by Mary Ann Moore | Jan 13, 2023 | A Poet's Nanaimo
Dr. Sharon Blackie wrote about menopause in her latest book book Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life (New World Library, 2022), and described it as “a time between stories, when the old story fades and a new story is waiting to emerge.” (See my last blog about the book.)
As a young woman in my late thirties, I had a hysterectomy which meant I didn’t go through the “time between stories” as Dr. Blackie refers to that particular time in a woman’s life, at least not in the way she is referring to it. I had though, definitely embarked on a new story.
At this time, more than thirty years later, I’m reflecting on the final chapter of Hagitude: “The Valley of the Shadow of Death.” Dr. Blackie says she had never been “particularly preoccupied by death. Not until now.”
Dr. Blackie was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma – “one of the most aggressive hematological cancers, centered on lymphocytes: infection-fighting cells in the immune system.” She wasn’t frightened by the “life threatening nature of the illness itself” but by the toxic chemicals her body would have to endure for six months. She immersed herself in the lessons the illness had to teach her, seeing the lump on her neck not as an “evile alien invader” but as part of herself.
I can relate as I had a lump that was on my shin that I thought odd but not alien. It was diagnosed in the summer of 2015 as Spindle Cell Sarcoma. Although my body had to undergo CT scans, MRIs and the like, I didn’t have chemotherapy but rather radiation followed by surgery.
“The Guest House” by Sufi poet Rumi is a poem that Dr. Blackie includes in the last chapter of her book. The “guest” of cancer whispered in her ear: “If you want to live, you’re going to have to learn to walk hand in hand with death. If you’re going to write about elderhood as a big initiation – here’s an invitation for you. Don’t waste it now. It’s time to slough off another tough old skin.”
Among the lessons learned and gifts recognized by Dr. Blackie was kindness from people near and far as she had decided to go public with her diagnosis and treatment.
I received flowers from friends from afar including Sarah’s, my partner’s, former partner. I spent five weeks in Victoria, B.C. for radiation treatments and came home on weekends at which time I’d write a blog. I remember one faithful follower as being my poet friend Bill Cunningham who lived in Florida. He would send me an email in praise of poetry and offer me poems of his own along with his own heartfelt insight. Bill died of cancer on January 12, 2021.
The second gift Dr. Blackie received was slowing down. Dr. Blackie cleared her calendar several months ahead of treatment as her “sole focus was on recovery” and working on Hagitude if she could.
I loved clearing my calendar. It seemed to come at a time when I wanted to do that anyway. Part of the lesson is to do that before any sort of illness forces you to, to learn to create boundaries and say no.
The third gift that Dr. Blackie recognized as the most profound was “the opportunity to know and to befriend death.” She says “a key benefit” of a life-threatening illness is the “absolute necessity of forensically auditing your life.”
It’s a time to realize what’s important and if one survives, to continue living but in a new way as a transformation has taken place.
“And in this fallow time — in this ultimate place between stories – space is finally cleared for new growth,” Dr. Blackie says. It’s a clearing time, not a time for “new goals and new agendas.”
At the end of the “brutal but restorative treatment,” Dr. Blackie had new insight and had reacquainted herself with delight, “with the pleasure of time and space to simply be.”
It may sound strange to those who haven’t gone through treatment to hear some of us speaking fondly of the time we were required to rest. I thought I could skip back to Ontario possibly between radiation treatments and surgery, a period of about three months. The doctor said no, it was a time to rest. I went with that.
The challenges of a life-threatening illness are similar as we approach elderhood. Actually, I’m there now. Hagitude is to grow old seeing all there is to see in terms of an aging body, the likelihood of a serious illness, the inevitability of death with “clear and open eyes.” It’s time to “let the inessential fall away, and focus on the essence of who we are.”
And who are we? I do love the notion, and actually it’s based on ancient beliefs going back to Plato, that we have a calling in this life. James Hillman in his book The Soul’s Code declared: “Each person enters the world called.” This means we have a purpose and as Dr. Blackie sees it, our calling has “much more to do with ways of being in the world, rather than ways of doing” such as an occupation.
This final chapter in Hagitude, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” was to me the most important chapter in the book, the one that especially resonated with me. “We are always going to encounter paths that align us with our calling; the world never gives up on us,” Dr. Blackie says. Opportunities keep coming my way to offer writing circles in the community for instance. And in this very full and fulfilling life, I would also like to remember those times when I can simply be.
by Mary Ann Moore | Jan 2, 2023 | A Poet's Nanaimo
“Hagitude, hags with attitude” Dr. Sharon Blackie says in the prologue to her latest book Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life (New World Library, 2022), as she refers to Cailleach , the Old Woman, in the Gaellc languages of Scotland and Ireland.
Dr. Blackie is a psychologist “with a profound affection for Jung and his successors” as she says, as well as a folklorist and mythologist. She explores how the “wonderfully vivid and diverse archetypal characters in our fairy tales and myths might help us to recreate a map of what it is to become a good elder.”
