The Selkie and the Dragon. . ..Photo credit: This is an AI generated image from Canva.

What primordial union lives buried in the bedrock of history, under the cross currents of time, that remembering will bring us back into belonging with each other?

We can find a beautiful answer to this question when we reflect deeply on the wisdom of the enduring love story between a creature from ocean and a creature from the land that washes up on the coasts of many landscapes. The story of Selkie and her human lover from Irish folklore, and the Ocean Dragon and his Crane lover from Vietnamese maritime folklore are two such stories that might very well be one love story that has drifted miles across the ocean to find a home in two separate places. Both stories take place on the coast, that liminal mystical folklore-rich place between land and sea. They both share the theme of entering into courtship with the mysterious other, and in the process, discovering a more authentic sense of self and belonging. Together these ancient folktales gift us with some wisdom to weather the stormy seas of our times.

The story of the Selkie is about a shapeshifting seal woman who is robbed of her pelt, that part of herself most vital to her thriving, and through that loss she realizes where she truly belongs and who she really is. Her decision to return to the ocean after finding her pelt is heartbreaking because she must leave her son behind and acknowledge the ending of the relationship with her human lover. The story of Selkie is a wonderful manifestation of the words of Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, who says that both a sense of loss and a feeling of wholeness can coexist, as can brokenness and beauty intertwine.

The process of carving a block of artist’s linoleum into a design inspired by the Vietnamese folktale of the Dragon & Crane.

In the Vietnamese folktale, an ocean Dragon and mountain Crane are wedded together, yet also separate in the end becuase they cannot resolve their differences. However, their hundred eggs hatch into the Vietnamese people and fifty children go with their father Dragon back to the coast to be near the ocean. Fifty remain with their mother Crane up in the mountains. The Dragon and Crane folktale is often told in the context of explaining the cultural differences between northern and southern Vietnamese, or the indigenous highland Vietnamese and coastal sinicized Vietnamese and is told as a reminder about how these differences are woven together through a shared ancestry with the Dragon and the Crane. Like the Selkie story, the story of the Dragon and Crane is about how the process of returning home where one belongs can involve deep loss and grief, while at the same time is also a celebration of the birth of a new sense of belonging that emerges out of that grief. . . .once again embodying Solnit’s reminder of the recurring paradox: that opposing things can be entwined together.

Both these coastal love stories are an ancient way of using storytelling to contend with differences, paradoxes, complexities, and nuances. Often it is assumed that we in modernity are more advanced than the people who originally told these stories. However, just read a newspaper article or listen to the news and it becomes obvious modern day narratives have a way of erasing the complex, and replacing what is messy and meandering with logic, and sensation with sterility. Moreover, there is an underlying assumption that relationships that bridge differences are a modern new thing that are the result of technological advances and globalization. But here, in these two ancient folktales, we witness a marriage between ocean and land, separateness and belonging, love and loss, grief and wholeness, all of which live together in a silent covenant. We see the intertwining of self and other, showing how humans have contended with differences since the beginning of time. These stories show us there is magic in the messiness, offering us a space where nature still reigns, wild and unbroken. . . . .a form of maritime medicine that is as untamed, mercurial as the undulating waves, and as ancient and deep as the ocean itself.

A handcarved block of artist’s linoleum that has been covered with a layer of ink before printing.

Folktales, like pilgrimages, travel and go somewhere sacred and their impact is transformative. Contending with the complex themes that emerge in the unfolding of these folktales and how they resonate so synchronistically with each other, is a journey we take that helps us renegotiate both our inner and outer landscapes. Noticing the similarities between the Selkie and the Dragon & Crane folktales invites us to swim in the timeless currents of the folkloric underworld reorienting our minds, as we find connections between geographical landscapes and cultures we thought of as vastly different and separate, and find resonances in the characters and their shared losses, loves, griefs and discoveries.

A handcrafted linocut inspired by the folktale of Selkie.

Thích Nhất Hạnh, the globally recognized Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, coined the term “interbeing” to describe how everything lives in relation to all other things. What appears to be separate is actually a combination of interrelated parts. Recognizing how the Selkie and Dragon & Crane folktales are in fact the same story though they are from different landscapes is a beautiful manifestation of this. Perhaps this is the real love story: where the Selkie is the Dragon swimming in the ocean searching for a lover from a different world, and all the heartbreak, loss, separation that can happen when we forget they are interbeing with each other. Each loses a vital part of themselves when they are only seen in isolation, and what wonder and magic comes when they find belonging together again in the oceanic underworld of our psyches.

