Story as Matryoshka
The transformational power of breaking open the story
The wounding becomes sacred when we are willing to release our old stories and to become the vehicles through which the new story may emerge into time.
Jean Houston
I’ll break open the story and
tell you what is there. Then, like
the others that have fallen out onto the sand,
I will finish with it,
and the wind will take it away.
Nisa, a !Kung San Woman, 1969
It began with a story. I opened one story, and discovered many more inside. Writing a coming of age memoir, it looked as if my personal story was a Russian nesting doll, a matryoshka. The image at the center of my matryoshka is a butterfly landing on an acorn, and a wolf woman dancing.
When I was nineteen years old and lived in Moscow, the symbol of Russia was a matryoshka. At first glance, it was because the matryoshka could be found on every street corner, at every market and in the underground passageways. The men and women who sold wooden dolls stopped me and said, “Girl, maybe doll?” or “Girl, buy doll?” or “Devushka, matryoshka?” I preferred the handmade matryoshka with one-of-a-kind fairytale images that told a story. The image on the largest doll alluded to the fairytale. Breaking her open, the next image specified a character or theme in the story, and on and on until the discovery of the tiny unbreakable doll at the center, who symbolized the story’s happy ending.
I discovered during an excursion to a folk art village, that in provincial Russia before the revolution, the name Matryona or Matriyosha was a very popular female name. It was derived from the Latin root mater, which means mother. This name was associated with the image of a mother who was healthy, well rounded and had many stories. It became a symbolic name and was later used specially to describe the brightly painted wooden dolls.
Matroshka remind me of the storyteller dolls from southwestern pueblos. The difference is that the storyteller pueblo dolls have children that seem to be growing off the mother or storyteller, whereas you have to break open the matryoshka to discover the story children inside.
Movement, image, solitude and nature assist me when I cannot find words. When I break open a story, words that might have been stuck or lodged inside of me need to move or work their way out before I can break open the next story. Dance, writing, artistic process is the fuel for moving the story.
Girltruth from the Belly (my coming of age memoir) is my matroshka, my coming of age identity discovering itself. I discovered the transformative power of breaking open a story through direct experience. The stories were sleeping inside of me. Breaking them open made them come alive, allowed me to see them more clearly and helped me to understand my relationship to place, ancestors and different kinds of conditioning. When I first began breaking them open, I felt like I was the story and all of its parts. I was the feeling of the story. When I began writing the story, I broke open a lost, disowned teenage story and I experienced stuck teenage feelings. I broke open a story from the mines of the place where I was raised and met the ghosts of place and experienced the deeper depressions of place and people. I broke open the story of my grandfather’s hands and met his ancestors and felt their story hearth light a fire in me. I broke open the story of a girl in Russia and met the mythopoetic devil who told her the story about her religious conditioning. I broke open the story of Dr. Zhivago and revisited the transformative cycle of transition in people and society. Each layer of time and each story doll gave me the experience of feelings, thoughts and memories from the past projected on the present, and by working through the layers, I was able to come closer to the core at the center.
Writing is an amazing tool for self-discovery. I never imagined I’d write through a matryoshka from the hidden forest of my adolescence and discover that what was hiding in the belly of a wolf was my need to tell the story of what was hiding in my belly at age sixteen. I didn’t realize that hiding in my belly was a thread connecting me to the story of my mother and her mother and the other mothers before her, leading me back in time to the ancient sea of life. Seula, Seula. Seula. My matryoshka story helped me to discover the seed of my soul and led me to the my father’s ancestral land of matryhoska so that I might better understand my soul seed and how it wishes to grow.
I discovered an image of the wombline soul not quite halfway into my matryoshka. This image is important to me because it shows me where the confusion about my identity began. It told me that the origin of soul comes through my grandmother’s German lineage, and that my granny’s granny lost a piece of her soul when she traveled across the sea from Germany. She lost her husband on the journey, and they returned his body to the sea. It was the first time she crossed the unpredictable ocean, leaving her black forest oak tree village behind. The journey for adventure and freedom became a journey with a tragic story. My great, great ancestors discovered that the sea is dangerous and takes life without warning. I imagine this moment grew a seed into my great, great ancestor’s belly that she passed to Nonna who passed it to me.
The wombline told me what the Catholic Church said about my origin, about how God made the water and split the waters from the sky and created the land and the plants and the animals and eventually a man. God made Adam, and from Adam’s rib, a woman was born.
