If Women Rose Rooted

The Power of the Celtic Woman

Sharon Blackie

Aged 30, Sharon Blackie found herself weeping in the car park of the multinational corporation where she worked, wondering if this was what a nervous breakdown felt like. With a PhD in Psychology, she ought to have known. Somewhere along the line she had lost herself. And so began a long, winding journey back to authenticity, rootedness in place and belonging.

In this extraordinary book of myth, memoir and modern-day mentors, Blackie faces the wasteland of Western culture, the repression of women, and the devastation of our planet. She boldly names the challenge: to reimagine women’s place in the world, and to rise up, firmly rooted in our own native landscapes and the powerful stories and wisdom which spring from them.

If Women Rose Rooted offers an immensely affecting journey through the native stories and wisdom buried in Europe’s wild Celtic landscapes. It tells the stories of contemporary women (from fashion designers to lawyers, from Scotland to Wisconsin) who, after years of corporate alienation, weariness of the male world, or wrath at environmental destruction, have broken away and reclaimed their power as Celtic women.

‘Rising high up on the heather-covered moorlands of Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man and Brittany, seeping through our bogs, flowing down our streams and into our rivers and out onto the sandy strands of the rock-strewn Atlantic seaboard, are the old Celtic myths and stories. Our own stories, no-one else’s. Stories steeped in sea-brine, black and crusty with peat; stories that lie buried beneath our feet, which spring directly out of our own culture, our own distinctive native landscapes, and which informed the lives of our own ancestors, waiting to be reclaimed and re-visioned for the modern world.’