Sharon Blackie - Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

NONFICTION

If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-Changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

The Enchanted Life: Reclaiming the Magic and Wisdom of the Natural World

FICTION

The Long Delirious Burning Blue

Foxfire, Wolfskin and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women

Copyright 2022 by Sharon Blackie

Illustrations copyright 2022 by Natalie Eslick

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, www.refinecatch.com; emended for US edition by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Blackie, Sharon, author. | Eslick, Natalie, illustrator.

Title: Hagitude : reimagining the second half of life / Sharon Blackie ; illustrations by Natalie Eslick.

Description: Novato, California : New World Library, [2022] | First published in the United Kingdom in 2022 by September Publishing --Title page verso. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: Unearths the stories of the little-known but powerful elder women in European myth and folklore, inspiring readers to radically reimagine the last decades of their lives as the most dynamic of all -- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022029485 (print) | LCCN 2022029486 (ebook) | ISBN 9781608688432 (paperback) | ISBN 9781608688449 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Older women--Social conditions. | Older women-- Health and hygiene. | Menopause. | Crones.

Classification: LCC HQ1063.7 .B53 2022 (print) | LCC HQ1063.7 (ebook) | DDC 305.26/2--dc23/eng/20220629

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029485

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029486

First published in the United Kingdom in 2022 by September Publishing

First New World Library printing, October 2022

ISBN 978-1-60868-843-2

Ebook ISBN 978-1-60868-844-9

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10987654321

This book is dedicated to the feisty and irrepressible old matriarchs of the far northeast of England, who enlivened my younger years and taught me never to let the illegitimi get me down.

CONTENTS

Ceait N Bheildiin

She is the essence of weather itself.

She is the wind

tearing violently at the roof,

squealing on the old gate,

calling down the chimney.

She is my fear taking human form,

calling into me tonight

unexpected

seeking lodgings.

Dressed as Karalalam,

she torments me

til, at first sight of day,

she flees.

Let me out to the wind after her,

out of my concrete skin,

out of my iron skull,

because theres a fierceness in me

that desires the edge,

the tempest,

the change.

Marrow stirs in my bones

reviving the awe of youth

in my flesh,

ending

the inertia of winter,

reopening my sword-sharp eye.

I n the oldest known cosmology of my native lands, it wasnt a skybound old man with a beard who made and shaped this world. It was an old woman. A giant old woman, who has been with us down all the long ages, since the beginning of time. When I was a young lass, the ocean was a forest, full of trees, she says, in some of the stories about her stories that are still told today, firmly embedded in the oral tradition.

This mythology is from right here. From these islands of Britain and Ireland, strung out along the farthest western reaches of Europe where I was born, and where I live still today. In the lands where my feet are firmly planted. Although a lot of attention has been paid to the question of whether ancient European cultures honored a Great Mother goddess, in these islands we were actually honoring a Great Grandmother. Her name in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland is the Cailleach: literally, the Old Woman. There are traces of other divine old women scattered throughout the rest of the British Isles and Europe; theyre probably the oldest deities of all.

How thoroughly weve been taught to forget. Today, we dont see these narratives as remnants of ancient belief systems rather, theyre presented to us as folktales intended merely to entertain, as oddities of primitive history, the vaguely amusing relics of more superstitious times or bedtime stories for children.

Whatever weve been taught they are theyre not. They are remnants of pre-Christian cosmologies cosmologies that are firmly embedded in the land, the sea, the sky, and the human-, animal-, and plant-populated cultures to which we belong. Cosmologies in which old women mattered.

What I love most about our Old Woman is that she clearly wasnt a character to be messed with. Take this story from the southwest of Ireland. One day, a parish priest visited the Cailleachs house to ask how old she was. He thought, as such men do, that he was a fine fellow, and very clever; hed heard that she claimed to be as old as time, and he wanted to catch her out. Well, the old woman replied that she couldnt quite remember her exact age, but every year on her birthday, she told him, she would kill a bullock, and after shed eaten it, she would throw one of its thigh bones into her attic. So if he wanted to, he could go up to the attic and count the bones. For every bone you find up there in that attic, she said to him, you can add a year of my life. Well, he counted the bones for a day and a night and still he couldnt make a dent in them. His hands, they say, were shaking as he pulled at the door handle and left.

A few years ago, on the opening night of a womens retreat I was leading on the far coastal tip of the Beara Peninsula in southwest Ireland heartland of Cailleach folklore I had a dream about her. I was part of a small group of resistance fighters, women and men together. We were captured by the establishments military, then securely locked away in a prison with thick stone walls. I spoke to the leader through the bars of our cell door. Youd better be careful, I said. Shes coming. He laughed, and shook a set of big shiny keys in my face. Just as he turned away from me, there was a rumbling outside, like thunder. A giant old woman in a black hooded cloak walked right through the prison walls as if they werent there, and all the stones came tumbling down around her feet. The iron door to our cell crashed to the floor, and we walked right out of that prison behind her.