The wombline told me that I was born premature, sped up and rushed into life with the aid of an injection that ripped me from the natural birth process. The wombline told me this too,
Etymology of Soul
Modern English soul continues Old English sáwol, sáwel, first attested in the 8th century (in Beowulf v. 2820 and in the Vespasian Psalter 77.50), cognate to other Germanic terms for the same concept, including Gothic saiwala, Old High German sêula, sêla, Old Saxon sêola, Old Low Franconian sêla, sîla, Old Norse sála. The further etymology of the Germanic word is uncertain. A common suggestion is a connection with the word sea, and from this evidence alone, it has been speculated that the early Germanic peoples believed that the spirits of deceased rested at the bottom of the sea or similar. A more recent suggestion[1] connects it with a root for "binding", Germanic *sailian (OE sēlian, OHG seilen), related to the notion of being "bound" in death, and the practice of ritually binding or restraining the corpse of the deceased in the grave to prevent his or her return as a ghost.
Mom’s belly button is still connected to mine. There is a thin line from my belly button to hers. It is finer than a spider’s web. My mom’s belly is connected to my nonna’s belly, Geraldine Amelia Baumhardt Pricco. My nonna’s belly is connected to her mom, Adelia Bartelt Baumhardt. Adelia has a line going to Auguste Maria Louise Fredericka Seigfried. And from Auguste, the line goes to Fredericka Louise Gloepky. This is what I know. If I have a baby, it is connected through the love line wombline and it will have my Gypsy Russian Romanian Hungarian Jewish Lutheran German Italian Catholic blood.
But what is in my bloodline really?
Our wombs are sleeping together. Their wombs breathe together. They blow foam to the shore together. They sing a mnemonic song. Seula. Seula. Seula. Not with their mouths or the minds. Their song is deeper than time. Their song is embedded in stone before words were what we now know. Their song carries symbol in pure form. It just takes time to follow and unravel.
The film Ten Canoes, by Rolf de Heer and the people of Ramingining, illustrates the transformational power of story within a story, told from an Aboriginal perspective. I liked this because it showed me a masculine indigenous perspective on story, place and coming of age.
The cosmology of the Yasmu people is an entirely different cosmology than ours. The universe is a different place, the way of thinking is therefore different, and the language, apart from being structurally different, describes different things. Ours is a language of classification and categorization, theirs is a language of connection and unity. Everything is all one. There is no notion of fiction in their cosmology, and telling a story out of order, as we were having to do in making our film, makes no sense.
The film begins and ends with an image of water, a river running through Australian swampland. The Aboriginal storyteller, Jamie Dayindi Gulpilil Dalaithngu says,
Bout time to tell you a story, eh? Then I'll tell you one of ours …Once upon a time, in a land far, far away...Nah not like that, I’m only joking …I am going to tell you a story…It is longtime ago. It is our time, before you other mob came from cross the ocean...longtime before then. The rains been good and ten of the men go on the swamp, to hunt the eggs of gumang, the magpie goose. One of the men, the young fella, has a wrong love, so the old man tell him a story …a story of the ancient ones, them wild and crazy ancestors who come after the spirit time, after the flood that covered the whole land …This land began in the beginning.
I come from a water hole. I was looking like a little fish in my water hole. When I die, I’ll go back to my water hole. I’ll be waiting here like a little fish, waiting to be born again…
At the end of the film, Gulpilil says,
Now you’ve seen my story, not like your story, but a good story all the same.
The Aboriginal storytelling in Ten Canoes expressed a relationship to story that is fluid, alive and multi-dimensional. I was conditioned to relate to my coming of age story as an isolated incident. My conditioning, perspective, thoughts, emotional wellbeing and relationship to place affect the way I write or experience a story.
I reparented my story in relation to place, and the multidimensionality that I am, as a human being. Through writing and the mythos of imagination, my story changes shape before my eyes, and through the language of place and body, it rooted and grew alive, differently thru me.
