her story because of her ability to create community.
So I love that. And I was trying to think, is that a component of any of the fairytales about boys and men? I don’t recall. I mean, I know that some of them, they have to get the antidote and they encounter the mentor. But I was like, “Oh right, it’s always the animals in the forest.” I very much relate to that.
SHARON:
Yeah. In fairness, I have to say that I have not done as big a research project on the fairytale hero, fairytale hero’s journey, but there are an inordinate number of fairytale heroes who are jokers or chances or who attain what they want through the help of three wise old women in the woods who bring the birds rather than them kind of doing that stuff themselves. So there are always exceptions, but my sense of it in all of the many volumes of musty old books that I went through is that there is something very specific about the fairytale heroines journey and it is, and that’s the contrast to the archetypical hero’s journey, whether Campbell intended it or not, that’s what it’s turned out to be of the individual searching for glory, the individual, the exceptional individual turning up and saving the world. And although a lot of these fairytale heroines are called princesses, that’s just shorthand.
These were peasant women that were telling these stories. They weren’t talking about princesses. It was just a metaphor. It was a symbol and they are not exceptional. They’re just people. They’re just girls who’ve been thrown out of the house with the clothes on their back if they’re lucky, or they’ve been thrown out of the house after their father has chopped off their hands or whatever might have happened. And this is not privilege, which happens to be a word I hate, but that’s a story for another day. There’s nothing privileged in that. There’s no exceptionalism. They’re just trying to get through the day and every single one of them puts one foot in front of the other. It starts with catastrophe. They just walk out of the house or they’re thrown out of the house, they put one foot in front of the other and how do they do it?
They do it by just not turning bitter, not cutting heads off, but just, “Oh yeah, there’s a loaf there and it’s burning and it needs to be taken out of the oven. Okay, I can do that. “ And it’s just that sense of what is valued in that journey is relationship with others and sense that you’re not the only one who’s suffering. The loaf’s going to burn for heaven’s sake. I better take it out of the oven. Why should it suffer because I’m suffering? And so there’s that beauty and also that reciprocity because by giving to the others that she meets, whether they’re animals or birds or humans, whatever it might be, she gets something back in return. And there’s a lot of stuff about indigenous wisdom these days, which is so important to us to learn from. But what I’m always trying to explain to people from this part of the world that I live in and grew up in is that we have our own stories of reciprocity in relationship.
They’re a little bit different and we don’t see them in the same way. We’ve long ago started to see them as entertainment, whereas in lots of native and indigenous cultures, they’re still very much teaching stories, but they’re beautiful and they’re absolutely the same kind of phenomenon.
ELISE:
Yeah. I think it’s so important in our quest for our own indigeneity and this feeling, this severing or this search that I think so many sort of quote unquote white people have for like, where did I come from and what’s my culture? And often our culture is, oh, you displaced this group of people and then you killed this group of people and you don’t really in some ways belong anywhere, but it visibly shows up in a culture that’s proclaiming white genocide and white culture is being erased. And in reality, you’re like, what does that even mean and what is your culture? So there is something I think really essential about unearthing some of these stories for those who are sort of obsessed with ancestry.com and saying, yes, there is a wisdom tradition here too. There’s story here too that establishes who we are. Because I think that that’s an unspoken anxiety, maybe not for you or me, but certainly for people in America where it’s this proclamation, I don’t know.
And it comes out in violence and it comes out in this really perverse way. And I think it’s a homesickness and a need to assert dominance because there’s this severance or this, I don’t know who I am or where I come from, so I have to make this current place right or how it’s always been. So I wish we were more connected or more tethered because I think it would be a balm in a weird way for what we’re seeing in America at least.
SHARON:
Yeah. And pretty much everywhere else as well. I mean, really since I wrote If Women Are is Rooted, which was published in 2016 and is still going strong, my whole point was I had lived in America for six years and I had read Louise Edrich and Joy Harjo and Linda Hogan and all of these amazing Native American writers who were so steeped in their land and their story and just thinking, why haven’t I got that? But then being the kind of sort of nerdy creature I am when I came back to my lands, I thought, okay, I’m going to do the research project. I’m going to look at the stories. And lo and behold, I found it. And it’s almost as if nobody had gone looking for it before because we have had it so ingrained into us that our myths, our stories, they’re not really myths at all.
