The finished block of linoleum after carving and inking (right before printing)
How I love folktales that smell of the ocean and offer themselves up with a gusts of salty air . . . and the ancient story of the Selkie is definitely one of these oceanic stories! In Ireland, Scotland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, there is an abundance of seals and seal folklore from ancient times when these creatures were endowed with personhood. One of the most famous of these folktales is about a Selkie, a half-seal woman who falls in love with a human man who steals her pelt so she cannot return to the ocean. She lives with him in his human home on the land until her skin begins to dry and she aches to return to her home in the sea. Their only son discovers her seal skin that his father had hidden away, and gives the skin back to his mother who slips it on and disappears back into the depths of the sea.
Though this is a folktale from the distant past, the theme is still relevant for many of us today who, like the Selkie, may undergo a loss of skin or loss of soul in some way or another. Whether it is stolen from us or we unknowingly sacrifice it, the story speaks deeply to the lived experience of those of us who offer time, resources and creative energy in the service of others only to discover as time passes that we have lost something vital and essential to our being. The loss could be a love, a dream, or the potential to develop, or a distraction that sways us from our authentic path, or a weakening sense of Self.
I love Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Este’s version of this story in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves. She says, "Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. Her name is Wild Woman, but she is. . . an endangered species”. How true this is, even in this modern age, to lose ourselves. The story of the Selkie reminds us about the significance of that loss of soul, and the importance of retrieving it again.
When the Selkie puts her skin back on and returns to the ocean she returns home to her authentic Self, and that wildness is not foreign or threatening, it is comforting and where she is most at home. Like what happens to the Selkie in the story, so many of us are enamored by false lovers who promise us alternative homes than the skin we were born in: advertisements that offer us diets to become thinner, clothes to make us supposedly look “better”. We may feel like to be loved we must act differently or in conformity to cultural and social pressures external to us that do not see or value who we really are. This folktale is about falling back in love with who we are naturally, it is about finding our pelt or skin, and returning back to our true home.
It is difficult to think of the wild as the path to authenticity these days given that science has colonized our conception and relationship to nature. Many fear the wild, and moreover, in this industrial age, we have categorized nature, objectified it (we refer to nature as “it”), put it under a microscope and dissect it in order to understand it, we think of it as outside ourselves. What is missing from this perspective on the wild is what folklore offers us: a romance with the wild.
We need to fall in love with nature, be enamored by nature, mesmerized by it, in conversation with it, all of which are aspects of storytelling and myth-making which allow us to enter into a deeper, more interconnected relationship with the wild. The story of the Selkie does just this. Whether we identify with the Selkie, her human lover, or their child or all three characters, within the spell of the telling we witness ourselves being mothered by the wild, longing for her, falling in love with her, aching to return back to the wild so we can come home to ourselves.
I created this linocut as a reminder to always return to the sea, to the wild, to retrieve my skin again whenever I find myself caught up in distractions that disguise themselves as love.
I find it fascinating that in the story it is not the grown Selkie but the child (or perhaps, symbolically, the inner-child) who is able to find the skin (or soul) again. Perhaps the story is telling us that it is through the process of reconnecting with our inner child that we can retrieve our soul, or get in touch with our most authentic Self. Frequently, the process of achieving adulthood in modernity involves prohibiting ourselves from following our natural inclinations and passions that we had as young children. We are often asked to develop certain skills and habits to become successful adults at the sacrifice of our gifts and talents we had as children that may be regarded as less useful or lucrative, or valuable in an industrial economy. How poignant that this ancient folktale still speaks to us today, and is still relevant to us when it reminds us to reconnect with our inner child to recover a loss of soul.
The story includes a bittersweet ending when the Selkie leaves her child to return to her home in the sea. If we think of the child more in symbolic terms as an inner-child, perhaps the story is speaking about the inevitable loss that is the true cost of losing one’s skin.
This story reminds us of how sometimes there is sense of grief and separation that comes with something beautiful and authentic and how both these contradictory feelings can be felt at the same time. Certainly, we have all experienced a Selkie choice at one point or other in our lives. It reminds me of the Mary Oliver poem We Shake With Joy:
“We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
Housed as they are in the same body”.
All too often folktales and fairytales are considered childish fantasies and less important than “realistic” stories, when the truth is, many folktales like this one of the Selkie speak of difficult truths and complex realities we may experience in our real lives.
The folktale of the Selkie allows for both a sense of loss and a feeling of wholeness to coexist. In the words of Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, brokenness and beauty can sometimes intertwine, and both Solnit and this folktale suggest that there is a crucial need to embrace, “complexities and uncertainties, with openings”. Finding one’s true self is about integrating all the inevitable pains, defects, woundings into one’s authentic story and this is the gift this folktale offers us, in spotted gray flippers, whiskers and a magical underwater world.
Blog Post Cover Credit: Wendy Wei on Pexels
References:
Pinkola-Estes, Clarissa (1996). Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books.
Solnit, Rebecca (2016). Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Haymarket Books
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An ancient folktale from the Faroe Islands, Scotland, Ireland and Iceland about a seal-woman, or Selkie, who loses her pelt, and how she finds it again. Though this story is ancient, it still speaks deeply to the lived experience of those of us who offer our time and energy to others at sacrifice of something vital to us whether it is a love, a dream, or the potential to develop, and how important it is to reclaim it.