My first novel The Long Delirious Burning Blue was described by The Independent on Sunday as ‘Hugely potent. But there’s also developing the skill set, if I can use that word, to manage the really tough stuff that can come along with Elderhood as well. It's lovely to read about the author's friends who decided to chuck their life in the medical field/professional world and live on a lovely farm in Wales/Ireland/The South of France (okay maybe not that last one). And a lot of people are still struggling to find that or even struggling to just cope with living and haven’t got onto the path of trying to find their service for life. It is crafted around stories of Baba Yaga, a supernatural being in many Slavic mythic and folkloric traditions, depicted as a dangerous, frightening older woman.

In the oldest known cosmology of my native lands, it wasn't a sky-bound old man with a beard who made and shaped this world. We produced a large proportion of our own food, keeping sheep, cows, pigs and a miscellany of poultry; a large thriving polytunnel, and a herb garden. Because I remember one of our previous conversations, you said that you loved midsummer because it meant that the days were becoming shorter and the nights were becoming longer and we were heading down into winter. Manda: It feels, having listened to you several times speak about this, but also reading it again in the book, that this was an elderhood rite of passage.That’s my passion, really, is to see how can we make them grow so that they are relevant to today’s world, not to a world that was, you know, 500 years old and was facing quite different challenges very, very often. And we landed in Donegal, where for centuries there had been a strong trading relationship with particularly the southwest of Scotland and the islands, because of the sea route, which was very, very easy and actually very short. Only that I find that I become very much more aware of death when I’m sitting with a foaling mare or a lambing ewe.

But I think until you have been through the testing pot of life over and over again, you don’t necessarily know exactly what it is that you are made of and what survives when everything else is stripped away. Manda: Yes, because you say in the book, towards the end, as Elders our job is to die as eventually we came to live, always in the service of life. And I suppose I had a little bit of a feel for that walking through the valley of the shadow of death, as I think of it, for a number of months while I was undergoing treatment. The cookie is used to calculate visitor, session, campaign data and keep track of site usage for the site's analytics report. He just happened to be the first person that really wrote it down, which is the idea that every soul chooses to come into this world for a kind of purpose.I remember in one of the very old Rosemary Sutcliffe books that I read, the Spear of the Warrior had heron feathers around its neck. Which subsequently about just under a year later was clearly associated with the lymphoma that I was then diagnosed with. Blackie wants to reconnect you to the natural world, to life-giving goddesses (“no twinkly fairy queens”), to laughter, to argument, and to meaning. Sharon Blackie weaves a rich tableau of what a life full of wonder and authentic connection might look like, supplying practical ways to approach ancient wisdom. They seem perfectly happy accepting that non-mothers and mothers are both women; and that not having this pivotal experience does not mean one is not a woman.