If Women Rose Rooted Quotes

“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.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“Long before God the Father, there she was – God the Mother. Where did she vanish to, this great mother goddess? How did we women become so completely dispossessed? It wasn’t that I wanted to replace a male god with a female god; it wasn’t that I wanted to find a religion at all. I was simply looking for some sense that women might have worth. And I found it: there in the old stories of my own native land, I found it. Filled with images of women creating, women weaving the world into being, I took up knitting. Thread by thread, stitch by stitch, I began to knit myself back into being. I had never thought of myself as being a particularly creative soul, but I discovered that creativity was a wide-ranging affair. I simply thought about what brought me joy, and I began to cultivate it. I dug my hands into this strange foreign soil, and I began to grow things. I began to reacquaint myself with the soft animal object that was my body. Slowly, spending more and more time outside, focusing on the wisdom of my senses rather than on what was going on inside my head, I began to weave myself back into the fabric of the Earth. Some”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“We are not separate from this Earth; we are a part of it, whether we fully feel it in our bodies yet or not.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“It’s a contract you see, people and the land. You care for it, and it cares for you.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“We can possess all the fine goods that our civilisation has to offer us; we can have important jobs, and social status, and tone our bodies on all the latest machines – but without a sense of belonging to the world, we feel empty and our lives lack meaning.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“Whilst the Earth Mother finds immense comfort, safety and satisfaction in marriage, domesticity, growing food and children, and enjoys order around her, the Creative Rainbow Mother regularly feels the need to fly free. And if she can’t . . . well, the flip side of her is the Crazy Woman: depressed, unable to touch her power, tied, numb, self-medicating, addicted. Crazy Woman breaks out if we try to spend all our time out in the world, or serving others.’ The”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“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.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“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”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“Creation, and so creativity, is the act of giving life, the nourishing and enhancement of life, in whatever way you choose to do it. And when we find our individual creative power, we can harness it and use it to fight for what we care about, to remake the world in our own image. But what might such a creative woman look like, and how might she do such a thing?”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“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.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rise Rooted: The Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“I see someone desperately hanging on to the cliff-edge of control with bleeding, shredded fingernails and gritted teeth, wanting all the while to just let go and scream her tired heart out as she fell.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“Whenever I was in the woods, on my own, I would have one ear pricked for the sound of approaching footsteps. I would always make sure that I knew what time sundown was, how to find the path back. I started to carry a pepper spray. I was full of impotent rage. When I saw men jogging through the trees I envied them their freedom, and this is in the full knowledge that men, too, can be attacked in quiet places. But the men I saw seemed to think they were invulnerable, just as I had on that summer day; the women, on the other hand, were more like me, all too aware of how “the great outdoors” can be a dangerous place for a lone female, even in broad daylight.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“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.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“It is a Call to Life – a full, authentic life. It is a Call to rise from the half-sleep of our existence, and take up our part in the great unfolding of the world. To become a Voice of the Wells. We must answer the Call, or forever be lost in the Wasteland. For many women, that Call occurs at midlife. Dante expressed it perfectly, in the opening lines of The Divine Comedy: ‘Midway upon the journey of my life I found myself in a dark wood, where the right way was lost.’ Most women experience major change in these middle years: physical change or professional; social or psychological; changes in our family and our relationships. Our children leave home. We are overtaken by disillusionment and dissatisfaction. We find ourselves unhappy in our jobs, in our marriages. We develop physical illnesses, anxiety or depression. Rage and grief threaten to overwhelm us. We begin to contemplate our own mortality. We question who we are, who we might have been, who we might yet become. We question our spiritual values and our material values. We begin to wonder what we are doing with our lives, what meaning we might find. We open our eyes a little wider, and take in the world beyond ourselves. For the first time, we see the Wasteland for what it is.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“Sometimes, if you have grown up in certain ways, a fear of being seen to fail can outweigh the personal cost of continuing to live in impossible circumstances.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“There are times when you need the extremity of rock, the hardness of an old, cold place against which you can measure yourself. There are times when you need to retreat to the wilderness. But there are times when you need the subtle flow of a river, the song of a waterfall and the deep, slow presence of trees. Times when you need to Return. There are times for holding on, and times for letting go.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“I felt no love for this world, no sense of belonging. I felt separate from it, closed in, claustrophobic. Some days, walking through identical grey suburban streets to school, I felt as if I were being buried alive.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“When the Wind Blows,”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“She dreams of a night sky from which the stars have not fled in horror, and of wild-pawed, stinking foxes yapping in a moonlit wood. She can see it; she can almost taste it.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“Because it’s time for us to rise up and take back our role as caretakers and stewards not just of the land but of the children, too. I think a lot of women are doing this now, with more homeschooling, with community projects, with educational projects that operate a little bit outside the norms of our patriarchal education system.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“More and more in all of my work I find the rhythm and flow which came out of that time with the land and its creatures, which is now part of me. I’ve learned how to show up and pay attention in a new more authentic way which informs my daily life.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-Changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“If women remember that once upon a time we sang with the tongues of seals and flew with the wings of swans, that we forged our own paths through the dark forest while creating a community of its many inhabitants, then we will rise up rooted, like trees.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-Changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“The Eagle and the Raven,”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“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.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rise Rooted: The Journey to Authenticity and Belonging