Sunday Journaling Prompt: What secrets do you hold sacred in midlife?📔🖋️✨

Dr. Sharon Blackie's amazing work on the nature of secrets & shapeshifting women...

This image of Mélusine was created by the brilliant Helen Nicholson for Dr. Sharon Blackie’s book ‘Foxfire, Wolfskin and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women’.

Fellow Empresses,

This week’s got me thinking about the nature of secrets, the sacred, and how peri/menopause literally makes shapeshifters of us as women. Dr. Sharon Blackie, author of both Hagitude and Foxfire, Wolfskin and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women, has conducted below a completely compelling (but brief) salon on the mythopoetics of the French Fairy Melusine and the monstrous feminine… She’s so soft-spoken, yet so powerful in her rewrite of the myth:

Fairy tale salon: The Fairy Mélusine

What about midlife has felt secret or like it needed to be hidden—just for you? How have you felt like a shapeshifter? Have there been moments when you have intuitively felt the monstrous feminine?

Are there certain peri/menopausal symptoms that bring it out? For me, it was always waking…