If Women Rose Rooted
By Sharon Blackie
"And if we rise up rooted, like trees...well then, women might indeed save not only ourselves, but the world."
If Women Rose Rooted is a spiritual exploration of women's connection to the natural world and our power to rise, rooted, to save the world.
Blackie charts what she calls an Eco Heroine's Journey, a reimagining of the traditional literary device of the Hero's Journey. The book will speak to readers in different ways. For me, what stood out was Blackie's articulation of the Wasteland: a spiritual, moral, or physical world where connection to land and to nature is lost, where values are corrupted. Much of the book charts ways out of the Wasteland, and follows Blackie's own turbulent journey.
"In her weaker moments she allows herself to dream of a life outside the Machine, and goes to bed with an aching heart and a sense of desolation so deep in her core that she cannot imagine how she might not someday soon die of it...something is rotten at the mechanical heart of the Wasteland."
This book is also a great way to connect with Celtic stories, as Blackie tells them throughout. Personally, I felt less connection to the stories. Connection to place and past is incredibly important, but most of the stories told in the book, while including elements of the strength and wisdom of women, are still hung on a patriarchal framework: often focused on men, often seeing women as objects, or as bearers of men's children, usually in some way under the control of men, and the stories often centre around marriage, war, or both. They are often violent. Although Blackie's analysis of the stories is beautiful, and often feminist and spiritual, I don't think the stories represent the breaking free of patriarchal, war-mongering society that Blackie describes in other parts of the book. If these stories are meaningful to you then treasure them, but we don't have to look to the past for a representation of how our world should be; we don't have to find precedent to dream of a new world.
If everything about what we once called the "rat race", that now feels more like our entire lives, feels, at best, off, and at worst, so awful that it stokes an ever-burning panic in your stomach, read this book.
"Like the first August swallow fidgeting on the telephone wires, we know there is something we should be doing. We know there is a journey we should be undertaking."
"I was a woman, and I had begun to remember who I was. It was the whole earth."
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