A myth I love about a selkie :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON JANUARY 18th 2023

In school, most of the electives I took were women’s studies/ feminism related. I easily immersed myself in things such as myths of the goddess.

Being alongside women in ritual for me has always been important. I miss it deeply these days. Here is a photo that elicits such happy memories from 2018 of the group I communed with every full moon for a long while. I am to the far right if you’re looking at the photo, with the weird hypermobile limbs and the previously long hair. We would dance like wild animals all around a huge room, and cry and laugh and do cacao and people would ask me to make their periods come back in the circle. And also once, someone took out a flute and began to play. It was so ridiculously funny, I thought maybe I had dreamt it. I have been told many times this was actually a real event. The flute.

WOMEN WHO GATHER IN CIRCLES, GEMINI FULL MOON 2018.

I’ve been carrying with me, from home to home to home to home, an old copy of “Women who run with the wolves” for the past several years now.

I often use it as an oracle, I have never actually read it from start to finish in one go, which is unusual for me, given I am very intent about finishing every thing I start in proper order. The other day I sat and I read, chapter 9; homing: returning home to oneself.

It tells the story of the sealskin/ soulskin of the selkie woman. I love that myth. I recently remembered it this fall when I fell into several weeks of devouring Sharon Blackie’s books.

Essentially, the story is that there is a sealwoman who dances under the moon light (under the full moon, the sealwoman turns into a human woman) and a lonely man (often a fisherman in the story) asks to marry her after he has stolen her seal skin. He says that after 7 years he will let her go back to the water and he will safe guard her skin in the meantime. They get married, and have a child. But then, when the time is up, he has gotten rid of the skin and the sealwoman is devastated.

She starts to dry up because she cannot return home.

In this myth, the sealwoman represents the soul, and the lonely man, the ego. And their child, a hybrid of the two. It is her child, the embodiment of both ego and soul (what we would consider being a wild woman in this case), who hears the call from his mother’s elder. He hears it and goes to find it, rescues the skin and brings it back home. Then, his mother, the soul, returns back to the water with him. He stays there for 7 nights and then returns to land. After that, he comes to get council from his mother as he lives in the “top world”.

The whole idea of the myth is that we must merge soul with ego, and be led by the soul eventually, and not the ego. Despite the best efforts of our ego to keep us trapped and separated from the soul.

I interpret the ego in this story as the part of us who is concerned with roles, duties and responsibilities, and that without the soul, these roles, duties and responsibilities aren’t informed well and could be misguided for us. What I like about this myth is that it never says to leave your ego behind completely. Instead, it suggests the two must merge. Co-exist. Inform the Self from two angles; two dimensions.

I love in this chapter how Dr. Pinkola Estes says that for the woman, what is hardest is not searching in the dark for the soul retrieval. It’s actually in leaving whatever we are doing once we get the call, given that if we are being called, it means we’ve already ignored a lot of the warning signs of our need to come back home to ourselves. In essence, the hardest part of coming home then seems to be the shift between the ego-led to the soul-led existence. The decision to let go of one, and trust the other.

The lonely man is so set on dominating the situation by stealing her skin without her consent to begin with (which domination of course means one person has control while the other does not), and then he fears losing his wife that he breaks his promise of letting her go back. This represents how the ego often takes hostage the soul because it wants what the soul can give him, with no concern on how that impacts the soul to be trapped like this.

Our elder only calls us when we haven’t come back home naturally; when we’ve stayed married to the ego or when the ego has tricked us into staying. I guess the elder could be a myriad of things in our practical world. For me, it is usually illness.

Illness may be the only thing that for me is a strong enough pull to come back home; it is the most powerful elder. And so, I relate to that intensely.

During the new year retreat I took… I often meditated with questions I wanted answers to. I looked to my Self for answers, to nature, to books in the form of oracles.

One of my questions was, “How do I stop having so many regrets?”

Mainly my biggest regret is not listening to my cues to go back home to myself seriously enough post best year of my life - end of 2018 & 2019.

I loved that time period so much. I can look at pictures of myself during that time, and cry of witnessing or cry of longing, and if that sounds weird, I get it - I have found it weird too - and it’s because I was so happy. I was so myself.

After Dennis and I had broken up, I became a wild woman. My soul came back. I loved life so deeply and I felt so rich in being alive. And that is because I had dropped the protector part of me that is concerned with acting proper; always being mature and adult-like, always doing the right thing. This protector part of me can be so blended with my Self that I am often highly self-disciplined, extremely contained and rational, always restraining myself, and being the leader who knows and considers all angles involved, never just being WILD.

And so I became wild by retrieving the exiled part of me (I am using IFS language here ha) who was soul-led.

And then I danced in the moonlight, and there was a lonely man who stole my soulskin.

The ego trapped the soul once more.

And so, I stayed too long in a climate that is not my home. I yearned for the sea and for my skin, and I was trapped on land, feeling robbed by the lonely man, feeling hopeless and stuck there.

For months, I dreamt of people stealing from me, breaking in, taking from me.

And it was symbolizing my soul starvation. My soul was being taken from me.

I’m sure many women can relate to the pandemic feeling like this for them. If not the pandemic, a relationship; a work situation; a role or a duty or a responsibility that was not soul-led.

My Self, books and nature answered me in a lot of beautiful ways during this new year retreat, most of which feel important to keep private, but one thing I feel is for everyone:

There is still water flowing when all else is frozen.

In other words, the soul is the river between the snow. The soul is never lost, and never that far away, even when it is captured, covered, tricked. We can, and we will, come back home.

On coming back home

A myth I love about a selkie :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON JANUARY 18th 2023