Learn to be still

Monthly newsletter, September 2025

Read on for news of my first residential women’s retreat in six years (places are selling fast!), a daylong London workshop in December, a 20% discount on the new Wise Women paperback, reading recommendations, and more. There’s a lot going on in this month’s newsletter, and this email might be cut short by your email provider (especially if it’s the dreaded gmail …). So please click on the title to go through to Substack and read the full thing in your browser. And while you’re there, do join the conversation and leave a comment!

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Dear friends

There’s an old Eagles song that haunts me sometimes; it’s called ‘Learn to be Still’.

You thought you could find happiness
Just over that green hill
You thought you would be satisfied
But you never will
Learn to be still

I’ve often berated myself with it, in the context of my various wanderings and uprootings over the past couple of decades – until I learned to make peace with all that and see it not as a flaw, but as a series of blessings. The places I’ve lived, as I’m so fond of repeating, have been my greatest teachers in this life. Nevertheless, stillness of any kind has never been my natural state. I’ve always been too busy doing. Even over the past couple of decades, as I’ve recognised this and striven for better balance, every time a space opens up, I let something in to fill it up too soon. I’ve so perfectly encapsulated that basket-bearing old woman in Kathleen Jamie’s poem ‘The Creel’, which I included in If Women Rose Rooted:

It’s not sea birds or peat she’s carrying,
not fleece, nor the herring bright
but her fear that if ever she put it down
the world would go out like a light.

Ah, the vast, dysfunctional hubris of imagining that the world so absolutely relies on you! I’m sure most women have it, to some degree or another; I am thoroughly pickled in its abundant aspic, and always have been. And yet, although I still firmly believe that a good part of my job here is to be in service to this world, I’m slowly learning to shed the more bonkers manifestations of that particular character flaw. Since I handed in the manuscript for my next book at the end of June (full announcement finally coming within two weeks, I promise!) I’ve been so very determined not to sit right back down at my desk and start writing a new one – even though a couple of ideas have already begun to take hold. Apart from writing this Substack, and responding to the usual teaching/ lecturing things and a seemingly neverending stream of podcast invitations (how can there be so many podcasts in the world??) and other enquiries that need attention, I’ve shut the study door as often as I can. Instead, I’m using my hands. Baking bread. Making jam. Playing with a bit more patchwork quilting. Or even – shock horror, and in the middle of the day – curling up to read a novel! Heading off on longer walks, now that the air is fresher and the light is warmer and the ravening hordes of tourists are slowly beginning to dissipate. Letting the well fill up. Trying to avoid that insistent ‘back to school’ energy of September which is usually so welcome to me. It isn’t welcome at all, right now.

(It did amuse me, a couple of days after I’d started drafting this newsletter, to find the lovely Katherine May expressing the same thoughts. I’ve always known I’m not entirely alone in all this!)

Well, this all sounds very fine, I’m sure, but my trouble is that although I have a permanent on-switch, I also have a very rarely used but equally permanent off-switch. Once I get into the swing of being still, everything that interferes with my reclamation of my own time and energy feels like an assault on my autonomy and makes me intensely grumpy.

As always in my life, the trick is trying to attain something remotely resembling balance. One of the strange things about September is that it always seems to me to be a more appropriate time to set intentions for the year ahead than New Year’s Day does. Perhaps that’s because some of us – especially those of us who had six years of higher education following immediately on from our school days – never fully recover from September marking the beginning of a genuinely brand new year. And I can’t ever seem to properly feel it on January 1: it’s just another winter day, and even if the Christmas holidays are coming to an end, it doesn’t ever, out there in the natural world, feel like it’s marking any kind of real transition. Now, though, the days are shortening rapidly, the leaves are thinking about turning, the garden plants have given up the ghost and the plums and damsons are letting go of the trees. Everything feels different; everything is beginning to fall. Don’t you feel it too?

So, working on balance for the rest of the season will be my equivalent of a New Year’s Resolution. Can I find – within the same day, and maybe even at the same time as I’m working on a book – a way to carve out space for all the things I love to do, and retain the strength I’m finding all too easily right now, to say no to things when life runs the risk of becoming too busy? It’ll be Equinox soon, and that’s also a time for thinking about balance, so maybe this year I’ll finally crack the code. And this year, finding that stillness, that balance, feels more essential than ever. The human world is so out of balance, so full of rage and judgement, so full of extremes; the natural world is more changeable too. This summer here in Britain started too early, was too hot and dry, also too extreme in too many ways. If we let ourselves be swept away by the tides of extremity, we’ll drown. Like the young heron who has been hanging around our riverbanks recently, flapping about and not seeming quite to have got the hang of being heron yet, we all need to find our own still point amidst the turmoil of those fast-flowing waters. I’m going to be working hard at finding mine.

