The long, slow slide

Monthly newsletter, July 2022

Please scroll down for news of the opening of my new yearlong Hagitude program, for reading recommendations and this month’s poem.

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Dear friends,

This has been an unusual week; I made my first trip out into the ‘real world’ since lockdown began. With a new literary agent and new writing contracts with two publishers, including one I hadn’t yet met in person (more on that piece of news next month!), I really needed to head to London for a couple of days. Although, as one of the ‘severely immunosuppressed’, I’ve now had FIVE doses of the COVID vaccine, and so should have a few antibodies lurking around somewhere, it’s still a little scary to think of going anywhere without a mask. But it’s really hard to be taken out to lunch while wearing one ... Well, I seem to have survived it, and it was so lovely to meet such key people in my writing life in person, rather than via the inevitable Zoom calls. As well as to celebrate the imminent publication of Hagitude (only two months to go!) and the birth of two new books/writing projects. I’m heading back there in a fortnight to spend four days recording the Hagitude audiobook (first time I’ve narrated one of my own audiobooks, so all very exciting as well as potentially exhausting) and was delighted to find that the recording studio is near Archway; through all my student and postdoc years I lived around that part of North London, and I’m really looking forward to the chance to revisit a few old stomping grounds in Highgate, Muswell Hill and Crouch End.

I have a bit of a strange relationship with London. As you’ll all know, I have a distinct penchant for living in wild places. But I lived in and around London for the best part of a decade, starting in 1982 when I began my PhD in neuroscience. Although I was very glad to move away from an urban environment, the truth is I do retain some fascination with the city. There are stories in the land wherever you go, and in an ancient city like London you can feel them seeping up through every crack in the pavement, nestling into the walls and hiding in the shadows of those old narrow streets. Sometimes it’s easier to imagine ourselves as part of a living ecosystem, or as part of a storied landscape, if we live in the country. Here, we can more easily identify the other-than-humans who inhabit it along with us; we can more clearly see the soil and understand the impact of the geology; we can more easily piece together the rivers, hills, fields and forests which are the building blocks of a particular, unique landscape. But urban areas are ecosystems too, and although it might not always be quite so clear to us, everything in them is just as interconnected: the weather, the waterways, the soil, the animals, birds and trees.

There is a tendency to imagine cities as alive only with the energy of humans, and to see city buildings as dead entities constructed from steel and concrete, possessing none of the ‘soul’ of vernacular architecture, which is more likely to be based on natural materials and local construction methods. And yet, and yet … Canadian literature professor Sean Kane, in his 1998 book Wisdom of the Mythtellers, quotes the following anecdote: ‘The Aboriginal teacher Bobby Macleod said to Robert Lawlor, while walking through downtown Sydney, “With your mentality, these tall buildings are the result of the dreams and plans of architects, engineers, and builders. But the Aborigine also sees that the stones and bricks themselves have an inner potential – a dreaming to become a structure.”’ I’ve often thought that if we were to look at our urban environments in this way – not as dead places, but as places that have their own dreaming, their own process of becoming – then we might develop very different relationships with them. Imagine a city in which all the inhabitants spoke to their apartment buildings just as they’d greet a person in the street (or a crow, if you’re like me!). Wouldn’t those buildings of concrete and steel begin to blossom then, in their own ways?

But in the meantime, I’m delighted to be back home in the Welsh mountains, back in my newly planted little garden which is full of flowers and bees and butterflies. Maeve, the Kitten of the Apocalypse, has developed a new dance routine which involves leaping up into the air to try to catch them. Happily, they seem easily to be able to outwit her. Our old-lady sheepdog, Nell, prefers ambling along the path cut through our wildflower field, where the sheep don’t get to go.

I’m also delighted that we’re past Summer Solstice, and on the long, slow slide into the dark half of the year: my natural habitat. For now, the days are still long; it’s light outside and the birds are in full-throated song at 4am. For the next couple of months the world is going to feel frenetic, as if trying to cram all of the bright growth, all of the frantic, flowery shoutings of ‘look at me! – I’m so fine’ into the dog days of summer which are still ahead. At this time of year, I’ve always felt frantic too. Summer can seem like such a hard taskmaster; the peacefulness, the ability to slow down and rest, the depth of creative work which is so easy in winter – none of that seems possible at this time of year. But those days will come, soon enough. And while looking forward to them, I’m still taking the time to sit in the garden, to quite literally smell the newly planted roses.