They’re not really cosmologies at all. They’re just tales for kids or whatever. And it’s not that the stories hadn’t existed, it’s just that nobody had seen them in the same way. Of course, they were absolutely the same. They were cosmologies once upon a time. And it’s always seemed to me really important that we have to, instead of continually trying to appropriate or even to respectfully engage with the myths and stories of other cultures, we have to start from a place of our own belonging. And I thought at the time, for women particularly that’s a thing. But I have worked with a number of indigenous elders who say exactly the same thing. I mean, one of my friends is a woman called Sherry Mitchell. I don’t know whether you know her. She’s from Penobscot people in Maine, a lawyer who’s written some beautiful books about sacred instructions of her people and she says exactly that and is constantly recommending if women are resuted to Western people who come to her looking for wisdom, not to turn them away, but just to say, look, you’ve got this, you’ve got this in your culture, go back and kind of immerse yourself in it and then come and let’s talk and see what it adds up to.
And that sense of a lineage of something that anchors us either to a place for someone like me who’s still in the place where my ancestors were born or to someone from America who has ancestry in this part of the world, that sense of, okay, there’s an anchor from which I can build and grow and feel that sense of belonging. It’s so important.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, and you see in America, I think so many of us are like, “This is ridiculous.” 90% of us are immigrants to this land at some point in our lineage and we have to get more comfortable with that reality rather than this sort of I’m being replaced by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
SHARON:
Yeah. But I guess for me, for a lot of the Americans I work with, that knowledge that they have these stories of relationship and reciprocity in their culture, which they can bring to a place that has stories of relationship and reciprocity from the Native peoples that for better or worse, they haven’t had a great relationship with over the past couple of centuries, that gives you somewhere to meet.
ELISE:
Yeah,
SHARON:
100%. We came from the same roots. Let’s just start there and see what we can co-create to move ourselves actually forward rather than constantly harking back to, and I don’t mean not acknowledging it, but harking back to the point of rupture, do you know?
ELISE:
Yes, 100%. And when you go into the Carl Jung concept of the collective unconscious and you start to see the resonance of stories from different parts of the globe and the repetition of themes and archetypes like the trickster who shows up as the Joker or Loki or the devil, you start to understand the basic framework of humanity and how humans relate to others and to nature and to the cosmos in such a profound and beautiful way too.
SHARON:
Yeah. And it’s only really, I mean, we do tend to forget that in the grand scheme of human history, I mean, certainly in Europe in the West, what we think of as the West with the capital W these days, it’s only really the past two, 300 years that we’ve lost it. Before the kind of scientific revolution and the enlightenment, I mean, the whole idea that people could lift themselves out of relationship with the land would’ve just been a non-concept. It would’ve been completely incomprehensible because that’s all there was. They couldn’t go down to the supermarket and buy a packet of bacon. It’s just like if they had a pig on their land, they got bacon. There just wasn’t that ... The sense of separation that we feel today wasn’t even possible because there was nothing else that could conceivably replace it. And so it’s not that far back in our kind of cultural memory, I don’t think.
And of all of the ways that ... If what we want to do is to create transformation in people so that we remember who we are, we remember who we were, we remember that sense of connection and relationship to the land, then we have to capture imaginations. We can’t just say, oh, everything you’re doing is bad. We have to actually capture the imagination so that people can envisage a transformation and new life and nothing does look like story, noth. And that’s why in the book I took a fair bit about the days quite a long time ago now, probably about 20 years ago, when I was still practicing as a psychotherapist and used fairytales, specialized in narrative therapy and used fairytales in my practice because cognitive behavioral therapy is really important. It’s a really important tool, but no one is going to get excited by it.
And I had a lot of clients just fail at it because it’s just like, oh God, this is so tedious. But as soon as you say, nobody ever sits in a therapy room and says, “Story, I don’t want a story. I don’t like story.” It’s just like story in there, they want it even if they can’t bring themselves to tell you. And so you’ve got them with that hook. You’ve captured their imagination and they’re already, before you’ve kind of finished the story, they’re already seeing how it relates to them, who they could be in this story, how they could, if they were that heroin, find their way out, which relationships they would make, what does it mean to be clothed in a dress of stars? The psyche is imaginal. It’s as Jung said and others from more spiritual traditions said before him, the image is everything and these stories just hand us that on a plate.