I think that the story in a person is transformational in the way that a matryoshka or a caterpillar changes forms. I felt the need to follow the ancestral stories in my stories so that I could better understand why I am who I am. I wanted to see my ancestor’s temperaments more clearly through an imaginal lens, so I could understand my genetic disposition. I wanted to make sense of my desire for freedom in relation to my father’s tragic ending in prison. I wondered why I have certain soul urges, and wanted to trace these urges through time. I wanted to reconcile my passion for magic in relation to Nonna’s fear of magic. I wanted to understand why I felt bound to Russia, and to understand the history of her soil and her people so that I might understand some of the victim feelings in my body that don’t make sense. My personal story felt connected to ancestral and collective stories on a knowing level without words. I want to keep moving closer to the words. Breaking open the story helped me to do that.
I like to story. To me, to story implies a living experience. The story becomes more than a story and is connected to more than one story in the way that a tree grows roots through soil and reach the roots of other trees. The land speaks through the story and the story speaks through me. One example of this could be the story of descent and initiation in the myth of Persephone and Demeter. Persephone spoke differently in Russia than she did in upper Michigan; she spoke differently in northern Wisconsin than in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She speaks differently in spring than in fall.
To me, storying, or to story as a verb, feels like many different things. I see leaves story in the spring, summer and fall, because, to me, they are animate and their colors and shapes, buds and eventual fall tell many stories, such as the story of change, and transition. When I use story as a verb, and experience the leaves storying, they guide me to experience seasons, transition, and life and death inside of me.
I experience and witness the transformative power of story when I look at the life cycle story of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. The story of a caterpillar in a cocoon gives me strength when I experience awkward change or growth. It teaches me the benefit of solitude and that a story can be and often needs to be contained so that the main character, or object inside, can do the necessary work to experience transformation. These natural images assisted me. The story of the caterpillar becoming a butterfly felt instructive to me while writing Girltruth because it helped me to understand how a thing biologically changes from one form to another. I felt curious about this, in terms of my own coming of age processing and experience of embodiment through writing, nature and dance. If the physical changes are less obvious in me than a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, how does one record it or prove that the change happened? Obviously my body has changed a lot since I was sixteen. However, my psyche has changed in ways that are less noticeable.
Can story transform an inner caterpillar into an inner butterfly? I think it can when combined with movement and nature, solitude and other forms of sorting.
There are five stages to a butterfly’s life. I see human beings as having five distinct phases, including birth, childhood, adolescence, maturity and death/rebirth. The simplest way I see the story of a butterfly is this. A butterfly starts with an egg, becomes a caterpillar, and transforms into a pupa, the quiescent stage during which its body structure changes into an adult structure. Ten to fifteen days later, the adult butterfly emerges. The adult butterfly flies, lays eggs, and will eventually die. The cycle begins again. Egg. Caterpillar. Pupa. Butterfly. Death/rebirth.
Most caterpillars molt four to six times, each stage between molts being called an instar. The rate at which a caterpillar grows increases with each molt. The caterpillar may remain still for days while the pupal skin forms under its skin. The old caterpillar skin splits open and the pupa emerges. Hooks on the pupa, called cremaster, breaks through the larval skin. The pupa is extremely vulnerable to parasites that try to lay their eggs within it because its skin is still very soft. Inside the pupal case, the caterpillar is transformed into an adult.
Since hatching, the caterpillar contained growth centers called imaginal buds. These were inhibited from developing by the secretion of a juvenile hormone in the caterpillar from glands near the head. When production of this hormone is shut off in the last stage of caterpillar life, the caterpillar enters the pupal phase, and these imaginal buds begin to grow and develop into adult organs and structures. At the same time, many organs and structures of the caterpillar are dissolved into a juicy substance that feeds the growth of the adult structures. All of this takes about two weeks or a little less if conditions are ideal, such as the weather being warm. p. 22
The pupal skin cracks open near the head, and the butterfly emerges. It must
remain still and hang upside down for a period of time in order for its wings to dry. When they finally harden and dry, the butterfly flies. Most butterfly species spend winters and summers in the same areas. Monarch butterflies, my favorite species, move south to avoid the cold, and continue in a migratory cycle following their ancestor patterns.
I think the story of caterpillar/butterfly/caterpillar is so fascinating because it tells the beautiful story of transformation simply. Not all caterpillars make it as butterflies. To me, the real story is that it is a miracle when transformation happens. It is dangerous to transform. Not all caterpillars survive. The butterfly keeps on laying eggs. Not all butterflies emerge able to fly. Many butterflies are eaten. Chyrsalis are often destroyed. The butterfly keeps emerging. The process of transformation is dangerous and so extremely moving and beautiful. The story of the caterpillar transforming into butterfly helps me to view transformation as natural life process, moving through the chaos of transition, out of one stage and into another. To me, it makes transformation appear both sacred and profanely simple. The process of transformation is a bit yucky, gooey, sticky and messy at times. This yucky, messy, gooey stuff in the body’s processing of change makes transformation seem that much more real and grounded to me.
