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Once upon a time, in a land of long, dark winters and hot, bright summers, in a place where the wind takes the sea in its hands and twists it into new shapes, here in this place at the very edge of the world, there lived a sad and lonely man.
And this man was not just a little sad, and not just a little lonely. The loneliness inside him was as deep as a well and, when he tried to speak, no sound came out of his mouth, only gasps and echoes from a place inside himself that he himself could not touch. People said that something terrible had happened to him when he was very young, but no one knew for sure what it was.
Some tried to guess, of course, as people do, but the man kept himself to himself in a small house by the harbour wall and he wrapped his loneliness around him like a slick oilskin.
For like most of the men in the village, this man was a fisherman. He’d leave the harbour in his boat every morning, just as other people were stirring in their beds, and he’d return home every evening, with a chill in his bones and a heavy heart. He’d watch the other men tying up their boats as their wives and sweethearts and children called to them from the harbour wall and each day his sadness grew darker and wider.
Soon he began to fish only at night so that he wouldn’t have to feel the gap between his own life and the lives of other men, a gap that seemed to him to be as wide and bottomless as the sea itself.
One night, as he was making his way out to fish under the full moon, he rounded the dangerous rocks outside the harbour and came upon an incredible sight.
At first, he thought he must be imagining it, that it was a will o’ the wisp, an illusion formed from the sea spray and the moonlight to taunt his lonely heart.
Resting his oars, he let his boat drift in close, closer, closer until it was dangerously close to a cleft in the rocks. From this hiding place in the shadows, he watched and truly, what he saw was an enchantment.
There on the rocks were three women, their naked skins as white as milk under the moon. Their hair was loose around their shoulders and glittered – one red head of hair, one black, one golden – under the stars.
He watched for a long time, as the women threw up their arms to the sky, swaying and dancing. Across the rocks towards him came the sound of their singing, which was also the sound of the sea itself, a deep thrumming and a high keening. The man felt his heart clattering to life in his chest like a rusty engine. He felt the black spaces inside him begin to melt away.
But it was the voice of the woman with long, red hair that he heard most clearly. She was the youngest and, he thought, the most beautiful of the three and her voice rang out across the water and reached all the way inside him and filled the dark spaces with light.
He felt all his sadness and loneliness fall away from him like an old, wrinkled skin.
Quickly, soundlessly, he pulled his boat right up to the rocks and, trying not to splash in the shallows, he dropped to his hands and knees and crept ashore. There he saw another strange sight.
At the edge of the water was a heap of empty seal skins and he guessed that these belonged to the dancing women.
So it was true, the man thought to himself. All the tales that his grandmothers had told him were true, after all. These women must be the selkies, the seal people, part human, part seal-spirit. His hand trembled over the pile of skins and they were hot and quivering under his palm.
Without really knowing what he was doing, he quickly selected the most beautiful of the skins, the one that glinted at him with its fine red hairs, and rolled it up and stuffed it under his sweater where it felt soft and warm against his skin.
Then he hid himself again and he waited.
And he waited.
And as the moon began to set, the women stopped dancing and climbed down over the rocks, one by one. Two of them slipped easily back into their sealskins and slithered and splashed into the sea.
But of course, the youngest woman, the woman with red hair to her waist and the voice like music, couldn’t find her skin anywhere. As she searched, she began to cry out.
‘O, sisters, where is my skin, my sealskin?’
It was nowhere to be found.
And it was then that the man stepped out from his hiding place.
‘O, beautiful one,’ he said, for now his voice had loosened from his chest, and it rang out above the sound of the waves, clear and true. ‘You must be my wife. For until this moment, I’ve been the saddest and loneliest man in the world but now I’m changed forever. Your voice has soothed away all my troubles.’
He saw the look of horror pass over the selkie’s face. She flushed with shame and clasped her arms around herself to shield herself from his gaze.
‘No,’ she cried. ‘Of course I can’t be your wife. I’m not of your kind. I’m of the Others, the sacred ones, the ones who live and sing beneath the waves.”
But the man was insistent. He clasped the skin to him. Now that he’d at last found his happiness, he had no intention of ever letting it slip away.
‘Be my wife,” he said. ‘Live with me and and I give you my word that in seven summers, I’ll return your sealskin to you, and then you can choose to stay or go. It will be up to you to decide.’
The young selkie looked out at the place beyond the shoreline where her sisters heads were still bobbing in the water. Her tongue darted over her lips and she let out a long, rippling sigh.
Her arms fall to her sides and she studied the man’s face for a long time. He felt those large, dark seal’s eyes look deep into him and he imagined that he knew a little of what she was thinking. Perhaps, he thought, she was a little curious about what life would be like among humankind.
Slowly, gradually, a smile twitched at the corners of her mouth as she looked him up and down.
‘Very well, Fisherman,” she said. ‘I will live with you for seven summers. But after that, I must return to my sisters and my true home.’
The fisherman lifted the young seal woman into his boat and rowed her back to the village. Although his nets were empty, his heart beat proudly in his chest for he knew that he’d landed himself the biggest catch of all.
Months passed in the village. The trees growing in the cracks between the rocks put out fat green buds and the sun climbed higher in the sky. Before long, he and his seal wife had a baby together, a little boy. The seal wife told her son stories, just as I’m telling you this one now, stories of a secret world under the sea where the people lived on sunlight and starlight and wove songs out of the ocean waves.
And the seal woman tried to be happy. She really did. She tended the firs in the hearth and mended her husband’s nets, whispering powerful charms into the knots, and she taught her son how to drum and sing.
