The Eco-Heroine’s Journey

“And if we rise up rooted, like trees…well then, women might indeed save not only ourselves, but the world.”
Sharon Blackie: “If Women Rose Rooted”

The Heroine

In her book, If Women Rose Rooted, Sharon Blackie presents a model that leads us to return to our native wisdom. If we discover our own authentic values and ways of being in the world, we can wake up our creative powers. If we take this journey we can bring forth our own individual visions for what we can personally offer to our ailing planet. We are asked to “step into our own power and take back our ancient, native role as guardians and protectors” (19). We are asked to be the Eco-Heroine in our story.

The Wasteland

The Wasteland can be defined as the ways the current patriarchal society manifests itself in our lives. Sharon Blackie outlines the following examples:

Finding ourselves obeying the rules that are locked into societal systems.
Embracing the male hero journey – an action-based model which repudiates her feminine instincts and values and runs counter to who she actually is.
Joining in the male dominated world to fight for equality in the male model and play by those rules and if we are lucky, they allow us to join in their societies and institutions.
The best that can be hoped for is to be “not-quite-men”, not quite good enough.
Colluding with the patriarchy – which cuts us off from our own creativity.

The Wasteland is a rootless place (39) and it can create a hollowness inside of us. To counter it we buy and collect more things to fill us up. It can burn us up and then burn us out. We are most likely alienated from the natural ecosystem.

Neoliberalism is a Wasteland. Do it alone. Be successful. Compete. Isolate. Destroy the Planet. What can we do to get out of the Wasteland?

Awareness
Restorative Justice
Connect with the Land
Connect with Community

“If women want to change things, we need authority, and authority comes in good part from inside ourselves. It comes from conviction, from understanding and owning our stories, from a strong sense of who we are and what our place is in the world” (58).

The Eco-Heroine’s Journey travels out of the wasteland. Each of us has own unique story of the years spent in the wasteland , the story of our awakening, and the the story of the path we took out of the wasteland. We can find the way out of the woods of the wasteland. We can follow the river out of the wasteland. In the old stories, the women make the world, we are the weavers and we can remake the world.

The Call

We have to decide if we will listen to the Call that will lead us down a path…that we know will lead to CHANGE.

If we have seen the Wasteland for what it is…what will we do now? Will we listen to the Call? Will we step off the ledge?

Blackie shares the myth of The Selkie. The heroine in the story was beginning to die because her skin was stolen from her. She heard the call louder and louder until she was led back to the sea. Blackie asks us to consider:

In what ways have you lost your skin?
What does your skin represent?
How did you lose it?
Is there a lost part yourself that you yearn for?
Have you constructed a skin that is false?
Is there a phase of your life that is ending?
What is the Call? Where does it come from?
Will you go? What does it mean to go? How will you begin?
What are you going to seek? what is the nature of your quest?

The Cauldron of Transformation

Step Off the Ledge. If you step off, let yourself fall. Feel the grief and the loss. Feel the rage. If you fear it, stay with the dark anyway. Don’t fight it, don’t try to manage your way out of it. All that does is postpone the inevitable. Don’t fear the dark. It is a natural part of the journey. Out of the darkness comes strength and focus. There is always a REBIRTH. It always begins in the dark.

What are your patterns? Dysfunctions?
What must be left behind?
What sustains you when everything else dissolves?
What support structures hold you up?
How will you learn to be still and listen?

The Pilgrim’s Way

Stay for awhile in the Dark. Lick your wounds, and then pick yourself up and find the path. Put one foot in front of the other. A PILGRIMAGE begins with one small step.

The Eco-Heroine’s journey may start out solitary but it is co-creational at its heart and is focused on building relationships with other humans, plants, animals, and the land itself.

What shows you the way?
Who or what offers hints?
Do synchronicities occur?
Who are your allies?
What tests or temptations do you face?
What cultural myths must you uncover and overcome to own your life?

The Eco-Heroine has started her journey. She emerges out of the darkness and goes firmly on her way on the hard path that lays ahead. This is NOT the hero’s “Road of Trials” with tests and ordeals that must be met to achieve his transformation. Slaying the dragon is not the Eco-Heroine’s way. She would rather engage with the dragon than kill him, she wants to bring him into her team and harness his unique skills.