As always, I wish you all the blessings of whichever season you find yourself in – and the balanced blessings of whichever of the two annual Equinoxes you find yourself approaching.

Sharon

New residential women’s retreat: A Psyche the Size of Earth

I can’t quite believe it, but it’s a full six years since I last offered an in-person residential retreat for the lovely women who read my books and follow my work – and now the day has finally dawned again. I’m offering a signature retreat, ‘A Psyche the Size of Earth’, in which we’ll learn how to fall right into the heart of the land’s dreaming. The retreat will run from Monday February 23, 2026 (late afternoon) through Saturday February 28 (late morning) and it’ll take place at the majestic and wonderfully rewilded Broughton Sanctuary, near Skipton, on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. I’m delighted to be working with the brilliant team at Broughton on this and other projects of theirs; it feels like a very natural home for my work.

Early-bird registration has been available to my paid subscribers for a week, but the remaining places are now open to everyone. The original post describing the retreat was already quite long, and I don’t want this newsletter to be the length of a telephone directory (remember them?), so what I’m going to do is point you to last week’s post for paid subscribers, now with the paywall removed, where you can find all the details along with the booking link. Half the places are already taken, and news will go out to Broughton’s community on Monday, so if you’re interested and are able to move quickly on this one, it’s probably advisable. (If you want to skip straight to the booking link at Broughton, it’s here. But please do read the post as well, for context and for more information.)

Note added to say that currently (Sunday 7 September) single rooms are showing as sold out but some of the doubles are going to be made available as singles, so please do keep checking back on the Broughton web page.

One-day workshop with Alternatives London, Saturday December 6

I’m delighted to be heading back to a wintry London with the lovely people at Alternatives for a second year running, to offer a daylong workshop, this time around on ‘Calling and the post-Heroic Journey’.

Among the earliest recorded European beliefs is the idea that each of us is born with a ‘calling’: we came into the world – to this particular place, at this particular time – for a reason. This philosophy can be traced at least as far back as Plato, who suggested that before each of us is born, our soul selects a purpose and a pattern for us to live out during our time on Earth. Plato also believed that each soul is accompanied into this life by a ‘daimon’: a spiritual companion, a ’necessary angel' who acts as a ‘carrier of our destiny’ and helps to ensure we fulfil it.

And so we all have this hidden but innate vision which expresses who we truly are: a kind of concealed invisible potential. We might think of it as an acorn. The acorn, like any seed, carries within it the image of, and the potential to become, the oak tree that it might eventually be – given the circumstances that would allow it to flourish. To express our calling is to allow ourselves to uniquely express one mode of being, one unique way of embodying what it is to be human, one facet of the creative life force of the universe.

In this workshop, we’ll delve deeply into the concept of calling, and work with ways of revealing and remembering what it is that we’re here for.

I’m so looking forward to this one; full details and tickets – £95 for early birds till 9 October, and £125 afterwards – at this link.

The Fairy Tale Heroine Oracle is with us!

Finally, on Tuesday, The Fairy Tale Heroine Oracle will be published. It’s available from Hay House/ Penguin Random House, in all the places where you might order books and cards. I thought you might like to see one of the Instagram reels that the lovely Tom at Hay House produced, animating one of the cards, with my voiceover of the guidebook text. (It might be clearer in fullscreen view.)

The cards in this deck are divided into four suits, each of which represents a critical aspect of the Fairy Tale Heroine’s Journey which I’ve written about so much here on this Substack: your journey.

• Tasks cards represent the work that must be undertaken by the fairy tale heroine to grow and transform, and ultimately to reach her goal.

• Places cards depict the magical locations through which the heroine will have to pass—and in which she’ll be tested—during her journey.

• Guides cards characterise the allies and antagonists she’ll meet along the way.

• Tools cards portray the objects that empower her to fulfil her destiny.

The archetypal images, characters and motifs at the heart of this deck are designed to act like keys to unlock your inner wisdom, and to offer guidance and inspiration at every point of your long, winding journey through life. If you’d like to find out more, there’s a page on my website with a few extra images. And I look forward to hearing what you all think of the deck!

Wise Women paperback preorder discount code

It’s a bumper autumn: on October 2, the paperback edition of Wise Women will be published, and the team at Virago are offering my readers a special 20% discount, if you preorder directly from them. The code WISE will give you 20% off at the Virago store until the 1^st October at 11:59pm (on the paperback only). Please use this link to enter the code and obtain your discount: https://bit.ly/3GkR2eL.