Rather than simple entertainment, “stories are spells; they change things,” Dr. Blackie says. There is a potential in the archetypes “to become something you couldn’t have imagined before you began to grow old.”
As Kim Krans says in The Wild Unknown Archetypes Guidebook that goes with the cards I used for a New Year’s Day card spread, archetypes are patterns, are universal, are timeless, are infinite, contain both light and dark, use image and “they insist on the imagination” moving us “from the literal to the mythic.” Archetypes “prefer potentials over answers, collaboration over convention, dynamism over singularity and inclusion over rejection.” You can see how archetypes are a profound aid to our creative experience of life, even and especially, as we age.
STANDING ON THE THRESHOLD
The Alchemy of Menopause
In a chapter entitled “The Alchemy of Menopause” in Hagitude, Dr. Blackie reflects on menopause making note of pharmaceutical companies and how they market hormone therapy. She sees menopause as “the beginning of a whole new journey – a challenging but ultimately fertile journey across the threshold of elderhood.”
Menopause is “a time between stories, when the old story fades and a new story is waiting to emerge.”
One of the characters Dr. Blackie introduces is the Henwife. While the stories many of us grew up with involved wicked stepmothers, the Henwife is an “integrated member of the community” who gives advice in the realm of “women’s mysteries.”
Someday Your Witch Will Come
Beautiful drawings by Natalie Eslick introduce each chapter. The illustration for the chapter entitled “Someday Your Witch Will Come,” is a witch with a wrinkled face, long hair, a tall black hat, holding a cat. There are three illustrations from the book on the Hagitude site. Have a look here.
Archetypal figures, usually associated with the work of Carl Jung, include the Great Mother, The Witch, The Trickster, the Hero.
The Wise Old Woman, another archetype, could be Grandmother Spider to Native American peoples and in the Gaelic tradition, she would be Cailleach. “In the Slavic tradition, she’d be the dangerous old woman of the woods, Baba Yaga – and so on.”
Dr. Blackie refers to these archetypal characters as “keys – capable of unlocking the imagination, opening the door to the dark, cobweb-laden room which houses the mysteries of our inner lives.”
“The Medial Woman” is the sub-title of the chapter about the witch and she is one of four key female archetypes: the Mother, the Hetaira, the Amazon and the Medial Woman.
The Mother nourishes life while the Hetaira “refers to a class of highly educated women in ancient Greece who were trained not only to provide sexual services to men, but also to provide them with long-term companionship.” The Amazon “excels in work and skills that are usually perceived to be the domain of men.”
The Medial Woman doesn’t “define herself in relation to others.” Medial Women are visionaries, psychics, healer and poets and Dr. Blackie gives the example of Hildegard who was “no ordinary nun.”
Hildegard of Bingen was born in Germany in 1098 and became a nun as a young teenager. She wrote of her visions completing five books as well as composing seventy-seven sacred songs. Hildegard saw the Divine as female as well as male and wrote: “Every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of divinity.”
Each of us has our own “unique inner imaginarium” Dr. Blackie says and “each of us identifies with different archetypal characters, stories, and landscapes at different times in our lives.” Those characters “provide clues to who we are and who we might become. They provide clues about our path in the world and about the nature of our unique calling.”
The Alchemist is one face of the Medial Woman and Hildegard represents another: The Mystic. A third face is the Witch. We have come to know witches as healers and medicine women and we’ve heard, they were executed in the millions during the witch trials in Europe “from the early fifteenth century through to the late eighteenth” century.”
Dr. Blackie’s research has found that midwives and herbalists “were rarely charged.” She says “around forty to sixty thousand people were legally put to death for the alleged crime of witchcraft” which would have been committing acts of evil in the name of the Christian Devil.
I was surprised by that number and obviously need to be open to learning about more recent research. I’m remembering the work of Barbara Ehrenrich and Deidre English in a book entitled Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers that they first published in 1973 about the “demonization of women healers.” A new edition was released in 2010.
Dr. Blackie refers to the “solitary old sea witch” in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Little Mermaid,” and wonders about her backstory as in the Disney version, the old sea witch became cast “as a straightforward villain.” The old sea witch’s story is like that of many other older women “whose stories no one will ever know.”
There are no aging mermaids in the stories we’ve read and Dr. Blackie asks: “Where are the mermaids with hagitude?” There’s a challenge particularly for me who has been drawn to stories about mermaids for a long time. And it’s true, none of them have been old. Does an aging mermaid still gaze into a mirror while reclining on an ocean’s rock? I think so although maybe not to see her beauty so much as to see how every line helps her to fit her life’s many many pieces together.
A Radical Beauty
In her chapter “A Radical Beauty: Kissing the Hag,” Dr. Blackie says she was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune form of hypothyroidism. She was also diagnosed with a kind of “radically aggressive inflammatory arthritis.” She had been relocating back to Britain from Ireland at the time.
