Dark Moon Musings

On selkie stories and finding my way home. (TW for mention of domestic abuse and child separation.)

I’ve always loved selkie stories. I can’t remember when I first heard one, or which version I first heard, I just remember identifying so strongly with the sense of longing for the ocean, for home; a fierce yearning that made me hold my breath. I know that I was a child when I first felt that sense of being out of place; sensed that there was another world somewhere, somehow, calling to me.

I suspect this was about being neurodivergent and not knowing it, knowing only that I didn’t quite fit in the world and that others had noticed this too, that there was something slightly Other about me, that I belonged somewhere else. ‘Fey,’ elderly family members called me. If I had been born a century earlier, I imagine I’d have been marked for a changeling. Which never bodes well.

I was a teenager when I read Clarissa Pinkola Estes award-winning Women Who Run With the Wolves, and it was as though I had been introduced to a new world. Much of what she wrote went over my head then, but I lapped up her chapter on selkie stories, especially paragraphs like this:

Sealskin, Soulskin…tells us about where we truly come from, what we are made of, and how we must all, on a regular basis, use our instincts and find our way home.

Estes framed the story as being about the need to retreat from the busyness of the everyday world, especially for the more sensitive among us, and make time for what she called soul-making. All I knew was that her words spoke to that longing I had always carried.

Later, as an adult in my late twenties, I still identified with the selkie story, but for rather more sinister reasons. The stories revolve, of course, around a seal woman who is forced to stay with a human man and marry him and have his children, after he steals her seal skin while she is dancing on the shore. Sometimes she falls in love with him, sometimes he is abusive, depending on the version, but always she withers away without the ocean until eventually she finds her hidden skin (sometimes with the help of her child) and goes back to the sea. Sometimes she takes her child with her, or the child joins her later, sometimes she leaves him or her, and we are left with the image of her offspring at the seashore waiting for rare glimpses of a mysterious, friendly seal. In these stories, although the selkie-woman has returned home, she has had to leave her baby behind, and so even in escape she will never be truly whole, but still always torn in two.

In those days, I preferred a less psychological and more folkloric interpretation of this story. Many of our folktales speak of the everyday, brutal reality of our world. While tales like these have layers of meaning, they also no doubt highlight the tragic fact of domestic violence in communities, of women who run away, of the Othering of women who were considered ‘fey,’ or who couldn’t settle into married life and a woman’s proscribed role. For me, trapped in a horrifically abusive relationship that indeed saw me withering away and weighing up the dangers of leaving with two small children, I felt like I was the selkie, especially in the more brutal versions of the story. And when I finally escaped, my ‘sealskin’ was tattered and torn and took a long time to restore to health. For a while, I was indeed separated from my oldest child, a wound not fully healed in either of us to this day. Freedom comes at a cost.

This is on my mind this dark moon because, this month, it will be fifteen years since I made my escape; quite literally made a run for it in the moonlight, one child under my arm, and ended up in a woman’s refuge on the coast, having left behind everything and everyone I knew. I went to the ocean a lot that summer, feeling the salt wind whip across my face, tasting the tang of it on my tongue; a taste and smell I always associate now with both the giddy relief of freedom, and the desperate longing to hold the son I had no choice but to temporarily leave behind.

I am proud of that young woman for what she survived, but I ache for her too, and that ache can be both the throb of a fierce compassion that brings healing or the raw pain of an unhealed wound; like a graze that won’t scab over. It comes and goes.

I am safe now, my family long since reunited, in a loving relationship and finally in a place I can feel at home. That young woman on the seashore feels like a different person; or maybe, like someone I heard about in a story once.

A selkie story.

Folktales like these last because they touch us on a deep level and because they have so many layers of meaning, from the personal to the communal to the environmental to the archetypal. For me, the tale of the selkie will always be about escaping from and healing trauma. About the long journey to coming home again in my body and psyche after the time I spent in a place of derealisation just to survive. But I can also now appreciate other interpretations; especially that of Estes’, reminding me to take needed time to rest and create; to find silence and stillness and not apologise for it. Even to myself; perhaps especially to myself.