ELISE:
I want to talk about stories of transformation and women and whatnot, and I want to talk to you about beauty, but before we go there, and this is a story that I think that women relate to so deeply and yet it is also somewhat enraging and here in the US at least you break it, we fix it. We clean up the messes that are left to us and restore the world. So you write, the message that these stories leave us with is the message of so many fairytales. When a woman is left alone in a room with a spinning wheel then somehow or other, even if it can only be achieved with the help of a malevolent little mannequin, she’s going to find a way to spin straw into gold. When she finds a room full of dead things, she’s going to find a way to bring those dead things back to life and this role of the feminine, I guess you could say too, that men can access as well of restoration and repair that’s in so many stories of taking something on the brink of desolation and bringing it back to life.
So why is that our destiny?
SHARON:
Because it’s the nature of the beast. I’m just looking at it. If people forgive the essentialism, let’s just look at it from a purely biological perspective. I mean, women give birth. They create life out of their bodies. I’m not saying that men don’t have a role in it in a different role, an important role, but it’s just we are creative vessels and in all of our ancient Western traditions, philosophy traditions from Plato and neoplatonism onwards, there is a sense that humans are here to participate in the creation of the cosmos.
We’re here to kind of help the divine, whatever we think of the divine as being. We’re here to participate in that. And I think women do it particularly effectively. It’s equality that’s always been associated with the feminine. In that old tradition, the old philosophical traditions, neoplatonism, particularly there is this concept of the world’s soul, the anima mundi, which gives life to, gives birth to the physical world. It’s the soul of the divine which gives birth to the physical world and then animates it and nourishes it and nurtures it. We see this in the Celtic traditions with that concept of the other world that is always bringing life and nurturing and you mess with it at your peril. And so I think there’s always been this sense of creativity, of nurturing, of tending, of relationship, and it’s always been associated with a feminine. And we’re seeing that even in the fairy tales.
And I do think that one of the reasons why women today are so particularly good at this taking dead things and bringing them alive is because for centuries, people have tried to make men have tried to make dead things of us and it’s like there are just so many remarkable women that just weren’t having that. You see that in the stories, I don’t want to go on, but just there’s one story that really always I have loved ever since I was a teenager, and that’s the grim story of Made Marlene. And she’s the princess who refused to marry the man that her father wanted her to. So he locked her up in a tower for seven years. He walled her up in a tower with a bit of food and he said, “I’ll come back in seven years to see if your perverse spirit has been broken.” And seven years comes and he doesn’t come.
And so Maid Marlene literally chisels her way out of that tower by chipping away with the fork that he’s kindly left her and pulls the stones out and she emerges into a world that is effectively a wasteland, but she makes something of it. And so we’re always being dealt this dead stuff, okay? We walk out and it’s just, okay, we’re walled up in the tomb and then when we get out, it’s like there’s another wasteland, but she manages to create her own destiny, even though she’s clearly traumatized as fairytale heroines go. And I think that that is a pattern that women recognize that time and time again we’ve been suppressed Our voices have been taken away and these heroines show us that there’s always a way to turn it around and it always requires community, as you were saying at the beginning and that kind of relationship and reciprocity.
I love that about fairytales.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, it’s a beautiful story. I mean, it’s a messed up story as they all are and yet-
SHARON:
It’s timely.
ELISE:
It’s timely. Yeah. Can we talk about this other story? I hadn’t really encountered these, but I guess you’re saying that they’re prevalent, but this idea of the skin stealing stories and how so many women in your practice relate so intensively to this story of stolen identity and transformation.
SHARON:
Yeah. So I mean, there are various stories. So in Scotland and the Northern Ireland of Britain and up as far as the Pharaoh Islands, there’s this concept of seal women who generally speaking for one night every month when there’s a full moon, they can slip off. They come out of the sea and they slip off their seal skins and they’re human women and they dance on the beach under the full moon. It’s very beautiful. And then they put their skins back on and off they go. And the story is of a fisherman who says, “Gosh, that’s beautiful. I want one of those.” And steals the skin and won’t let her go back to her natural environment, to her element, which is really the sea. The human side of it is in this particular case is what’s unusual. It’s not unusual that a woman has become a seal.
