Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

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I also wanted people to understand that certainly I think as you enter into later stages of Elderhood, it is a process also of continually letting go of whatever it was that you thought defined you. Which subsequently about just under a year later was clearly associated with the lymphoma that I was then diagnosed with. I would love to go into that one in more depth, but I have a suspicion that we would be mining my own psychology, and that’s probably not useful for the podcast. But at midlife there is a shift, and the shift is a kind of turning inwards, not to navel gaze, but to question what the purpose of life is. Dr Sharon Blackie is a psychologist, folklorist and mythologist too, and shares her knowledge and own story.

Sharon: It took us a long time to sell our house, and my husband went back to collect some things that we had left there when we finally did, about 18 months later. Do we have anything that survives in Western Europe from our pre-Christian and preferably forager hunter past? After a few twists and turns, including some unwise years advising a tobacco company on smoking and health and safer cigarettes, and the acquisition of a master’s degree in Creative Writing, I moved to a croft in the north-west Highlands of Scotland. And if any book and concept and the course that you run from it, is ever able to rid our society of its fear of age and death and look up to the wise people who have gone through the alchemical process and come out the other side.Blackie explores these archetypes in Hagitude, presenting them in a way sure to appeal to contemporary women. But even during the writing of her book, it was knowledge easily found that it’s actually NOT that simple. Blackie wants to reconnect you to the natural world, to life-giving goddesses (“no twinkly fairy queens”), to laughter, to argument, and to meaning. Hagitude takes readers through the “house of elders” – an extraordinary cast of figures including fairy godmothers, wise women, tricksters and creators, offering bewitching role models for women in their later years.

I did not want to die tomorrow, but it’s just like, okay, no, it’s not about being self satisfied with what you’ve done and thinking that, you know, you’ve got nothing else to learn. Sharon: It’s incredibly difficult to trace things back in the oral tradition by definition, because it is the oral tradition where we are very fortunate in this part of the world, as in Ireland certainly,the stories began to be written down for the first time, you know, back in the in the seventh century. Sharon: I would say that it is easier to work in that context, particularly in psychotherapy, with fairy tales and folktales rather than myths.And I do love that we managed to get to Granny Weatherwax in the end because she too is one of my all time favourite characters. It doesn’t even seem to be feminist, just a woman’s book talking about their own experience and interpretations of the world. And I said to him, oh go down to the rocky place for me and, you know, and say hello to the Cailleach and all of the other beings that I’d found there in the rock.