Why is the story of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly important in connection with a coming of age journey or rites of passage integration? The story of the caterpillar illustrates the complete breakdown of one structure, so that a new structure can emerge. It feels like that in adolescence. Some physical structures are changing and maturing. The words imaginal buds fascinate me. I think of how my ideas of what it means to come of age have changed since I was thirteen. My ideas about how Moscow affected me have changed since I was twenty. Writing through the story has added a dimension of change in my experience that I wasn’t aware of. I feel like memory, body, place and imagination created the alchemy of change inside of me. Going back to the land and listening to her stories while storying a coming of age story was a powerful experience because it transformed my relationship to my place. I went from disliking my adolescent place to developing love, concern, appreciation and desire to preserve and protect her. I felt my young body’s memory and disconnect from place. With my imaginal buds, I grew my young body into connection with place and my present body. I gave my young body and its emotions and thoughts a container for processing the yucky, messy, mucky stuff. I learned more about my adolescent bioregion and what it means to become native to place.
To me, the transformational power of story is the fact that I experienced change on an emotional, physical, intellectual and imaginative or spiritual level in terms of my changing perspective on my identity. I am seeing my adolescent identity with greater compassion, have reclaimed my girltruth and am discovering this emerging and beautiful womantruth or woman identity. The breakdown of the old organs and structures of the caterpillar are dissolved into a substance that feeds the growth of the adult structures. This intelligent act of nature points to the physical process of transformation and embodiment in a way that makes poetic sense to my own journey, and helps me to understand the transformational and embodied power of story in my own life.
One of the reasons why I wrote and danced through adolescent transition is because I, like the caterpillar, have molted or changed and grown many times since then, but I haven’t fully embodied the process in a way that made sense to me, or that allowed me to experience the emergence of becoming a woman as clearly or strongly. I learned that becoming adult isn’t the static when you are an adult, you’ll know what I mean. Wisdom from experience isn’t attained by merely crossing the threshold of time. The natural maturing process helped me to have more patience about how it works inside of me. I think my caterpillar child and adolescent selves didn’t have the proper tools to navigate successfully through the transition. They were encouraged to rush, speed up, fear or ignore it. Many of my traumatic experiences make me feel as though my caterpillars were victims to natural laws of survival. They got eaten or had a lot of parasites stuck to them, making it impossible to go further developmentally.
I know myself better from having discovered writing as a spiritual practice. I have been lost on so many different fingers that I missed the personal authority that grows from personal experience. I am the author of my life!
Women who Run with the Wolves made a deep impression on me the first time I read it in 1994, not long after returning from Moscow. I was particularly influenced by her story of La Loba, the Wolf Woman, the central theme woven throughout her book. I included this story at the end of Girltruth because the center of my matryoshka is more than a butterfly migrating to desert landscape to land on an acorn. The butterfly told me the center of my identity is my soul, the power of transformation that lives inside of me. The acorn tells me that I must be patient with the natural cycle of change, growth and life. But the wolf woman, she tells me that the center of my core is also a wild and fierce element. She tells me that even if I am to bare myself to the bone, and even if it feels like I have died because of it, my wolf woman will rise from the bones and when she does, she will dance. When she experiences transformation, she wants to be in the south beneath a vast wide sky of stars, not in the hibernating winter of an isolated, sheltered forest.
The greater conversation that I wish to be part of from this point on is to continue to learn what other women feel about the center of their matryoshkas in their own words. What does another woman call her matryoshka? How does she describe her identity? Would she call it an atlas of the heart? Would she say that she had to peel the onion to find it, or would she find a word that describes the journey in her own words? How might writing as spiritual practice, or rite of passage support her in coming to know herself?
(This writing is an excerpt my Master’s thesis, 2008, on Power of Story and integrating a coming of age and spiritual identity thru writes of passage)
For more info on my upcoming writes of passage immersion
Crack open the Story, Spring 2004 please reach out!