Confessions of a Selkie

So, I have a confession to make. I have never read Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run With The Wolves from cover to cover.

It’s not that I haven’t had the time. And it’s not that I don’t respect the work that went into structuring this incredibly important book. In fact, I’m sure a lot of thought and effort when into the ordering of the chapters. Instead, it’s been a choice. My choice.

You see, for me, this book is alive. It’s a living, breathing expression of women’s psyches as beautifully depicted and explored by one of our most important storytellers. It holds deep wisdom for all of us who encounter initiation in the living of our lives. And so it is the book that I turn to when I need guidance, when I am looking to deepen my own understanding of how I am choosing to meet the challenges of my life, when I need a reminder of my own wonderful wild nature.

Because of this, I don’t, and never have, sat down to read it chapter by chapter. I have read it in its entirety, with some chapters lovingly returned to again and again, but that has been an act of devotion to the stories and to myself over months and years. And, I have to tell you, that in my reading of these stories and Estes’ analysis of them, I have favourites that call to me insistently and often.

The Ugly Duckling and the experience of exile and belonging. La Mariposa and the wisdom of the body and how to honour it. The Crescent Moon Bear and how to recognise and work our rage. Skeleton Woman and the cycles of life, death, rebirth… oh, I have read that particular chapter so many times.

But the chapter that I have read so often that my copy falls open at the start of it, and the pages containing the story have come away from the binding and are now only loosely held, nestled between The Feral Woman and La Llorona, is the chapter called Homing: Returning to Oneself…

This chapter holds the retelling of Sealskin, Soulskin, which is a folk tale of the far north. It tells the story of the selkie-wife – a strange mythical creature who swims as a seal, before stripping off her pelt to dance naked on the beaches, and who found herself blackmailed into marriage with a local fisherman.

(To read a brief retelling of this story, you can read this previous post of mine – Answering the Selkie’s Call.)

There is so much about this story, and in Estes’ careful and deeply compassionate unravelling of its importance to our understanding of the expectations of women’s time, attention and energy, of their medial nature, of the absolute necessity of her tending to her soulskin, that sings to the experience of my life, and my witnessing of other women’s lives.

When I speak of this story to others, they instinctively know the experience of having lost their soulskin, of having their soulskin treated roughshod and without care, of having their soulskin so desired by others that they found it difficult to refuse their pleas, of being reunited with their soulskin, of being at one with their soulskin – fine furred and glossy pelted.

We might not have used the story of the selkie-wife as the metaphoric framework for speaking to this instinctive knowing. And we may not, even now, have the words to describe it to another. For truly, there is something about the soul that eludes language. I have often thought that the soul resides in the gaps that open up between the words we use and that to which they refer. But in these gaps, these medial places of in between, the selkie swims – indivisible from her soulskin. And there’s something in that which feels enormously reassuring to me….

Next week, I’m going to be sharing a bit more about why this story means so much to me. So, this weekend, I’ll be picking up my well-loved copy of Women Who Run With the Wolves, and it’ll fall open at the same chapter that it always does. I’ll spend hours immersed in the story, soaking up the new wisdom that is unveiled for me in my re-reading. And then, early next week, I’ll tell you a story of a young woman who found herself living on the far far north coast of Scotland, in a cottage by the sea – a wife and a mother, to be sure. But at heart, always a selkie – one who knows the value of her own soulskin.