If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

And so, inevitably, my symptoms of panic returned: this time, with perfect resonance, taking the form of hyper-ventilation: a constant gasping for breath. I was thirty-seven years old, and it seemed to me that I was right back where I had started, seven years before. The Wasteland was all around me, and I was living in it again. But beyond a vague

I hadn’t burned my bridges, and so it was all too easy to play it safe, and to accept a job offer

It took me a long time to accept that I would not be failing by leaving this marriage – I would be failing myself by staying.

Sometimes along the path, temptation comes in the form of an easy way out; and if that was an important test on my journey

women have a deep, intuitive understanding that we too are animals, belonging to a world filled with other living things which are like us in more ways than they are different from us.

This journey of ours, like all pilgrimages, is in some senses a journey out of time – a journey which takes us far beyond the ‘normal’ everyday world. It is a journey through the Otherworld, where the rules are incomprehensible, the tasks seem impossible, and the stakes are perilously high.

It is true that we have to do a good deal of inner work before we have anything meaningful to offer to the outer world; it is true too that we must recognise our wounds and incorporate them into the ground of our becoming.

We want everything now, including transformation and wisdom.

This is what happens to Macsen, and Elen is the Otherworldly guide who reels him in along the thread of her dreampaths, bringing him to her so that he can serve the land as its king.