Selkie myths have been a favorite of mine since as long as I can remember. It’s no surprise I birthed a girl child with 4 planets in Pisces. We lived in Northern California when she was an infant, until she was 2. There she was, on the sand, transfixed with the horizon, the waves, beckoning, lulling her towards them. She’d crawl to the edge of the earth with determination, as if those waves were a language about home, known only to her, A concept I know she was connected to more viscerally when she was closer to it, having recently come from it. Home.
Home. Not defined by walls and the name of a town. But the deeper inner ‘om’ of home. The sanctuary of resonance. The balm of the heart inside the beat. The skin of dappled and dewed knowing and remembering.
And so I love fairytales that speak in riddles and symbols about animal brides or bridegrooms. And the bittersweetness of making union with the wilds, being separated from wilds (or merging with domesticity) and then re-membering, the salt spray velvet smooth blue gray of our moonshine seal skin or the rough soft fluffy tufted red white of fox tails flicking in the fields.
Fairytales about the Selkie abound in Gaelic mythology and folklore. Some cultures represent the otherworldly quality of Selkie (part sea, part earth) with Swan Maidens -part air, part water (I suppose too, earth). Some cultures resonate with the human animal four legged furred musky scented wilded tree and den burrowing wilds. Not quite bound though to two-legged domesticity. Not bound to forgetting when one is furred yet earth pawed and romping.
To be bound to earth as a human is to feel bound to stone and weight and mundane and density and here, now, the practical. There are times when the practical is something else entirely and with a bit of high faluttin’ sparkle, but sometimes, the mundane is everything but sparkly and wild and is tumble-free and cultivated in the shape of lines and squares unconsciously or sometimes even consciously.
To forget the spiral and the shape of fur and scent of howl is to forget the wild twin and the wild skin.
So, an homage to Seals and their Selkie kin. Playful and alluring. Silky and quick flash splash of tails. Mercurial. Moon-like. Shapes swishing and swirling and merging ocean time to skin time to protean time to all one ness time to no time. Eyes like the night with stars peering through. They know things we do not know. they remember things closer to the home without walls kind of home. The returning to remembering source kind of home.
Time. Place. Binding. And losing connection with the wild windswept glimmering, dangerous and mysterious elements. Age, and life and hardening and forgetting and survival and going through the motions of life and marriage or work or day to day or mundane. We forget. Our skin dries and wrinkles up. Before you know it, you can no longer see your freckles or the soft smile of your eyes. She looks longingly to the sea, to the horizon, to the stars, to the hedges, to the edges where landscapes merge and blur into clouds or lakes or abysses. How can one who comes from wet and salt and round and fluid inside womb room in mother wilds forget the truth of return. Remember how, like my daughter at the beach, we crawled right up to the ripples of her seaweed dress fearlessly, knowing, seeing in her shimmering reflection, the truth: I once came from you. And I will return to you. Source. Nourishment. Replenishment. The water of life. The skin of renewal.
In the story of Selkies and seal maidens, it is a strange and magical enchantment to be from an elemental realm -not quite here, not quite there. Liminal. Between. And then once in a blue moon to rise from belly to ocean belly to sand to feet, to two footedness, to uprightness, to stand. To press upon earth. To experience wind pressing upon flesh. To have a dance beneath a full moon, where feet, not fins stomp and step. Senses alert to having stepped from one realm into another. It goes both ways. One can be enchanted by either side of the door to the liminal to the earthly to the other earthly.
Yet, to be disconnected from the wild knowing, the wild water, wild fields and wild flowers, wild ecstatic dance and the wild pounce of lust or remembering, (to be divided from the liminal and wild under the surface swim for too too long) is to parch on the inside. Is to forget inside the parch and to harden inside the drying and to wrinkle and harden more and habituate and wear more lines on the skin. Not the kind carved by smiles. Little by little, to become a crabless shell. An empty habitat where dreams are no longer cradled, but have no where to shape shift and paint themselves stories inside skin.
And so… she, my not quite child, not quite young woman, my ‘in between-ling’, my moon child water child, she unknowingly reminds me to return, returns me to the elusive will o’ wisp of my girl changeling woman wisdom knowing, as I witness her insouciance and freshness as she cascades in water sprays illuminating rainbows.
And when I see her joy and her effervescence when she slips into the creek each spring, or jumps into our desert pool mid March or May, I remember. I too have a second skin. Removed unknowingly or perhaps I knew and willingly gave it away, but it is here, somewhere. I see how my daughter becomes one with water skin, becomes one with her waterhome, her comfort zone, where words are replaced by silence and burbles and shapes of bubbles and waves, eddies and waterfalls. And she goes below the surface, in her element, in her water skin, seeking refuge from the hardening, the drying, the forgetting of the world.
And for a timeless time, she remembers. And I remember through her as I witness.
And something else happens. A chest once locked tight and hidden in an attic or forgotten hole in the floor is revealed. And there, inside of it, an old thing. I can hardly recognize it, but it is mine. Or perhaps it was my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s, and it was passed down from her mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s all the way down to me. A second skin. A sensing, wandering, imagining, magic-ing, wordlessly sleek skin. Water kin skin. Strange creature with a mind of its own skin. Slips itself upon my wrinkles. And escorts my legs, my mind, my heart, my being, away away away from the mundane. From the story story story that travels in a linear pencil thin line to the rounded story. The moon story. The circle story. The spiral story. The water story. The fluid story. The hips wearing mermaid green scales moving side to side in a watery sway. The remembering story of skin penetrating mystery penetrating imagination penetrating remembering. And I am home. Inside the skin of the mama of renewal. the chalice of remembering.
We all need a refuge. Whether we live in the desert or not. A second skin to dance in, bathe in, sing in, self care in, make love in, remember in. And perhaps the more often we re-member this skin back to its source, it begins to do the magical thing that skin does, after an injury, as it etches itself tattoos itself, knits its memory of the enchanted life, of the otherworldly life, of the before marriage or before mothering or before forgetting life, and marries itself to the inside out. reanimates itself. Infuses the anima/animus within itself, more palpably, more primally. More ethereally, yet unmistakably tasted. Sweet wild water. Like after eating artichokes or desert ephedra and taking a sip, the way it is sweeter than normal. A fresh spring on an old Appalachian mountain where rose quartz infuses its taste with delicious sweetness. The way the children say, “This spring water is sweeter than lemonade.”
It’s that kind of remembering. It’s that good when we take time swim in the other direction. The one the world bars us from entering. The one the salmon remember. The one the selkies sing about at dawn.
Join me for a wild remembering into Selkie myth and meaning.
Friday, 10 am Pacific on Zoom.
$22 - $44 sliding scale.
(pay via Venmo or PayPal movingthestory@gmail.com)
or eventbrite:
Thirteen: Session Three -Selkie Stories & the Wild Remembering
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