Reclaiming a folktale’s magic pelt that has been lost, and rediscovering its true home in another requires a recognition that folktales are adaptive, emergent, untamed narratives that transcend time and space. Far from being embalmed in dusty tombs or preserved behind glass, folktales thrive and swim fluidly with the restorative tides of underworld love magic. If we allow them to fall back into love with their wild twin, they off-set and balance out the linearity and rigidity of our modern fixed sense of bordered identities and landscapes and allow us, too, to discover a different versions of ourselves.

This process of reclaiming our shared belonging together in the folkloric, mythical and archetypal underworld has been given many names. Martin Shaw, renowned mythologist and storyteller calls it “courting the wild twin” in his audiobook Courting the Wild Twin. He talks about the “wild twin” as a metaphor for the innate and often ignored wild and mystical aspects of ourselves that have been severed from us by the forces of modernity that separate us from the wild and divide us from each other. He says we need to find and reclaim this wild twin to feel an enlivened sense of belonging to the earth. It makes sense also to use it here in this context to suggest each folktale also has a wild twin that has been severed from it by those same forces of modernity that work against giving visibility to archetypes or recurring synchronistic themes in folktales and myths that bridge cultural divides because acknowledging this doesn’t serve modernity’s divisive interests.

There is so much that suggests how the act of forgetting our shared heritages in the folkloric and mythical worlds runs parallel to the devaluing and suppression of the feminine in history. Toko-pa Turner, Dreamweaver from the Sufi and Jungian perspectives, talks about how cultivating a belonging to one another is our true source of female power in her book Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home:

“The feminine is in direct conversation with that which joins us to all living beings. It is the mystical path that turns us to our own sense, and to the living world around us for guidance and collaboration. We need no mediating authority to grant us permission or tell us how to heal or bring life into the world, because there is a greater authority, a vital impulse which is flowing through each of us at all times. And it is our network, our combined wisdom and experience, our dedication to belonging to one another, which is our true source of power” (60).

In fact, the process of rethinking and remapping our internal sense of ourselves in the world, or finding our wild twin, also can be seen as the Heroine’s Journey (distinguished from the Hero’s journey which is characterized by external quests and victory over an external threat or goal). The Heroine’s Journey is an internal exploration of self discovery and a quest for wholeness and balance that comes from an integration of opposing forces. Finding synchronicity in folktales like Selkie and Dragon & Crane is a classic Heroine’s Journey of self-discovery because in the process we are confronted by these questions: What precious thing have we traded in exchange for the comfort of being married to our bordered landscapes? What wild pelt have we lost that beckons us from the salty waters between and betwixt our domesticated divisions, that finding and reclaiming will bring us all into belonging? The process of discovering the Selkie in the Dragon, and the Dragon in the Selkie reorients the way we see ourselves in relationship to landscape, because they may be from geographical locations that transcend our modern national and cultural categories, encouraging us to rethink people, place and belonging. The journey is a portal to our original oceanic womb that holds us all together.

Ilarion Merculieff, a leading voice of the indigenous Unangan people from St Paul Island in the Bering Sea, shares that in the Unangan language the word for hello is Aang Waan which translates as “Hello, my other self”. He mentions this in the context of an interview about how indigenous perspectives can help guide our vision for healing the earth amidst environmental catastrophe and political upheaval in the book We Are The Middle Of Forever: Indigenous Voices From Turtle Island On the Changing Earth. I love how this concept of Self and Other resonates so much with envisioning and remembering Selkie and the Dragon as one, confirming and encouraging us to see ourselves in others, and harness the wisdom and energy of the original love story in the primordial amniotic ocean of time as a way to move into the future. Because after all, as the wise mythologist Michael Meade reminds us: “It is not simply a better future that we need, but also a more meaningful connection to the past and the lasting things that help the world to be in balance. When the times become dark, it is important to have a narrative feel for what is old and wise and waiting to be found again”. Though we may be grieving so much loss in the world today, stories like the Selkie and Dragon & Crane can never be stolen, they will always be sovereign because they live in that shifting mosaic of blues and greens that make up the oceanic underworld, the womb of the world where we all belong.

Hanh, Thich Nhất (Author), and Laity, Sister Annabel (Trans). (2020). Interbeing: The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings of Engaged Buddhism. Parallax Press.

Hardy, Sophie-Jane (Host), “Cyclical Wisdom for Life’s Greatest Challenges” with Carly Mountain. Episode 80. The Menstruality Podcast (by RedSchool).

Meade, Michael (2012). Why The World Doesn’t End: Tales of Renewal in Times of Loss. Greenfire Press (67)

Merculieff, Ilarion (2022). We Are The Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices From Turtle Island on the Changing Earth. The New Press (31)

Turner, Toko-pa (2017). Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home. Her Own Room Press .

Solnit, Rebecca (2019). Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Haymarket Books.