It’s unusual. The seal has become a woman and he won’t let her back. And she just like, she died. She’s dying. He says, “Stay with me for seven years and then I’ll give you his skin back.” And he doesn’t. She has a daughter and the daughter finds her skin, which he has hidden under his boat and gives it back to her mother and then her mother kind of slips back into the sea. And that just resonates with every woman that I’ve ever known. At some point we feel that we’ve lost ourselves. And in Ireland, it’s normally a story of a mermaid and the man steals the mermaid’s comb, which is the source of her power. She’s sitting there on the rocks combing her long hair. He steals her comb and that means that she can’t go back to the sea. I found a wonderful story in Croatia a few years ago where it’s a wolf woman and the man steals the wolf woman’s skin.
So wherever you go, there are these stories of skins being stolen and we all know what that means. I don’t have to put it into words for you. It’s somebody stole that authentic, deeply embodied kind of not animal but almost kind of animal part of us and we don’t know how to get it back. And yet Salky gets her skin back. So I think that’s the kind of story that’s kind of image that I’m talking about that really just sinks into you and won’t let go.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, 100%. And you write about it too in the context of this midlife transition point that comes for all of us where we’re up against the wall and you have to grow, you have to shift, you have to transform. What got you here will not get you there or you’re really tired of what got you here or you don’t care or you’ve outgrown your beauty. Maybe we talk about beauty and the archetypes of the woman because as you point out, and we all know this, the way that beauty and goodness are interwoven in these stories and ugly and lazy or ugly and mean this prominence and it’s put on ... I mean, there’s this idea of an inner light or beauty as well, of course, but it’s definitely, and particularly in how it’s served to us culturally about beauty as goodness. And then all the evil stepmothers, and it used to be the mother, and then it was over time edited more to be the stepmother.
But this intergenerational war around beauty is quite pernicious. What is that about and what is the deeper invitation there?
SHARON:
Okay. So I see it in a particular kind of way. There are two elements to that for me. So on the one hand, fairytales are not novels. I mean, obviously, sorry, I’m stating the obvious, but they’re not novels. They don’t have characterization. They’re very straightforward. There was a girl who lived in the woods. We don’t know whether she’s got blonde hair or dark hair. We don’t know anything about her character. And so what they do, these very simple stories is they use shorthand. So beautiful means she’s good almost always. And that is contrasted with ugly, which is bad. And it’s just kind of a way of saying it rather than have to go on three pages about why she’s kind of good or why she’s bad. And there is a very strong element of that that is true. It’s complicated by the fact that the evil stepmothers are often beautiful as well.
But what is shown in the course of the story is that in their case, actually, surface beauty isn’t always to be taken at face value. So there’s sometimes a little bit more complex on the subject of beauty than we give them credit for. But they do hark back to this very, very strong thread in Western culture that dates back to Plato of beauty as a kind of archetype in the world, a kind of universal archetype, one of Plato’s forms and ideas which were actually kind of the thoughts of the divine mind in the cosmos. And beauty is a very, it’s a very complex one, and I don’t want to go into philosophy, but again, it’s kind of shorthand for goodness and truth. They’re all kind of tied up together. So even 2000 and a half years ago, beauty was seen not just as a nice shaped nose or glossy hair or whatever, but something in the cosmos that was true that was something that we wanted to get back to.
The eros is very tied up. I don’t mean the Cupid and the little kind of Roman God. I’m talking about this old Greek concept of eros, which is very tied up with the experience of beauty and wonder and awe. So there’s all of this complex stuff I believe that is tied up with this simple kind of, okay, she was a beautiful princess and it’s kind of hard to unpack it, but I don’t think it is old women 200 years ago saying, “Oh, you’re only good if you’re pretty.”