But as the years passed, her skin began to crack and her hair began to come out in handfuls and the roundness of her hips and breasts began to wither away and she could no longer see very well to cook or clean or mend.
‘Husband, you’ve kept my sealskin for seven long years and now it’s time for you to honour your promise and return it to me,’ she said. ‘The eighth autumn is arriving.’
But her husband took his oilskin from its hook by the door and strode off into the night. Truth be told, his heart ached to know that she did not love him enough to stay, that she would sooner leave her own son for her world under the waves.
That night, as the little boy lay sleeping, he heard the wind and the water whispering to him in his dreams.
He jumped out of bed and ran out into the night, scrambling over the rocks and through the rockpools. As he looked down into the waves, he saw a bundle, clumsily tied with string, rolling out of a cave between two rocks. He picked it up and held it to his chest, and gasped as he felt the strong scent of his mother unfolding itself all through him, like the breath of the sea itself.
He ran back to the house and stumbled through the door where his mother was waiting for him. She snatched him up and snatched up the skin.
‘Mother,’ he cried. ‘Don’t leave me!’
But something older than herself, something older than the rocks and older even than the sea, was calling to her.
Holding the little boy by the hand, she staggered to the rocks, stepped into her sealskin and drew it up all around her. Already she could feel her strength pulsing through her. Now she dove down deep under the water, still clasping the boy tightly to her body, and the boy discovered that he too could breathe the water like air and swim with all the grace and slipperiness of the seals.
Seven days and nights passed and the boy lived among his mother’s selkie-people. They danced and sang in their world under the waves and feasted on starlight and sunlight from plates of shell and drank the moon’s reflections from goblets of pearl.
The seal woman’s skin turned silvery again and her long, red hair shone more brightly than ever before. The little boy laughed to see how plump and soft she was becoming. He could no longer circle her wrist with his hand.
But on the seventh night, he noticed tears in his mother’s eyes and knew that it was time for him to return to the upper world.
‘Little one, my precious one, one day, many years from now, it will be your time to come and join us,’ his mother told him, guiding him up to the shore and perching him gently on the rocks. ‘But until that time you’ll live here in the world of human beings,’ she told him, ‘and I’ll never leave you.’
And, sure enough, as the years passed, the boy became a man and well known in the village as a poet and a singer and a teller of fantastic stories. And every evening, his nets were filled with fish.
Some people say that this was because as a very small boy he’d been dragged to the bottom of the sea in a terrible storm and he’d learned how to talk to the selkie-spirits.
Even today, you can see him, on moonlit nights, sitting on the rocks, singing softly to the waves. Some say that the seals come close to the shore at night to speak with him and that one particular female seal, with a pelt of shining silver, sings to him the songs and stories that he shares with the village people, like this story, that he once told to me and that now I’m telling to you.
I’ve always loved the story of the sealskin, which has been made and remade so many times, by different story-tellers. I love it so much that I included a version very similar to this one in my novel, The Dress, where Fabia, a talented story-teller, tells it to her daughter Ella. My own favourite version is the one told by Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run With the Wolves.
Estés calls her tale Sealskin, soulskin and her intepretation of the story, which is too nuanced and complex to try to summarise here, includes the idea of ‘losing one’s pelt’ — that is losing one’s true, soulful nature —and then seeking it again. The return to oneself is crucial in order to replenish and restore ourselves. The cycle of going and returning, going and returning is, Estés tells us, what we all need, in order to stop ourselves from drying out, to restore our oceanic knowing.
And so as we begin this restorative journey, I’m reaching for this story as a magic charm to remind us of the work we need to do in order to return to our right way of being, that place where we feel more fully alive to ourselves and our creativity.
Our pelts, our soulskins can be stolen away from us, as in this story, by a single traumatic or dismissive act, but it can also be stolen away from us in a million little pieces. The work of tending, caring, loving and all the wants and desires and expectations of others can pull at us from all directions. It feels like there is no time for our own wants, our own soul’s calling, and so we turn away from it.
And sometimes we give our soulskin away. We shimmy out of it, forgetting its worth, seduced by shiny objects that may make us feel better for a time. We stay too long away from our soul home because we get caught up in all the machinery of the world that doesn’t value creativity, art, our deeper instincts.
The question that I’ve begun to ask myself recently is this:
What do I need to do to restore and nourish my soulskin?
Because even if you think it is in tatters, even if it is a dried-out remnant shoved in a dusty corner or hanging at the back of your wardrobe, it is not too late. All of us can find our way back.
What does being in your soulskin look like, feel like, sound like, smell like for you?
Where is your soul home, that equivalent of the world under the waves, where there is space for your creativity to expand?
What do you need to do to make time to return to that place? Perhaps you need to insist that others around you let you go, just for a little while. Perhaps you need to explain that you are not abandoning them, that you will be back, but that you need time and space to restore your silvery, shimmery brilliance.
As Estés writes:
‘Everyone becomes snagged by land commitments. Yet, the old one out in the sea calls everyone. Everyone must return.
None of these ways to return home are dependent on economics, social status, education, or physical mobility. Even if we can see only one blade of grass, even if we have only a quarter foot of sky to scry, even if we have only a rangy weed coming up through a crack in the sidewalk, we can see our cycles in and with nature. We can all swim out to sea. We can all commune with the seal from the rock.’
Paid members, you’ll find this week’s guided writing invitation below plus the Zoom link for our first Writing Together of this season, tomorrow Saturday 11 May at 4pm (BST) on Zoom.