I'll never forget the day we were preparing for my daughter's birthday party and we taped three balloons to one of the beams.... Why three? She asked. Three is the magic number, I say. Everything magical comes in threes. Like maiden, mother, crone, the three things a woman can be.
But mummy, she says, there's not just three things a woman can be. You told me that women can also be seals.
The story of the selkie is the story of a woman taken from the sea and her wildness stripped from her as she has to conform to life on land. Ultimately she cannot, and she leaves husband and children to become a creature of the deep once more.
This story especially resonates with me as a woman who experiences chronic illness. The dry skin, the salt cravings, light and sound sensitivities, the hypermobile joints. It's easy to believe there is somewhere else that we might be better suited to, an environment that our body and soul is craving...
To slip beneath the deep and experience the weightlessness and the white noise and the sweet relief.
Even now, there is a part of women that longs to return to the sea.
We will be exploring the story of the selkie in my new course The Medicine Wheel of the Womb. When a woman reclaims her innate wildness and knowing, she activates a deep part of the wheel.
