Winter traditions

Living meaningfully in the year ahead

Read on for a couple of special subscriber offers/discounts for the festive season, a new gathering on If Women Rose Rooted/ The Rooted Woman Oracle, and for this month’s reading recommendation and poem. This message might be truncated by your email provider, so please think of clicking through to Substack and reading it in your browser. And while you’re there, do join the conversation and leave a comment!

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Dear friends,

I’m always very cautious about New Year routines, and haven’t gone near New Year resolutions for many a year. Nor do I ever think of trying to make a plan for the year ahead. I avoid that kind of plan, because if you are the kind of person who imagines not meeting such a thing as a failure, you run the risk of closing yourself off to possibility while you insist on following it just because you said you would on January 1.

Nevertheless, around this time every year, I do always pick up on some routines which always help me focus my attention on living meaningfully in the year ahead. The difference for me is that I plan such routines around Winter Solstice, rather than New Year, which is why, every year, I take a roughly two-week internet and email break from Solstice onwards. More often than not, this is the only proper ‘holiday’ I have in any given year, and since I almost died from lymphoma two years and ten months ago, it’s become even more important to me. Every year, it surprises me to find that some people are outraged by this, and this year is no exception. Apparently it’s at best a dereliction of duty, or at worst an utterly inconsiderate refusal to accept other people’s right to manage my time, that I should insist on having a break. Ho hum.

I celebrate Winter Solstice more than I recognise Christmas or New Year, because the fact that it is grounded in a physical reality – the shortest day; the still point around which the world turns – matters to me. There’s a real shift happening at this time to this beautiful planet which shelters and homes us, and at that point when we hold our collective breath here in the northern hemisphere, and begin finally to believe in the slow return of the light, this for me is the moment to mark. Whatever else you might celebrate during this season, do think of taking a moment to honour that pause in the long dance of the year. Here in the UK, solstice happens this year on Friday, 22 December, at 03.27. I’ll be there, lighting a candle in the morning dark; I’d love to think some of you were doing the same thing, at the same time. And that evening, a Winter Solstice feast will happen for the first time in this old stone house, which we’ve occupied now for just eight and a half months.

The much-longed-for break will begin, and I won’t be working or answering work-related emails until Wednesday January 3. During that time, I’ll be spending some time getting my head properly into my next book, Hearth; other than that, I intend to spend a lot of time curled up by the stove with books, walking up in the hills and down by the river, reflecting on and taking stock of the year just gone. That taking stock is especially important this year, after this move back to the north of England where I was born. And it’s important because I think that, since I reached my sixties, there has been a very strong sense of time speeding up. A sense of needing to really focus in on what I’m here for, and how my work needs to evolve for the times. That circling back to the place I was born also has me circling back to my childhood – to the places and people that made me, for better or worse. I have a feeling that I’ll be doing a lot of circling back and taking stock in the years ahead. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be, as we slip into elderhood. In Hagitude, I wrote this:

In the last part of our life, focus is everything. The years when we imagined we needed to be all things to all people are long gone, along with our dilettante days: the days of experimenting with this and that, of adopting and discarding different personas, of reinventing ourselves for every season of the year. Now, it’s time to get serious. To let the inessential fall away, and focus on the essence of who we are. What is it that is left of us when Old Bone Mother comes along and strips that old, decaying flesh from our bones? Who is it that we are; what is it that we feel we are here to do? What do we imagine these final years of our lives are really for?

I ask myself these questions every year at the time of the long dark, and the older I get, the more urgent the questions become. For me, the urgency is more in asking the questions with an open heart and mind, rather than anticipating a set of simple answers. As in the old stories of the Grail, the Question That Must Be Asked is always more important than the answer it provokes. Each year, what seem to be the same old questions somehow lead me, each time, down a different path. Nothing is new, but at the same time, everything is new. So that’s what I’ll be doing with myself over the festive season: the same thing I’ve done for years. Locking the door, lighting the stove, thinking about authenticity, and what it might look like to live fully and meaningfully in the year to come.

I hope that all those of you in the northern hemisphere will find some time to be with yourself in these fertile days of the long dark. But as always, I’m wishing for you all the joys and abundances of whichever season you find yourself in, and all good wishes for the year ahead. My next newsletter will be with you on January 6, after I’ve emerged from my wintering cocoon.

Sharon

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Special subscription offer for ‘The Art of Enchantment’

To celebrate Winter Solstice, my favourite time of year, I’m offering free subscribers a one-time discount of 20% on paid annual subscriptions, which is redeemable up until December 31 only; that makes the price of an annual subscription just £44, or £3.66 per month.

Please use this link to accept the offer: https://sharonblackie.substack.com/e2073002

There are lots of goodies coming up at ‘The Art of Enchantment’ in 2024, and I’m especially delighted to be offering, for paid subscribers, a live Zoom call as part of my monthly Fairy Tale Salons. This will allow us to more deeply explore the psychological processes that are illuminated by these powerful and wise old stories, and to take a deeper dive into the themes and archetypal imagery. Dates for the first quarter of the year will be provided shortly.

