Do you know the story of the selkie, the seal who transforms into a woman and lives on shore for a time?
She doesn’t choose this terrestrial life. In fact, she’s tricked into it in a cruel way. She is offered a kind of love and safety and is convinced to stay. The selkie decides she can compromise her freedom and marry a fisherman, at least for a little while.
And then, she gets swallowed up by this landlocked life. She is consumed by the expectations and responsibilities. She finds herself at the heart of a family, caught in the nets of a husband and children who depend on her for their comfort, routine, and perhaps their sense of identity, too.
But, in the midst of this family, she’s barely able to survive. The selkie is a husk of her former self, and she has no more to give. If she stays in this world as it is, she’ll die. If she leaves, the world says that those who depend on her will suffer something even worse.
Have you ever spied the selkie within you, your skin parched, your heart aching for your sisters and the sea?
Has your soul cried, “Yes, that’s me!” as you’ve considered the story of a wild creature who lost herself to the structures and shoulds of family and a “civilized life”?
The Mythology of the Shape-Shifters
Across cultures, we find stories of shape-shifters.
There are the werewolves, the children who become swans, the old witches who become hares… It’s the story of the Irish selkie, the seal woman, that wraps round my heart and feels the most real for me.
The selkie, and the fairy woman she becomes for a time, has appeared in well-known modern stories, including the gorgeous Irish films The Secret of Roan Inish and The Song of the Sea. You’ve likely heard the selkie story in one form or another, even if you don’t know the word, perhaps as a mermaid tale. You know the inversion of the story from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, which flips the script so the heroine longs to be shacked up on land and suffers a sense of alienation and dislocation in her own ocean.
In Episode 4 of KnotWork Storytelling, Jen Murphy comes to tell the tale of her own neighborhood selkies. Jen lives in Skerries in County Dublin and watches the Irish Sea from her home. Their harbor is home to colonies of seals, and inspires her version of this timeless story.
The selkie felt stifled and trapped in that fisherman’s cottage, but she also felt a bone-deep loneliness. As you’ll hear in the conversation that follows Jen’s story, I uncovered an old memory in the midst of our dialog, and long forgotten tears returned to the surface.
As mythologist and author Sharon Blackie says when she tells her own version of the Selkie story, “these shapeshifing stories tap into a longing we often don’t even know we have and we feel that very deeply as sorrow.”
When we give ourselves full permission to feel the pull of the currents of the selkie story, we recover necessary parts of ourselves. You may know this cry deep in your heart. Or, it may be hard to reckon with the voice within that whispers, “This. This life. It’s a blessing. But sometimes… it’s a trap.”
Find a place where you can either snuggle in or root into the wildest part of nature where you can feel at home and tune into The Skerries Selkie.
I’m so excited to hear about what comes through for you when you seek out the selkie within you. Tell me more on Instagram or on in our Facebook community.
