Raise your hand if you have ever been swallowed by a story. Stories can do many things. They are shapeshifters, change makers, weavers, psychopomps, wild tigers, devouring wolves, falling towers, golden bridges, liminal gateways, portals, fire breathers, and ancestral secret keepers. I have been swallowed by a story at least three or four times. The first time, was when I was ten, and I discovered that my father died in prison at Terminal Island (I didn’t know he was in prison -he had told me he was adventuring on an island); the second time, I was fifteen, and discovered that I had accidentally gotten pregnant; the third time, I was nineteen, an American girl on a year long study abroad, wandering the streets of Moscow, Russia in my combat boots, mid-winter, season of slush, while communism was dissolving and capitalism was being born. The fourth time was when I got pregnant with a mystical friend I had a deeply spiritual/mythic connection to, while exploring polyamory in my early thirties. That pregnancy was terminated and launched a journey to undercover all the stories I was still carrying, and which needed to be freed, released and or integrated more fully.
Forest of Teeth: Hazel Terry
The thing is, I didn’t know I had been swallowed by a story in any of those dramas of my life. I didn’t realize there was such a thing as ‘being swallowed by a story’ until I was far, far outside of each of those stories, (though those stories were unconsciously still contained in me) writing my way through the second semester of my low-residency, self-designed MA program in Transformative Language Arts through Goddard College. And then: one minute I was living at the top of a mountain, in a Priestess Path in Boulder, CO, exploring the Path of Ceremonial Arts and what it means to walk for a year with a goddess (I chose the ancient Yugoslavian ‘egg goddess’ who gives birth to herself.) The next minute I was selling or packing up my belongings and driving East on the 80, from Boulder, CO, through Nebraska onward to Iowa, North to Minneapolis and then veering Northeast to Bessemer, Michigan my hometown. All because the Moon had been full and it was a Scorpio moon, and I heard through its bright pregnant orb that my grandmother would soon be leaving this earth -and so shouldn’t I head home and find out for myself if it were true, and if so, offer my grandmother my respects.
Before you travel any further in my tale, you should know this upfront: some stories are like wooden nesting dolls, and if you crack one open, there will be another and another and another, and they will connect you to mysterious and unpredictable things within yourself, or above or below your stories, into your DNA and epigenetic past, or higher, to your cosmic star seeds. But mostly, it will pull something out of you, and like all story webs, there are invisible threads, that connect us to lost pieces, forgotten memories, collective memory, ancestral memory and much, much more.
Image: Anastasia Suvarova
Sometimes when following the path of story, you will discover that you are more than you thought you were (and less, in the same breath) but that you have a map, and a compass and a path, and if you nestle in and listen up, you are bound to uncover mysteries and retrieve lost story parts, the way you might retrieve your soul. Perhaps it is one and the same.
The next thing you know, the path leads you to yourself, right back where you started, only changed.
Travel does this to you too. Which is why, the story which unfurled after returning home to visit my grandmother in her last three days on earth before departing, a story literally hurled itself at me and told me it was time to listen. It was the story of my time in Moscow. 1992. Age 19. Transition from girl to woman. Transition of small town girl and small stories to small town girl in larger than life stories. Communism was fucking being annihilated by glasnost and capitalism and perestroika and the map was McDonalds and Blue Jeans and Russian punk and Night Wolves bikers, and death to the old, birth to the new. But it was also a map of pseudo civil war. And breakdowns. And anarchy. And Russian Revolutionary spirits rising and falling and tragically, it was also death to the Dusha, the Russian soul I had ventured to Moscow to discover.
I was a junior in college, on a study abroad from a small town in southern Minnesota. I went seeking an understanding of soul and depth in a foreign language; freedom and its opposite in a place where those things mattered beyond anything. I wanted truth, splayed out on a silver platter with a golden spoon in its mouth. My eyes were peeled layer by layer. Baba Yaga was somewhere making mushroom tea behind the scenes, blowing smoke and cheeky incantations at me. I was in living an old communist style dormitory once occupied by the higher communist party officials of the past. Dreaming of marching soldiers beating an end of the world drum. Truth was a foreign language, a mystery, a hoax, and a curse. Truth was Soul. Soul was truth. I was a girl wearing a red cape. I’d ventured far, far from home. Moscow was a wolf. She ate me whole.
It was all too large, too grand, too massive a feast to digest in one day, one month, ten months. Ten years. Fourteen years and counting, later, it decided I’d gestated enough and it was time to spit me out. To spit my voiceless voice out. Baring her tears and glistening teeth. I was now part wolf too.
That story churned its last churn inside my belly, the way Baba Yaga churns her pestle into bones. The death of my grandmother must have brought it out of me. Somehow, the stars aligned and her passing lured it into the room. My grandmother’s favorite color was Red. Her favorite story as a child was Little Red Riding Hood. She was not a very outspoken woman. She was a good woman. She followed the right path. She didn’t get lured off the path. I’m not sure if she knew any wolves. I don’t know if she was ever truly swallowed. Except that she didn’t exactly have a voice in the deepest, truest sense. She loved red but did she use it, really use it? What is Red anyway, I mean…Red. Blood Red. Blood on the snow in a fairytale red. Red the color of Firebirds red. Red like Red Square. Red like origins and beets. Blood Red Apple Red. Blood Red Cape Red. Apple of Creation Red. Red. Red is a songline leading to creation. Creation leads to transformation. In every creation is a story. And in every story is the songline of transformation. Little Red Riding hood is a mystery tale. hidden in her belly, hidden in the belly of the wolf are remnants of older myths, older secrets. We aren’t just talking about warnings, about girls going off paths, and dark suave strangers. no. We are talking about Eleusian mysteries and Initiation. Pomegranate seed red and deeper than deep secrets contained in blacker than black gaps between teeth. Chthonic mysteries.