The Eco-Heroine’s path is different. Her transformation started in the dark and now She starts reassembling her lost parts. Calling back her brilliance. She is reflective. She needs to reveal her strengths as well as uncover her weaknesses. The key component of her journey is to break through what she perceives as her limitations so that she will identify her unique gifts and then develops the resources to use them.

“The journey requires her to explore the source of her own belonging, find her center, begin to recover an understanding of her own place in the great connected web of the world. She is walking her way back into being” (162).

When pilgrims set out to explore, the path winds its way across unfamiliar uneven territory. This long, arduous journey requires endurance, stamina and focus as she keeps putting one foot in front of the other. She look for allies and the most valuable friends are those who teach her that she cannot succeed alone. Community is a powerful tool in this journey of the Eco-Heroine.

There are many kinds of allies. Some are human. Others can help us find the path or keep us safe on the road. Some offer sanctuary or wisdom and teach us necessary skills or set forth challenging tasks for us to grow. Allies help us prevail but they may test our strength and resolve. There will be temptations and seductions that try to pull us off the path. The greatest temptation is to turn to the easy life, but we must remember that we always have choices.

Retrieving the Buried Feminine

Creativity is at the heart of the feminine mystery. Women are the ones who give birth, who bring life into the world. Creativity is an authentic approach to life. It is an openness, a spontaneity, a determination to nurture rather than destroy. Think about the way you manifest, that deep, life-giving feminine wisdom in your own life.

What is your relationship to the feminine?
Who are your role models?
Are you comfortable in your body? Do you fully inhabit it?
Do you have a sense of being grounded? Rooted in the Earth?
What aspects of being a woman have you buried?
What does creativity mean to you?
In what ways do you offer the gift of life?

“When we uncover the buried feminine, we will always find there is a strong creative element” (220)

Restoring the Balance

Each of us has masculine and feminine qualities. We need to bring the qualities back into harmony. But in the patriarchy, we need to fight against the dominant masculine to insure that women are heard and listened to as well as men are. We need to demand that we are respected and kept safe. We can only change the world if we have authority and the power to act.

How do the masculine and feminine qualities express themselves in you and your own life and relationships?

Does one way of being dominate the other?
In what other ways are you out of balance?
In what way do imbalances show up in your life?
How might we begin to restore these imbalances and fight for women’s voices to be heard? For feminine qualities to be recognized and respected?

All the myths lead, according to Blackie, through one consistent storyline:

“What ails us is the dominance of the dry, wounded, merciless, over-extended masculine. What ails us is the loss and violation of the feminine. The quest for the Grail , then, is the quest to restore the lost feminine in the world. Women are essential to this task, and son in the sense our Heroine’s Journey is also a quest for the grail – but our path to it is a different route, for we are the Grail. Our weapons are not swords and spears but the fertile, creative, life-giving energy of the universe which is contained in the vessel itself: the energy we need to find within ourselves and bring out into an ailing world” (236).

After we have uncovered and embraced the feminine energy buried inside each of us, the next stage our Eco-Heroine’s Journey is to bring ourselves back into balance – to integrate and harmonize the masculine and feminine qualities we all possess. The archetypal feminine and archetypal masculine restore balance to an outer world that has lost its equilibrium. Yin and Yang where they flow and curve around each other and create a circle of wholeness.

“We can only hope to be effective by beginning from a place of balance inside ourselves; and we can only hope to do so in partnership with men. This is the marriage between Sovereignty and the king, the alchemical heiros gamos, the sacred marriage between masculine and feminine” (238).

What do women want? To be free to make her own decisions and chart her own destiny.

Balance is necessary for equilibrium. Blackie tells of meeting her new husband, starting the publishing house, and then realizing the extent of environmental destruction and then further realizing she was right back in the Wastelands. She longed for peace. She longed to reconnect to the Earth. They decide to move. Blackie vows to do her next journey differently.

