How It Feels When Your Soulskin Needs Tending

It has occurred to me as I have begun sharing my latest offering, Petitioning the Selkies, that not everyone knows what it feels like when their soulskin needs tending and mending, replenishing and restoring. The story of Sealskin Soulskin as retold and shared by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves has proved to be such a powerful and helpful framework for me to really connect and understand the felt experience of my soulskin, that I would now describe the selkies as some of my most important teachers throughout my adult life. So much so, that I forget that not everyone works with this framework, or these teachers!

In fact, not everyone even knows what a selkie is. A mermaid? Yes, of course. But a selkie? Not so much. And yet, the lessons of the selkie, I think, are some of the most important. Especially for those who can identify with the experience of being spread to thin, of saying yes to everyone other than themselves, of losing track of their desire, of losing sight of themselves.

And so, my lovelies, I’ve decided to share one of the poems from my collection From Revolutionary Lips (which is now available from here), called Carrion. While it doesn’t explicitly reference the selkies, it absolutely communicates selkie medicine. My hope is that it also gives a really strong knowing of how it feels when your soulskin needs tending…

Carrion

Sometimes in life,
we lose ourselves.
It doesn’t happen suddenly.
It’s not like one minute
we knew who we were
and then, the next,
we don’t.
No. It’s a far more slippery
thing than this.
It’s more like a shaft of sunlight
splicing through water.
We keep reaching out to touch it,
and our hand just passes through.
Once upon a time,
the light of our truth
shone bright and clear.
And now it is
dissolute, diffuse, indeterminate.

Where did I go, we wonder.
What happened to the woman
I once was?
She seemed so sure.
She seemed so present.
She seemed so vital.
The transparency of me was filled out,
sensual, vibrant, brimming full of myself,
radiant and completely me.
What happened?
Where did I go?

A thousand pieces of self
picked off the bones of the
woman I was
in the process of becoming.
And, in many cases,
gladly given and welcomed.
Expected, even.
Until a flock of hungry gulls descend,
pecking with sharp beaks
at the fibres of what I knew to be true.
What I knew to be me.

I see this self lying
washed up on the
beach of my own becoming.
Cast up beyond the strand,
up where the regular tides don’t
reach to reclaim me.
The shifting sands settle
below my still form.
And I let them.
Because inside
I am craving the stillness.
I am craving the settling.
I tell myself,
if I just lie here, if I just lie still,
then maybe,
maybe I can find myself again –
maybe the trick is to just keep quiet –
maybe the key is to choose nothing.

Yet still the gulls come.
Their assessing eyes
zeroed in on my remains.
And it’s then that I realise
it doesn’t matter how quiet I become.
How pliant. How still. How good.
It’s not enough.
And it never will be.
Because what is truly needed is
the restorative force of a deep
dive.

Ah, the deep dive that calls to us
so fervently, and which we resist
just as ardently.
But which won’t be denied.
Not ever. not fully.

Like the sirens that sit
just off shore and call to us,
sing our song of self back to us.
We hear them singing
and we long to return,
to give ourselves over to the mystery,
to dance on the edges
of who we were meant to be
and the roles that we continue to play.

What would it mean,
we ask,
if we were just to dive in,
deeply, fully.
To be completely submerged,
the water filling our ears
so that we couldn’t hear
the nagging voices of gulls
that continue to circle
above the surface.
So that we could only hear
the liquid lullaby of the water
and our own heartbeat
– powering through –
the constant soundtrack of our life
and our capacity to live it.

Can you feel how your body knows this place?
Can you feel it welcoming you home?

I can.
I can feel it as the cool touch of silken tides
upon my skin.
I can feel it as the delicious pressure
in my flesh.
I can feel it as the weightlessness
of my body.
I can feel it in the recognition
of my bones.

And with this powerfully embodied experience,
I remember.
I remember that I am more than
my roles, my responsibilities, my relationships.
I am the sum of all my parts
and more.
I am delivered back to myself
– fully restored, shining, resplendent.
My well-oiled pelt gleaming and glossy.
And I tell myself, never again.
Never again will I forget this feeling.
This gift of the deep dive.
Never again will I go so long
before coming back to me.
Before giving myself the gift of the deep
dive into my own wild soul.

Until, of course, I do.
Swept up in the needs and wants
and expectations and conditionings,
I deliver myself back to that king tide,
before being washed up
on the shore once more.
Stranded. Malnourished. Carrion.

But I am not content to be carrion.
Not anymore. Not again. Not ever.

If you recognise yourself in these words, if you feel a resonance with this work of selkies and soulskins, then I would love to petition the selkies on your behalf this summer solstice. To read more about this offer, please click the link below…

Petitioning the Selkies