ELISE:
Well, and I think that too, these are stories, right? So these are words and the sparseness of the words allows your own imagination and your own mind to fill in the pictures. And obviously there was art and there were illustrations, but I’m imagining that these, this is an oral tradition, this is words and it’s hard to imagine now in our incredibly visual culture and in our Disney versions of these stories and our Barbie doll land where we have very pernicious and specific ideas about beauty put on us. I don’t remember the number of images we see a day now, but it’s stunning.
SHARON:
Horrifying, Ken.
ELISE:
Horrifying. But it would’ve been up to us as the person hearing the story to define what that looks like. And so I can give the fairy tales some grace, but I don’t think it has the same heft that it does now where you’re like, beauty image, beauty image, and you’re concretizing that in someone’s mind as a reality.
SHARON:
Back in the day, that just wouldn’t have been a thing. It just wouldn’t have been a thing. As I say, it would just have been shorthand for a set of qualities that were believed to be desirable in the world. It normally comes with courage and kindness and generosity is all packaged up with beauty and it’s just like, okay, she was a beautiful princess and they would’ve instantly thought, “Oh, okay, so she’s kind and generous and has all of these much more important qualities.” It’s just shorthand.
ELISE:
Yeah. And then I think you offer something really interesting too. And the second part of that question where we have this battle between ages and the loss of beauty being this tug of war, at least I’m thinking of Snow White, right? But you write, “The evil or foolish women in her story in contrast are those who resolutely refuse to grow like Snow White stepmother who can’t bear to acknowledge that time has passed, that she herself has aged and that her stepdaughter has grown more beautiful than she is or the witch and Rapunzel who can’t bear to acknowledge that her adopted daughter has grown into a woman and grown out of her tower who refuses to move on, but instead wants to stop the clock to keep everything just as it always was. “ That is, I think, very profound insight of a reframe I think.
And we obviously live in a culture that really loves to sort of be anti-aging and to arrest women in time. And we see this now more than ever with the plastic surgery happening where people are getting head transplants and going backwards and it’s so confusing visually, but that idea, the refusal to grow and to change.
SHARON:
And that’s really what it is for me. And I think I’ve always had this sense ever since I was very young that transformation is what it’s all about. I don’t mean transformation for transformation sake. I mean just that we move from state to state and that’s the nature of life and then we die at the end of it and that’s also the nature of life. And it’s not that we shouldn’t try to be healthy or that we shouldn’t try to take care of ourselves and to keep our body functional and moving and whatever. But when I was writing Hagitude, which would’ve been probably around 2021, somewhere around that 22, it really struck me that all of the conversations, for example, that would be suddenly erupting, at least in the UK, I think it was slower in the US, but all of a sudden it was possible to talk about menopause and it had never been done before.
It’s like it was one of those topics that just, “Oh, can’t go there.” And people were talking about it in the context of staying young, not letting menopause get you. And it’s just like, “I’m sorry.” Yeah,
ELISE:
Staying
SHARON:
Sexy. Yeah. But the whole point of it, and that’s what I was trying to do in Hagitude by trying to bring to the fore all of these amazing, powerful, funny, feisty, older women in European myth and fairytales was to say, “Look, it’s a whole new adventure. And if you’re going to refuse it, then you are kind of refusing the trajectory of human life because that’s what it is. “
ELISE:
And there’s so much to aspire to there, but it’s served to us as a malignant crone, right? That part of the cycle, the etymology of that word is carrying. And yeah, I think we’ve talked about this before in previous episodes, but that the menopausal culture here as much as I’m ... And we did a fair amount in my old job to sort of rebrand it or put it back into the culture in a way that was like, let’s have this conversation, but over time it’s become ... And I’m glad we’re talking about HRT and sort of the making this easier for people. And in so many of these conferences and conversations, it’s all about the body, it’s all medical. I’m like, where is the spiritual psychic storytelling here? This is a totally different landscape that’s I think very enticing to those of us who are not quite there, but invite us over the threshold.