I appreciate Dr. Blackie sharing her own life experiences in her book. She makes note of other aging women writers such as the late May Sarton who wrote in her published journal, At Seventy, about her aged face being a more accurate reflection of her inner self.
Dr. Blackie sees this fresh awareness as “what it means to kiss the hag: to recognize and to be able to embrace the deep, radical beauty of the person inside, regardless of the nature of the superficial external mask.”
THE HOUSE OF ELDERS
In a section of Hagitude entitled “The House of Elders,” Sharon includes interviews with elder women (note: “elder” rather than “elderly”) who express qualities she refers to as “hagitude: a comfort with the unique power they embody, a strong sense of who they are and what they have to offer the world, a strong belief in their necessary place in the ever-shifting web of life.”
Sharon Blackie has written some wonderful books that I refer to often including If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-Changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging and The Enchanted Life: Reclaiming the Magic and Wisdom of the Natural World.
She says that her writing, at its heart, is “a way of trying to change the story, of weaving the possibility of a better world into being through the power of words.” The books she writes are “born out of a yearning to help people reimagine themselves and the world around them in more beautiful and functional ways.” Dr. Blackie’s books are born out of a deep desire to help women particularly to “reclaim our unique and necessary power” and make a difference in the world.
“That word-weaving and story-weaving is how the archetype of the Old Woman Who Weaves the World is reflected in me,” Dr. Blackie says.
Dr. Blackie notes women writers who opened her up to possibilities such as Virginia Woolf, Marilyn French, Anais Nin and Doris Lessing. She could mention many more, as most of us could. “These women writers not only changed my life – they helped me to imagine it,” she says.
Tricksters and Truth-Tellers
In her chapter, “Tricksters and Truth-Tellers: Holding the Culture to Account,” Sharon tells of the fourth-century BCE temple of Demeter and Kore in Ionia. Amongst the ruins were earthenware figurines identified with Baubo. She’s the old woman who approaches Demeter in the myth of Demeter and Persephone and lifts up her skirts and displays her genitals.
On each of the Baubo-like statues found, “the head and female genitals are merged together, with the vulva on display immediately below the figurine’s mouth, blending into her chin.” That helps to explain the image on the cover of Hagitude which doesn’t look like a very old woman but she could be in mid-life. Under her chin is not a leaf as I first thought but could be a vulva, in keeping with Baubo, the joker and Trickster.
In her discussion of gender identity, Dr. Blackie includes wonderful quotations by Jan Morris who was for most of us, the first transgender woman we had heard of. She had been a father to four children and then lived as a woman for the second half of her life. She and her ex-spouse lived as domestic partners until Morris died in Wales in 2020 at the age of ninety-four.
Jan Morris said: “In my mind [trans-sexualism] is a subject far wider than sex: I recognize no pruriency to it, and I see it above all as a dilemma neither of the body nor of the brain, but of the spirit.”
In her memoir, Conundrum, Jan Morris wrote in celebration of women including those past menopause “no longer shackled by the mechanisms of sex but creative still in other kinds, aware still in their love and sensuality, graceful in experience, past ambition but never beyond aspiration.”
The Wise Woman
In the chapter entitled “The Wise Woman: Deep Vision,” Dr. Blackie says that “the role of the elder woman as visionary isn’t always an active ‘out there’ role; sometimes it’s associated with a quieter, more inward-looking aspect of elderhood . . . “
While this image is seductive, leaving one’s strivings behind, Dr. Blackie isn’t ready to take to the “solitary cave” although for a writer that is an ideal place. She still wants to teach which requires her to be more visible in the world. As she wisely says, “For me, the trick is to discern what my heart and my body are telling me at any given time, so that I can always find the necessary balance between these two polarities of internal and external work.” To that I can definitely relate.
LEAVING THROUGH THE HOLE IN THE SIDE OF THE HOUSE
The Valley of the Shadow of Death
Dr. Blackie writes more about the body in her chapter “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” in a section entitled “Leaving Through the Hole in the Side of the House.”
As this blog has become rather lengthy, I’m going to write a separate blog about the final chapter which really resonates with me as it’s one in which Dr. Blackie tells of her diagnosis of cancer and the treatment of it. As I discovered inconvenient blessings when I had cancer, Dr. Blackie also received many gifts.
MJ Burrows, Marlene Dean and I began the celebrations of our new chapbooks with a salon at Sarah’s and my home which we call The Literary Hummingbird Ranch. Women from the Writing Life circle attended and MJ, Marlene and I were happy to share our poems with women we had spent time writing with and with whom we have shared encouragement and support.
Writing as a Spiritual Practice: Your Own Tea House Practice
Writing to Map Your Spiritual Journey
Writing Life: A Whole Life Practice