The Heroine’s Return

As we create a space of belonging we need to learn to belong. Reach out and learn the history of the stories of places and peoples. Learn the ecology, geology, and landscape. Stand under the skies and know your space, the seasons, the phases of the moon. Embrace the weather. Walk your streets. Explore your woods. Embrace the small beauties.

What do you know about the place where you dwell?
Do you know it’s plants and animals
What do you know of the community around you?
What myths and stories arise from this space?
In the context of your own Return, what do you think is the unique gift that you are bringing back to the world or your community?

“The Wise Woman is the Heroine, returned from her Journey belonging finally both to herself and to the land where she lives. She is ready to offer up her knowledge and her gifts in service to the community. The Wise Woman, the week wife, the curnadera, whatever you call her, she is my inspiration. I recognize in her the need which each of us has to delve deep Innside to uncover and develop the sources of our own belonging. To come to belong to this wide, wild Earth” (278).

Women are healers. Women are keepers of the Earth.

Blackie tells us that it is easy to sink into the magical Otherworld of the journey, and for some of us the temptation is to stay withdrawn from a challenging everyday world can be strong. Joseph Campbell writes, “The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities, and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world?”‘ Campbell’s hero comes back with a unique gift.

“Our Heroine’s wisdom may spring in part from her association with the Otherworld but above all else grounded, rooted, and earthy. It is the wisdom of this world and the Otherworld combined: the creative, regenerative, power of life”. The crucial mystery is our “understanding of our place in the wider web of life on this beautiful and mysterious Earth” (290).

The Return then is about what Jungian analyst Marion Woodman calls “conscious femininity” which is to bring the wisdom in nature into consciousness.

Reclaim our ancient authority. Restore the Voices of the Well. Our wounds are healed. We have new insights and strengths when we Return. We reconnect with nature. Blackie shares that her return was when she finally realized she was going to work with women, hold retreats, and guide them … she was finally making her Return. (303).

“The Journey of the Heroine we’ve been following in this book is a journey back to the ground of our own belonging in the world, a retrieval of our life-giving feminine wisdom and the regrowth of the roots that nourish it. Our own roots, which reach down into the soil, push down into the cracks in the rocks, drink from the groundwater that flows down the mountains. This is not a journey which takes place in our heads. It is a journey which takes us out of our heads and weaves us back into the shimmering web of life – life, with all its beauty and is chaos, its caresses and its stings, its dangers and its blessings. In this journey we learn to get our hands dirty – to thrust them into the fecund earth and plant the seeds of the world’s new becomings” (303).

We reunite with the stories. We do not do this alone. We must pass on the gifts and tell the stories. Love the place you are in. Wildflowers grow everywhere.

Becoming Elder

Walking into the second half of life is a journey of its own. We can accept and value the richness of aging. It’s a joy in freedom from old constraints. Blackie tell us we can embrace menopause. It is a physical, spiritual, and psychological transition. Pass your wisdom on.

She tells us to think about telling our own story. We each have a unique story. We can tell our unique tales and inspire and encourage others to do the same. Remember the archetypal fierce crone and when necessary become fierce. We are allowed.

What does menopause and the journey of elderhood mean to you?
How will it equip you to bring your gifts to the Earth and the community around you?
What will you welcome letting go of?
Embracing the simplified clarity of elder hood, what will you focus on now?
Welcome every adventure.

Welcome every twist and turn. It is how we know we are alive. We become the Wise Woman. The Elders are strong. The Wise Woman holds the power to stay the course and knows the secrets and speaks the language of the land. She speaks with moral authority of the Otherworld. She weaves the dreaming of the world (321).

“Women are spinners and weavers; we are the ones who spool the threads and weave them into meaning and pattern. Like silkworms, we create those threads out of our substance, pulling the strong, fine fibres out of our own hearts and wombs. It’s time to make new threads; time to strengthen the frayed wild edges of our own being and then weave ourselves back into the fabric of our culture. Once we know the patterns for weaving the world; we can piece them together again. Women can heal the Wasteland. We can remake the world. This is what women do. This is our work.” (375).

Sharon Blackie brings us the Eco-Heroine Journey and she expands on moving into Elderhood with her book and membership program: Hagitude.