Here’s what’s been offered to paid subscribers during the past month:

1. An audio conversation with writer Louisa Thomsen Brits: ‘On Being Held in the Arms of Death’.

2. A sneak preview of a video explaining The Rooted Woman Oracle.

3. An interactive Fairy Tale Salon on ‘Valemon the White Bear-King’.

4. An exclusive essay on place from 2008.

Next week, there’ll be another exclusive podcast episode: a conversation with the wonderful Sophie Anderson, author of The House with Chicken Legs, The Girl Who Speaks Bear, The Snow Girl, and more.

Meanwhile, in the Substack chat function for paid subscribers, many of you have been sharing your suggestions for places to visit during pilgrimages to Ireland and Wales, and having conversations about tarot (this was a long and rich one!) and motifs in folklore.

For members of The Hearth: as well as my four online retreats with you, in 2024 I’ll be offering some extra exclusive workshops/ talks with guest teachers and storytellers, focused, as ever, around the mythic imagination. Again, more details coming out to you soon.

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50% discount on online, on-demand courses

And for the same seasonal reasons, I’m delighted for the second year running to offer you all a 50% discount on any of the self-study, on-demand courses on my website, including recordings of Bone Cave gatherings. You can browse what’s on offer here: https://sharonblackie.net/self-study/ and the code can be used on any of the courses/ recordings on this page.

The discount code is 50WINTER2023.

This coupon will expire on December 31, 2023.

IMPORTANT! Please enter the discount code carefully, and be sure that it has been applied before you make your payment. We can't give partial or complete refunds for errors. Just underneath the box in which you enter your last name as you sign up for a course, you'll see a link in pale orange: 'Have a coupon?' You must click here to enter your coupon code before you go to the payment section. If, after you've entered the code and passed to the payment section, you refresh the page, or decide on a different payment method, the coupon code will need to be applied again. If in doubt, just check that the final amount you're paying is 50% less than the advertised price before you complete your purchase.

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NEW: February 10 Bone Cave gathering – If Women Rose Rooted, and The Rooted Woman Oracle

I thought you all might like to see this video, made by the lovely people at Hay House, in which I describe three cards, one from each suit of The Rooted Woman Oracle.

For more info, please do head over to this page on my website, where you’ll also find pre-order information – yes, this deck is available worldwide.

Mark your diaries: on February 10^th, from 15.00 – 19.00 UK time, I’ll be offering a Bone Cave session on working with this oracle deck, and its genesis in If Women Rose Rooted.

PLEASE REGISTER HERE

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Reading recommendations

I’ve been saving up a pile of books for my winter break and, in the effort to clear space for said thing, haven’t had much time for reading. However, I was delighted to receive a proof copy of geologist and psychotherapist Ruth Allen’s new book, Weathering, coming up from Ebury Press on 28 March, 2024, and available now for pre-order. Ruth and I share a literary agent, and as a wannabe psychogeologist and lover of rock, I’ve long been a fan of her thoughtful work. It’s a wise and fascinating book, and much recommended. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Rocks and mountains have withstood aeons of life on our planet – gradually eroding, shifting, solidifying, and weathering. We might spend a little less time on earth, but humans are also weathering: evolving and changing as we're transformed by the shifting climates of our lives and experiences. So, what might these ancient natural forms have to teach us about resilience and change?

In a stunning exploration of our own connection to these enduring forms, outdoor psychotherapist and geologist Ruth Allen takes us on a journey through deep time and ancient landscapes, showing how geology – which has formed the bedrock of her own adult life and approach to therapy – can offer us a new way of thinking about our own grief, change and boundaries. In a world shaken by physical, political, and medical disasters, Weathering argues for a deeper understanding of the ground beneath our feet to better serve ourselves and the world we live in.

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This month’s poem

Someone very kind pointed me in the direction of this beautiful poem recently; thank you, whoever you are – I’m afraid I lost your details!

Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods

Tishani Doshi

for Monika

Girls are coming out of the woods,
wrapped in cloaks and hoods,
carrying iron bars and candles
and a multitude of scars, collected
on acres of premature grass and city
buses, in temples and bars. Girls
are coming out of the woods
with panties tied around their lips,
making such a noise, it’s impossible
to hear. Is the world speaking too?
Is it really asking, What does it mean
to give someone a proper resting? Girls are
coming out of the woods, lifting
their broken legs high, leaking secrets
from unfastened thighs, all the lies
whispered by strangers and swimming
coaches, and uncles, especially uncles,
who said spreading would be light
and easy, who put bullets in their chests
and fed their pretty faces to fire,
who sucked the mud clean
off their ribs, and decorated
their coffins with briar. Girls are coming
out of the woods, clearing the ground
to scatter their stories. Even those girls
found naked in ditches and wells,
those forgotten in neglected attics,
and buried in river beds like sediments
from a different century. They've crawled
their way out from behind curtains
of childhood, the silver-pink weight
of their bodies pushing against water,
against the sad, feathered tarnish
of remembrance. Girls are coming out
of the woods the way birds arrive
at morning windows—pecking
and humming, until all you can hear
is the smash of their miniscule hearts
against glass, the bright desperation
of sound—bashing, disappearing.
Girls are coming out of the woods.
They're coming. They're coming.

From Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods. © 2017 Tishani Doshi.
www.coppercanyonpress.org.