At the end of the Summer 2025, I headed North to the Cumbria / North Yorkshire borders to meet Dr Sharon Blackie. I had read her wonderful book If Women Rose Rooted while on holiday and then devoured much of her substack when I got home.
As you will know if you have been joining me on this series in search of meaning, one of the recurrent themes I keep encountering is the denial of the feminine. It feels to me that we have lost sense of who we are and where we came from and in my reading about our ancient ancestors, I discovered that most of our ancient ancestors lived in matrilineal, egalitarian, nomadic groups for hundreds of thousands of years. We, of course, have lived in patriarchal, hierarchical sedentary societies as far back as the written record goes (roughy 5,000 years ago). I’m fascinated to know how and why things changed.
Sharon’s work has much to teach us about the role of women in Celtic culture, which is as close to an indigenous culture as those of us living in Britain can get. She has written many books that celebrate the feminine, particularly celebrating the wisdom and humour of older women, and her work is scholarly, wondrous and life affirming.
Speaking to Sharon was a complete thrill. It turned out that we had a few interesting things in common. A shared flying phobia (Sharon dealt with hers by learning to fly, which is something I am attempting when funds allow) and we both ran publishing businesses.
This is the eighth episode of my Do Radio Series Where To Next? A new episode is released every Monday. The week after each episode is aired I put it up here on my Substack to create a series archive for those who discover it in the future and want to go back to the start, and for those who want to re-listen to the wisdom of my guests that does seems to bloom on a second and third listening. That has been the case for me, anyway. This episode was first broadcast on DO Radio on October 20th 2025.
As always, please share it with anyone you think might find it illuminating.
Much love,
Dan