I invite you, this dark moon, if it appeals, to reread (or maybe even read for the first time) a selkie story, one or two or three, and think about what the tale says to you. You can find Estes’ retelling here. Or try some traditional Scottish versions. Or listen to me telling this traditional version from Orkney:

What medicine can you take from these stories? What calls you away from your every day? What do you long for? Do you have enough time for silence? For stillness? For creative flow? If, like me, you see trauma in this story, what do you need to help you heal? This dark moon, can you do one simple thing towards the need you have identified? Not as another item on your to-do list, but as a moment of care for your soul.

Some ideas:

Nurture your inner child and make a fort. Then rest in it.

Get a babysitter if possible/relevant and go and spend time by a body of water. Take snacks, a good book, a sketch pad…whatever works.

Lie down in a darkened room with soothing music and soothing scents. Or maybe run a bath with scented oils. Ocean smells are good. Picture yourself as the selkie woman. Give her/ what she needs, or let her tell you what that is.

Let yourself cry, if you need to. Tears are healing; salty like the ocean. When you’re spent, wrap yourself in something warm and soft.

Updates

You may have noticed my Substack looks a little different, and I’ve changed the name. This to reflect changes in my life and my own path; which fits perfectly with my theme for this Dark Moon because you see, I took some time to think about what I need to keep and discard in my life right now as I enter a time of needed stillness due to chronic illness; but it is a stillness I didn’t choose, which brings with it the anxiety of income loss and the frustrations of increasing disability, This means looking at where I spend my energy and where I can carve out space to create, and I realised two things; one, much of what I’ve been doing here recently isn’t bringing me joy and two; this is the perfect platform for expressing myself and building community in a way that meets my needs without putting myself under too much pressure.

So, you will see a slightly different focus to my posts and a different pattern. My focus will be less on mythology and goddesses and more on my personal expressions of nature spirituality (with a Celtic flavour) creativity, memoir style pieces and healing. I will still be diving into folklore and herbal medicine, digging into the Irish Traveller side of my heritage.

The pattern will be as follows

• Newsletters (free) will now be quarterly; on the solstices and equinoxes only, but they will have more content.

• A post for all subscribers every dark moon; these may consist of nature writing, personal reflections, short audio recordings and creative pieces. Occasionally, like this post, they may have a folklore focus.

• Every two months there will be a book review on the book I’ve been reading for the free Book Club I’m trying to set up here. Right now we’ve just started reading ‘Is a River Alive?’ by Robert MacFarlane and I’ve just started a free chat thread for this, so do please come and join me! Once I have enough subscribers, I’d love to do Book Club Zooms.

• Every Full Moon, there will be a long post for paid subscribers with lots of resources, focused around the theme and season of the moon. These posts will consist of a personal essay and reflections on the particular moon, journalling prompts, audio meditations and also a herbal offering; either a simple recipe or piece of lore taken from the ancient Irish herbal medicine tradition. As stated in my recent newsletter; once there is enough interest, I’d like to do circle gatherings on Zoom, around the Sabbat festival full moons.

• Every two months (so, inbetween book reviews) I’ll post a longer deep dive into Celtic mythology and/or folklore for paid subscribers. This month’s was on the Irish sun goddess Aine and was split into two parts. These may sometimes contain audio guided journeys or audio folktale retellings.

Why ‘The Well and the Wasteland’? If you have been following me for a while you will know that I talk a lot about sacred well stories, from the Brythonic tradition of the land I live on, to the Irish Traveller tradition of my heritage. There is a common theme to these tales, of keeping the wells flowing lest the land dries up and we lose it's wisdom, of not taking or asking for too much, of living in reciprocity. There is a need too for us to fill our own inner wells, to resist a world that would make a wasteland of our psyche. These things are not separate; we are the land.

That, I suppose, is the crux of what I’m trying to do here, to unravel the threads of these stories and longings and ancestral whispers that tug at me, and weave them into a coherent whole.

I humbly invite you to join me.