It might be a bonfire as you write about. We’re burning up all sorts of parts of ourselves in this process, but let’s make it compelling because it is. I am very grateful to be aging and all I care about is growing myself up. And you mentioned that Animasmundi, this idea of creation and God and I see God or my concept of what we’re doing here is evolution and growth as a mirror for God and that our job here is to become more mature, become wider, become bigger, expand our perspective. It’s definitely not to stay stuck
SHARON:
Well, there’s no story if you remain the same and you get very dull and it’s kind of a refusal of the adventure of life. And that’s not to say that it’s not ... I mean, it is hard, but then so is life. I mean, there are all kinds of philosophical and psychological ideas about how we do grow through suffering and that’s not to say that anybody should wish suffering upon themselves, but we grow through going through hard stuff
ELISE:
100%
SHARON:
You’re going to refuse the profound initiatory experience that is menopause and that is the transition to midlife. For men and women too, midlife transition is still there for men, even though it’s less visceral because they haven’t got quite the same physical component. If you’re going to refuse that initiation, then you’re refusing the story of your life and you’re refusing who you are because who you are cannot be embarmed at age 40. It makes no sense. And then we refuse elders as well. We refuse the concept of elderhood. We all whine about the fact that we’ve got no elders, but we don’t want to become them because we want to be exactly the same that we were when we were 30 or 40. And it’s just so messed up in all possible ways. And I do believe that there are functional ways through it. And all of these archetypal old women in European fairytales that I wrote about both in Hagitude and in Wise Women, my last two books are just there to say, “Yeah, this could be fun.” Yeah.
There are difficult bits, but boy, there’s some deep richness there. I love being almost 65, even though I’m getting a bit creaky. I love it. I’m so at home in my skin if I can use the fairytale language now in a way that I never was when I was young.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, you found that abandoned salke seal skin or whatever the particular metaphor.
When you think about this moment, Sharon, when you think about where we are and what feels like what to use Father Richard Ward’s language, the wisdom pattern or this period of disorder, you wrote about, I think that this was in hagitude where you were writing about the trickster and it was hard to not feel like you were writing about Trump or similar figures. Although Michael, when I had Michael meet on, he was saying Trump is way too dark to be the trickster. He’s the destroyer.
SHARON:
Oh, come on Loki. I mean, Loki’s pretty dark. Loki’s pretty
ELISE:
Dark.
SHARON:
Yeah,
ELISE:
Loki.
SHARON:
And he’s a trickster. Tricksters are not good often. No. They come in and they shake things up in a way that you do not like, but that’s their job. So yeah, I don’t see it quite the same way as
ELISE:
Michael does. Will you talk about that a little bit? Where do you see us in our common collective mythology and some of these characters who are coming? I try to be optimistic about it in the sense that the wrecking law that’s cutting through is a very painful but necessary raising to the ground so that we can build the next iteration on maybe a stabler or better foundation than the last. But how do you see this?
SHARON:
I see it quite like that. Yes. I see it as reflective of the human life cycle. So we’ve just been talking about you’re just in the swing of everything and when you’re approaching midlife and what have you, and you’re finally thinking to yourself, okay, I’ve finally grown up. And maybe if you’re lucky, if you’re very lucky, you’ve got the job or you’ve got a little bit of stability, you’ve got some sense of who you are and then along comes menopause and raises it to the ground. And that’s the nature of life and it’s also the nature of civilizations. And I abhor Trump and those associated characters as much as the next person, but if we didn’t have something to come along and burn it up, what would we do? And I think often what Trickster does, trickster disrupts. I mean, the nature of the archetype of trickster is disruptive.
Trickster is a disruptor archetype and that’s why I don’t believe that you can’t have an evil trickster. Of course you can. Everybody says, “Oh, but trickster is in service to the sacred.” And it’s just, yeah, because disruption is sacred. When something is stagnant, when something is not working, when you’re going down the wrong path and boy, aren’t we, in comes trickster to break it all and say, “Why don’t you just start again?” So I don’t know whether that’s what’s going to happen in the world, but I do see these periods of intense disruption as kind of a sacred moment, potentially. I mean, what we do at the moment is down to all of us. There’s no guarantees is there in anything. There’s no guarantee that you get out of menopause alive, but it’s just this possibility. I’ve always said that trickster holds a mirror up to the culture.