Image: Agata Jusak: The Visitation
I was pregnant with a story doll. A wild matryoshka. She led me into the imaginal, into the underworld, into the astral, into the body. I was pregnant with my grandmother’s death, and I was home, in the room where I grew up, the room that contained me when I was pregnant at age 15 and where I healed after my abortion and hid my story of shame; the room where I hid my teen sadness and messiness and self hate, and insecurity and loneliness. Where I hid my voice in a journal under my mattress, where I hid my secrets, where I swallowed my feelings, where I drowned in my deepest shadows, where story after story ravaged me. If you hide things, they can only start to sneak around behind your back -a wolf in grandmothers wildflower forest. They take on a life of their own through you. If you really understood the truth about hiding, you’d know that every child who has ever played hide and seek, wishes to be found. Our rejected, hidden, forgotten, and larger than life stories want to be found. They want to be loved. They want to be accepted. They want to be seen and heard. They want to be integrated and synthesized. They want to be understood. And then, and only then, can they truly transform. And bring you into the land of transformation with them.
The wolves were howling from the woods beyond my front door, the wolves which sparkled at night beneath the Northern lights on the edge of Lake Superior. and I remembered how Moscow swallowed me whole. How she swallowed my voice, just like my grandmother’s voice had been swallowed. She swallowed my sense of self, my transitioning identity. She took a part of my soul with her. I would dive in and dive deep, deep deep into the abysmal mythopoetic wolf bellied Baba Yaga bellied dusha, aka, the elusive, mysterious velvety Russian soul. She was an ancestral part of me after all. And she contained secrets. And secrets contain points of activation. Like imaginal cells in the dissolving goo of a caterpillar, activating butterfly wings.
Image: Adolfo Serro, Wolf Motive
The spirit of story wrote the words into my belly, tattooed them on my organs, pumped them through my blood, cascaded them through my imagination, stroked them into my primal creative fire and said: somewhere, a girl is hiding inside a belly of a wolf. She is pregnant with many stories. Finders, keepers. Somewhere, a witch keeps watch. Somewhere else, the mythical and the practical exchange places, the real and the imaginal weave a new rhythm and breathe life into each others domain.
All I know is sometimes, the path makes no sense, and sometimes, you follow the story as if your life depended on it. And so I did. I committed. I slept with the story of Little Red Riding Hood. I danced with it. I embodied it. I wrote it. I drew it. I natured and mooned and oak tree’d it. I made that story into a map, into a key, into an elixir, into a potion, into a dream, into a story. And she kept cracking me open, into a deeper understanding of self, of psyche, of story, of mythos. Into a deeper origin story, into a deeper embodiment story. Into a deeper truth. Into an acorn, just the right size for my pocket. The kind that contains strength and courage. The kind that came from the Tree of Life. The kind that returns to roots and place, self and knowing.
Little Red Riding hood found all my lost parts. The ones I’d left behind. She brought me to the edges of the forest. Where I danced with wolves and the wild. She brought me to the center and edges of story. To the great great great grandmother, to the ancestor, to the great mother, to the little red creation, to the wolves, to the flowers all nestled inside me. She brought me to the edge of my story and she watched me find other lost girls, native Ojibway legends of lost girls, and lost stories of the people in the village of the place that had once been my home. She brought me in touch with the docile and domesticated, but also, wild and longing spirit of my grandmother, of the motherliness grandmothers. She showed me how I can be a fly on story’s sticky thread, or the spider, devouring the fly, or the glistening like stars web itself, spinning a new creation.
How does a Fairytale transform a human being?
Well, I’ll say it like this: She taught me secrets about my bloodline. She taught me secrets of the council of wolves in me. She taught me the secret of story and the way stories stalk girls, and devour them unsuspectingly. She taught me about the rape of soul, when we are lost. She taught me about forgetting and remembering. She taught me about the color red, and the alchemical fire of creation. And, she told me again and again, that I am not here to remain a victim to any single one of my stories, but rather, to understand them as a map, as a landscape, as an ecosystem, connected to millions and billions of connecting and intersecting threads.
image: Andrejz Strumillo
I am part of the human condition. I am part of the story. The story is part of me. The human condition is part of me. I am and am not Little Red Riding Hood. I wear my red with pride. And, if you are truly lucky to have been devoured by a story, know that there is something to being gestated -by creation, by the mythos, by the map of the heroine’s journey. And then know that you will recognize yourself in Persephone’s inward gaze. In Vassalissa’s resilience. In the wonder of every girl who ever loved red and wandered brazenly off the path, in search of a good story. Isn’t it a choose your own adventure after-all? Or is it all predestined? Perhaps it is a little bit of both. Fate and Destiny. Wolves and Heroines. Self dissolving and self becoming. Whole-making. Story making. Swallowed by a Story. Pregnant with life/death/life. Full to the brim with mystery.