If Women Rose Rooted : A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

Product Information

Find out about new live online courses, or join me in my regular sessions in The Bone Cave: interactive online gatherings to reclaim the mythic feminine.

Distinctive and didactic poems, paintings, and music come into my life when I am deep into soul-searching, shadow work. This book arrived exactly when I needed it. It is gut-wrenching, beautiful, powerful, and very important.

The stories (within stories within stories) spiral at the same rate as your soul and seep into your heart and your dreams. Please read this book!

Book Review: Becoming Flawesome – Could your deepest flaws be the doorway to your greatest life? July 10, 2023 - 12:00 pm If women remember that once upon a time we sang with the tongues of seals and flew with the wings of swans, that we forged our own paths through the dark forest while creating a community of its many inhabitants, then we will rise up rooted, like trees. And if we rise up rooted, like trees … well then, women might indeed save not only ourselves, but the world.’ If women remember that once upon a time we sand with the tongues of seals and flew with the wings of swans, that we forged our own paths through the dark forest while creating a community of its many inhabitants, then we will rise up rooted like trees. And if we rise up rooted, like trees...well, then women might indeed save not only ourselves, but the world.” At once a scholar’s homage to The Iliad and startlingly original work of art by an incredibly talented new novelist….A book I could not put down.”

The book depicts one way of femininity – connected with nature, stories and heritage – and finds multiple examples of women that thrived when following this path. But these multiple examples still adds up to like 10-15 women in total. This makes me think about all the other aspects and ways of being that were completely ignored. Mind-blowing. An anthem for all we could be ... I sincerely hope every woman who can read has the time and space to read it.’ Manda Scott, author of Boudica and A Treachery of Spies What a disappointment. I almost couldn’t finish this. Congratulations to everyone who enjoyed this book, I wish I was you. There is Celtic mythology in every chapter with very little analysis about how the stories relate to the female psyche. Instead, the author takes readers on her personal journey from leaving a stressful corporate job to finding the perfect cottage in the middle of nowhere where she can settle down and just be. Spoiler alert, she is never happy and has to move from remote cottage to remote cottage to remote cottage. This is just a boring memoir and I feel like I’ve been cheated into reading it. This is the core of our task: to respect and revere ourselves, and so bring about a world in which women are respected and revered, recognised once again as holding the life-giving power of the earth itself.’

Sometimes, if you have grown up in certain ways, a fear of being seen to fail can outweigh the personal cost of continuing to live in impossible circumstances.” Beyond my issues with the feminism aspect, so much of this book was dedicated to the personal history of the author, interviews with different women, and repetitively talking about the connection between "the divine feminine energies" and the earth that I felt the connection to real environmental issues was missing, and I would have also enjoyed more context for the selected myths. In 1962, the French philosopher René Guénon suggested that we live in ‘degenerate times’, at the end of a long age during which important spiritual truths have been forgotten, the ancient centres of wisdom have been destroyed and the guardians of that wisdom have been dispersed. At such times, he said, a safe repository for spiritual truth can be found in folklore. He suggested that knowledge which is in danger of being lost passes into the symbolic code of a folk tale, and then is passed on to the people. They will perhaps only be concerned with the stories’ surface meanings – but they will at least preserve them, and pass them down to their children. Then, in better times, people might once again appear who understand the code, and who will penetrate the symbolic disguise to the wider meaning behind.59”My first event in The Bone Cave, in December 2020, was a free live webinar based on If Women Rose Rooted. I spoke about the process of writing it, how the inspiration came about, and how my ideas on reclaiming the mythic feminine have progressed in the intervening four or more years. There was also a chance for participants to ‘ask me anything’ about any issue related to the book. Beautifully written, honest and moving, If Women Rose Rooted is a passionate song to a different kind of femininity, a rallying, feminist cry for the rewilding of womanhood; reclaiming our role as guardians of the land.