Wishing you all the blessings of the season,

Sharon

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Hagitude – the new program is open for registration

I’m delighted to say that my yearlong Hagitude membership program is now open for early enrolment, and after a couple of years with no new courses, I’m so looking forward to this adventure. If you're hovering around perimenopause, menopause, or in your postmenopausal years – or if you’re younger, and would like to be thinking ahead – do come and join me in bringing together a vibrant and diverse tribe of women to explore the ways in which we can flourish during what is so often portrayed as a time of decline. How can we prepare ourselves for yet another searing transformation, and move into the second half of life with a new sense of vitality, creativity and vision?

The Hagitude program offers the opportunity to learn together (with and from each other), to create together, and ultimately, to become together. This program is far from a passive learning experience: it’s a rich, creative and mythopoetic immersion into meaning-making with a community of likeminded others. Together we’ll create the rituals and resources needed to inspire an elder-woman revolution in this challenged and challenging world which needs us more than ever. Led by a team of lovely women, and with an exciting line-up of guest teachers, here are just a few of the things we'll be talking and learning about:

• How can we find continued growth, meaning and authenticity in the second half of life?

• How can we uncover, and embrace, our own unique, archetypal Inner Hag?

• How might we work with the stories of the little-known but powerful elder women in myth and folklore – both to inspire us to create new stories of our own, and to reimagine our journey to and through elderhood?

• How can women elders pass down their deep feminine wisdom for the benefit of the wider Earth community, in these ever-more challenging times?

The program begins October 1 and is now open for early registration. If you'd like to pay in instalments, this option is only open until August 1, so do head over there soon if that’s your preference. It’s priced at £260 for the year, whichever way you pay. Lots more information by clicking on the button below.

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Reading recommendation

Last week I finished one of the most beautiful novels I’ve read in a very long time; it’s rare these days that a novel can make me cry. That novel is Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St John Mandel. Her book Station Eleven was very clever, but I didn’t much like it; it didn’t much move me. This one, though ... well, if I tell you why I loved it I’ll give the game away a little, so I can’t. Let’s just say it’s a novel full of grace, and its very general premise is that no matter what or how or why it exists, this world is a beautiful blessing anyway. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

The award-winning author of Station Eleven returns with a story of time travel that precisely captures the reality of our current moment . . .

In 1912, eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew crosses the Atlantic, exiled from English polite society. In British Columbia, he enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and for a split second all is darkness, the notes of a violin echoing unnaturally through the air. The experience shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later Olive Llewelyn, a famous writer, is traveling all over Earth, far away from her home in the second moon colony. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in time, he uncovers a series of lives upended: the exiled son of an aristocrat driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel is a novel that investigates the idea of parallel worlds and possibilities, that plays with the very line along which time should run. Perceptive and poignant about art, and love, and what we must do to survive, it is incredibly compelling.

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This month’s poem

The Treekeeper’s Tale

Pascal Petit

I have set up house in the hollow trunk of a giant redwood.
My bed is a mat of pine needles. Cones drop their spirals

on my face as I sleep. I have the usual flying dreams.
But all I know when I wake is that this bark is my vessel

as I hurtle through space. Once, I was rocked in a cradle
carved from a coast redwood, its lullabies were my coracle.

I searched for that singing grove and became its guardian.
There are days when the wind plays each tree

like a new instrument in the forest-orchestra.
On wild nights mine is a flute. After years of solitude

I have started to hear its song. I lie staring at the stars
until the growth rings enclose me in hoops –

choirs of concentric colours, as if my tree is remembering
the music of the spheres. And I almost remember speaking

my first word, how it flew out of my mouth like a dove.
I have forgotten how another of my kind sounds.

From: The Treekeeper’s Tale, Seren, 2008

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