And I actually wrote about that for the first time in 2016 when Trump got elected and we had Boris Johnson and the whole kind of Brexit phenomenon over here. It’s just like, okay, trickster is holding up a mirror to you if it’s a personal trickster or to the culture, if it’s a cultural trickster to say, “You think you’re ex, well, look at you actually. Here’s what you brought into the world. Here’s what you elected. If we’re looking at it in kind of mundane terms, this is who you are. Is that who you want to be? “ And it just allows everybody to go, “Oh my God, there’s the path we were going down.” And it brings it to a point of, it’s almost like a story. It’s the classic pantomimed villain you don’t believe with Trump that it could happen. It couldn’t possibly happen that America would elect a character like that to be president.
It’s a story. Of course it’s a story, but it allows you to go, okay, if we go down that route, here’s all the other stuff that’s bad that goes with it. Now what are we going to do instead? And we can only hope that that’s the way that people go, that they see that and go, “Oh, that’s awful. I want to create something better. We can be better than this. I can be better than this. “ And then they go away and start re-imagining the next phase of the story.
Maybe that’s too hopeful. I don’t know, but that’s- No, I’m with you.
ELISE:
Yeah. And I think it’s been a brutal awakening for a lot of people, but I think a lot more people are awake both sort of psychospiritually but also pragmatically and civically of, oh, this does matter. Politic sure is interested in my life so I need to engage. And I think also it’s done a really good job here of distinguishing for many of us the difference between federal and state power and watching those dynamics is really fascinating. But I think so many of us and you have to do this to be a functioning person but have sort of outsourced so many parts of our lives and now it’s like, well, what do I love and what am I willing to protect here? Who am I in this larger construct and what are my values? And I think so many of us hadn’t really been forced against the wall to even contemplate that, much less defend it.
Yeah. Yeah.
SHARON:
Exactly. And that’s where I do think fairytales come in and ripening is aiming to speak to that, that idea of, okay, everything looks broken. And of course what’s happened initially at least, and I don’t know, maybe people are coming out of it. I don’t know, but everybody goes into this funk. It’s just like, “Oh, it’s so hopeless. Oh, it’s so awful. What am I going to do? I’m going to leave the country. I’m going to dig a hole in the ground and hide myself in it for four years or whatever.” And that’s natural. That’s a natural response. You’re walled up in the tower and then can you claw your way out? Do you just sit there and think at one point, okay, I’ve run out of food. I’ve run out of soul food. There’s nothing to sustain me in this hole that I’ve dug for myself in this funk that I’ve made for myself.
How am I going to claw like Made Marlene my way out of the tower? And what am I going to look for? What am I going to cling to?
What am I going to try to bring into the world? And again, the risk of being really tedious, it’s community and it’s having an image of something beautiful that drives you on. And in a fairytale, something beautiful is often a dress made of stars that reflects the light of the stars or whatever. But again, we know what it means. It’s not about dressing up. It’s what would it look like? How would it feel like to wear a dress made of starlight or that reflected this? And we can kind of see that as something shining that we want to move towards, but the nature of most human lives is that we don’t really know what that is, but we know what it involves. And as you say, it involves the values and those are the values that fairytales put to us, courage and kindness, doing the hard work as well.
It’s not all pretty. And they’re so clearer at kind of showing us that this is how when you begin in catastrophe, it’s not through what you say you want to be, not through virtue signaling, but from the things that you actually embody in the world. And that’s why fairytales have stayed with us for so long, because there have always been situations where that’s mattered and it matters today.
ELISE:
Yeah. And there’s this symbolism of two where there’s this pervasive theme in so many fairytales that I think a lot of us want to reject, but it’s this 10th of garden you can reach and you write about how this housework motif, and again, I’m not putting a stamp on trad wifing, but you talk about just the symbolism of the regularly sweeping and airing out literal and metaphorical spaces about the task of sorting requiring us to be able to discriminate and bring order out of chaos. So many of those fairytales are about separating the wheat from the chaff and that there’s this basic daily quotidian as a metaphor, you can think of sweeping out your mind rather than sweeping out the kitchen, but that is this essential skill that we all need as well, particularly in this time. How do you discern? How do you discriminate?