‘An extra­ordinary selection of stories … beautifully and vividly retold, elaborating the bare-bones structures of folk tales into delightful literary short stories that will be enjoyed by a wider readership than the wise older women for whom the book is intended.’ – Times Literary Supplement

An evening at Westwood Books, Sedbergh

I seem to be turning into a creature of habit; this year, I’m also delighted to be doing another autumn event at my local bookshop, the very excellent Westwood Books in Sedbergh. It’s on Friday 10 October at 6.30pm, and right now it has no particular theme. I’m just going to see what stories show up and want to be held in our hearts on the night. I suspect there might be a wise woman or two among them, and I suspect that there might also be a story or two about a feisty old woman from the north of England. I like this format: normally, my bookshop events have been centred around a particular book and a more rehearsed talk. This time, I’m going to be making it up as I go along.

Tickets (£5, redeemable against a signed book) can be found here.

Reading recommendations

NONFICTION

Back in November 2022, when we had recently understood we were going to need to leave Wales and move up to my homelands in the north of England, I visited the lovely market town of Alnwick in Northumberland while house-hunting, and had a beachcombing walk with the delightful

Caro Giles

, author of a very fine memoir entitled Twelve Moons. Two of Caro’s four daughters joined us on the walk; all I knew about them was that they didn’t deal well with school, that Caro was homeschooling them and was embroiled in constant battles with the local authority to try to get them help. I didn’t quite know what to expect, but by the end of that walk I was thoroughly enchanted with those two remarkable, utterly original daughters-of-the-sea, who could never possibly have been confined within and conformed to the school system, but were bringing something unique and intensely beautiful to the world – while by ‘normal’ standards just being thought of as ‘troubled’. Anyway: Caro’s second book, just published and called Unschooled, is the story of those daughters, of her fight for justice, and her own struggle as the single parent of four daughters to retain something of her own self amidst a challenging and full-on experience of motherhood. Unschooled is highly recommended, whether you’re a mother or whether, like me, you’re just obsessed with the many shades of women’s experience and all the ways in which we struggle to understand who we are. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

It’s not by choice that Caro Giles is educating her daughters at home. Like so many families with children who don’t fit into mainstream schools, her family has become marginalised by an education system that is chronically underfunded and unable to support special educational needs. While still a school teacher, Caro had no alternative but to leave her job and take on a different role at home, as full-time educator and advocate for her wonderful girls. It was the obvious thing to do, because it was the only choice they had, and Caro made the decision unaware of just how much it would overwhelm her identity as a woman and challenge to the very core what it means to be a mother.

Unschooled is a searing memoir about the love and true grit of a family forging its own path. With lyrical prose and unflinching honesty, Caro chronicles the relentless bureaucracy and isolation of being a single mother navigating a system that refuses to see her children. Through her own story, Caro interrogates a society that nurtures conformity rather than difference, and a culture that continues to place the burden of childcare on mothers. Being unschooled has become an ongoing act of resistance and a political statement, one that demands a more inclusive, compassionate education system that recognises and supports every child’s unique needs.

FICTION

Well, I did say that I’d been finding some time to curl up with a novel or two, and this one has been the pick of the crop. It’s The Listeners, by Maggie Stiefvater, and once I started I devoured it in two days and could hardly bear to put it down. I’m not much of a reviewer, and can only tell you that I was captivated by the characters (including the sweetwater) as well as by the progression of the narrative and the highly satisfactory ending. I don’t seem to be alone in my love for the book; it’s already garnered a whole host of delirious reviews, including from Robert Macfarlane: ‘A marvel: strange, witty, moving, exuberant ... at once gloriously extravagant and perfectly poised.’ Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

She still recalled the first time she saw the Avallon. It called to her; she listened ...

The Avallon Hotel offers unrivalled luxury in the wild Appalachian Mountains, its curative sweetwater washing away the troubles of high society. June 'Hoss' Hudson, a local girl turned general manager, has known its power since she first stepped through the century-old doors – and into the fold of the Gilfoyle family, the hotel's aristocratic owners. But in 1942, the real world intrudes. War comes to the Avallon dressed in fine furs and government suits. Under the State Department's watchful eye, the Gilfoyle heir welcomes three hundred enemy diplomats and Nazi sympathisers. And June must play host.

As dark alliances and unexpected desires crack the Avallon's polished veneer, not every guest is who they seem. Not least Agent Tucker Minnick, listening for secrets through the hotel walls, whose coal tattoo threatens to betray his past and undo June. And more troubling is the secret she has guarded for years – that the mountain waters can harm as much as heal ...

If you enjoy it, try Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races, which I read about ten years ago now. It’s a young adult novel (The Listeners is her first novel for adults), but if you love water horse stories, you’ll likely love this one.