How do you know what’s what? You have to keep it tidy. You got to keep it organized. You’ve
SHARON:
Got to do the work. And that’s really something that always struck me about fairytales. I love fairytales that have this kind of apprentice motif. One of the images in fairytales that has always haunted me ever since I was a small child is that image of the glass mountain. So it often occurs in stories where the girl has married a husband who’s a bear, let’s say, and he’s only a bear because he’s been enchanted by some wicked witch. So she marries him and everything’s going well and he’s just about to be disenchanted because she hasn’t done something terrible or they’ve made it through to a particular place. And then she does the wrong thing and she unbreaks the spell in a way and then he is taken back to the Wicked Witch who first transformed him into the bear and it seems as if he’s lost to her forever.
And in one of the stories of this kind, a wonderful Scottish story called The Black Bull of Notaway, the girl is faced with. He’s gone beyond the glass mountain. This glass mountain is slippy. You can’t scale it. You can’t get around it because it’s too big. It’s beautiful. It’s shiny, but you can’t climb it. You can’t get to the other side. It’s everything that is unattainable, your lost husband that he’s lost because you may stop. And she apprentices herself to a blacksmith for seven years so that he will make her kind of studied shoes, which will enable her to get a grip literally on the glass mountain. And it’s all full of the fact it’s seven years. I mean, of course that’s a fairytale number of years, but nevertheless, I mean, that’s a serious investment in doing the work. It’s like you’ve got to put it in.
You’ve got to find a way through. Nobody’s going to just lift you up and plunk you on the other side, which going back to our initial conversation, often happens to the fairytale heroes. The woman always has to put in this work, this apprenticeship. And it’s so important, particularly in a world where I think often we forget that we’re not entitled to everything coming to us. And particularly when things are breaking, we have to remember how we do that work and to apprentice ourselves to whoever it is that we think has got the wisdom or the skills or whatever it might be that we need.
ELISE:
I love that too also as a counter to a pernicious idea from fairytales that someone’s going to come and save you, right?
SHARON:
Yeah, but that never happens. I mean, really, when did any fairytale heroine that you have ever encountered outside of Disney or some of the literary fairytales say, “Oh, the nice prince happened along and made it all right.” That never happens in the oral tradition. The fairytale heroine is the one who saves the prince. She’s the one who saves the husband. I mean, okay, she didn’t land him as a bear in the first place, but she was the one who stopped him from being disenchanted. She goes and she fixes it. They save their sisters, they get their sister’s heads back. They do all of these remarkable things and men don’t come into it. There’s some weird thing, and I’m sure it is just Disney. And Charl Perro and the fairytale writers who actively tried to take the stories out of the oral tradition and make them suitable for in the case of Char Pero, the French court.
So they take them out of their working class peasant roots and bring them into the kind of upper classes in the courtly phenomenon. And in doing so, they strip all of these women of all of their power and it’s really very irritating.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, certainly.
SHARON:
Because they always have agency in the originals.
ELISE:
Well, thank you. Your work is so helpful. You are one of our wise elders and we need you. So thank you for all that you do for us, Sharon.
SHARON:
It’s such a pleasure to talk to you.
ELISE:
Sharon Blackie is a gift and all of her books offer so much wisdom. Obviously hagitude if you are approaching perimenopause or menopause just reframes that whole stage as something beautiful, essential, alchemical, the burning up of what was for something new, literally figuratively. And I think at these moments of time, there’s nothing more powerful than story to remind us of who we are, where we came from, how we have been here before, and how those who preceded us managed to get out of it. So let me read to you just a short bit. This is from Ripening, her newest book, which was the subject of our conversation today. “We need somehow to let their energies enter into us and then find a way to alchemize them. Stories show us how. The idea of catastrophic collapse is fast becoming the dominant cultural myth of our times and doomsayers everywhere are tolling the bell that heralds the end of days.
“But to find our way out of the dark woods that are closing in around us, we need a trail of breadcrumbs, stories which can lift us out of despair and powerlessness and propel us onto a path of wise action and deeply rooted hope. When all our old certainties are crumbling and in a world in which all bets see currently to be off, fairytales show us how to recognize the creative possibilities that bubble up to the surface when broken systems are cracked open. Difficult times can draw out our deepest and most exquisite creativities and to be alive in this world at this time is to stand on the threshold of their great adventure.” All right friends, I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it.
That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you. I