The Coracle: Journey 1, the Handless Maiden
Welcome Voyagers
Thank you for finding your way to the Coracle, an alchemical vessel of individual and collective change powered by the spiritual technology of fairy and folk tales.
A few logistics before we dive in to the Journey 1 with the Handless Maiden. This is a long email packed with information and reflection. I hope you’ll take the time to absorb these words and come back to them as the story weaves its way into the fibers of your being. Here is a rundown of this email’s contents for ease of navigation:
Ways to work the story
Reflections on receiving the story psychologically versus as a cultural document of initiation
My written version of the Handless Maiden
Further resources and invitation for 1:1 collaboration with me
You’ll find my written version of the story below, as well as the architecture I’ve developed for how to collaborate with the stories you will hear in the Coracle. As living beings, these stories are constantly responding to their environment, just like we, and all of nature responds. I have developed this scaffolding through my own spiritual studies and inner process over many years. I offer them with a sincere hope that it helps you on your own path, while also acknowledging that the stories have a life of their own, and that a clearly outlined path is not the truest way to a soul-embodied life.
However, spiritual practices exist for a reason. Sometimes we need the discipline to get on the path in the first place, and to stay with it when the going gets rough. It is in that spirit that I offer you the steps below on how to collaborate with the stories. Get on the path, and make it your own!
I offer private sessions for those who are looking for a grounded mentor with a rich connection to the mythic in daily life. Respond to this email or send a message to jen@jenniferlighty.com [https://www.jenniferlighty.com] if you’re interested in working with me 1:1.
I am offering the Coracle as a gift, in the same spirit in which I have received these stories over the years. If you would like to reciprocate please consider a paid subscription, or a one-time donation through Buy Me a Coffee. [http://buymeacoffee.com/jenlighty]
The Corpus Callosum Chronicles is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The Compass Lives Inside You: Ways to Collaborate with the Stories in the Coracle
We are used to hearing people say a story is alive when we find ourselves moved by a tale, but have you ever considered that a story is actually alive?
I mean alive like you and me, with its own desires, intentions, and ability to navigate on its journey.
This list of suggested rituals and ceremonial practices will bring you into a living relationship with all of the stories that I will be telling over the next 18 months in the Coracle.
Introduce Yourself
It’s rude to just barge in and take what we want. When we don’t introduce ourselves with honesty, elegance, and humility in any situation, including meeting a story, we continue to perpetuate the attitude of extraction that is killing our planet.
This attitude has us believing collectively that the world is a resource, here for our taking. Introducing ourselves to the story is a recognition that it is also a sovereign being with desires and longings here on Earth to evolve through embodiment. I lead us through a way to do this in the podcast episode. You can make this your own. Have fun and get creative with your introduction.
Ku Like
Ku Like is a Mū Hawaiian protocol I learned from Ke’oni Hanalei of Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals [http://www.pohala.net]. It’s a way for us to honor and acknowledge our internal masculine and feminine that puts us into contact with how these two energy centers are in relationship to themselves and each other, in preparation for their union, what the alchemists called the heiros games, and the Hawaiians call the aumakua.
(Note, aumakua is also the word for an ancestral family spirit in Hawaiian culture, that takes the form of animals, plants, or other elements of nature. Here, we are using it to signify the androgynous state of consciousness that occurs when the inner feminine and masculine wed, resulting in a being who is able to function in flow because the centers are in balance and exaltation.)
Checking In and Consent
Through Ku Like, you will check in every time you listen to a story in the Coracle and ask yourself, “How much of this story am I safely able to receive?”
This is a strong initiatory container and I want you to learn how to keep yourself safe. You may hear a no. If so, you have the option to be a witness to the story and the voyagers on the Coracle who do consent.
Once you know how much you are willing and able to receive, give your consent to that. If it’s a no, verbally set that boundary.
Create an Altar
An altar is a physical space for you to nurture your connection to the story. By creating a physical space for it to land and be honored with food, drink, smoke, feathers, flowers, and herbs, you let the story know you are welcoming it into your life and value it as a gift from your ancestors who encoded their wisdom into these old stories so they could survive through centuries of imperialism to this point in time now when we are starting again to have the ears to truly hear them, and to follow their instructions back to a more natural way of living that respects all forms of life.
Ritual Walks
Set a threshold and step over it with the intention that everything on the other side of it is the story speaking to you through the circumstances in which you find yourself. This is a marvelous way to see how you are part of the land’s dreaming as the story moves through you and out into your environments and interactions.
Important—Make sure you step back over the same threshold and close the portal!
The Nine Currents
The Nine Currents are a path I developed inspired by the Nine Properties of Light as shared with me by Mū Hawaiian lineage carrier, Ke’oni Hanalei, of Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals.
I took each of the properties of light and formed them into questions to help you understand how the story is moving through you and informing you about yourself and your relationship to light itself as the manifestation of creation.(Versus dark as the metaphorical signifier of uncreation. I also want to note that I value both, and have great reverence for the primacy of darkness as the foundation of all we see with our eyes through light.)
Because they are currents, they will move you where you need to go, and because you are in a coracle, you will need to learn to paddle and navigate. The Nine Currents could serve as journaling prompts or tools for contemplation.
The Nine Currents:
The Current of Revelation: What does this story reveal to me about myself, others, or the world? Am I available for the disclosure? Am I hiding? If I am hiding, do I consent to exploring why and commit to the disclosure?
2. The Current of Reflection: How does this story expose my vulnerabilities? Am I available to be exposed? Where am I lying to myself or others?
3. The Current of Refraction: How does the story move me physically? What is it quickening in me? Where am I stagnating?
4. The Current of Diffraction: How can this story help me respond and adapt to the challenges it presents to to my ego and psyche? Am I willing to live with the consequences if I don’t adapt when called? How can I continue evolve when fears arise?
5. The Current of Interference: What am I resisting in the story? How can I work with what I’m resisting, instead of flowing with it? How can I overcome self-sabotage?
6. The Current of Polarization: What choice or choices is the story asking me to make? Where do I need to focus? Where have I been noncommittal to something I really care about? Do I consent to exploring that, with myself or others?
7. The Current of Dispersion: What must I do, or who must I be, in order to transform, now that I have received answers to the previous questions? Where or why do I refuse to change? Where am I refusing my own power and agency?
8. The Current of Scattering: What do I need to do in order to let others know I’ve changed? What gifts can I now share? Where am I withholding?
9. The Current of Completion: What am I now ready to release and completely let go? Am I still holding onto something that I want to release? How can I acknowledge I have completed this journey and move into the world in a new form?
Invite Your Image to Converse
This may be all you need to do to develop a deep relationship with the story that will catapult you onto the path you’ve been overcomplicating by thinking the story is either inert, or beyond your comprehension. It’s simple and involves only two questions. Ask the image that came when I asked where did you find yourself in the story:
Why are you here?
How can I serve you? (Or what can I do for you?)
Then do it!
Reflections on psychology as the primary lens for receiving stories in today’s world
If you keep up with trends in the mythopoetic world, you will have noticed that in the last couple of years there has been a move away from the psychological interpretation of fairy and folk tales popularized by late 20th century figures like Robert Bly and Marion Woodman.
I cut my storytelling teeth reading books in the Jungian psychology section of the Yes! Bookshop in my early 20s. It was a great job! Many years later, I was reintroduced to working with stories this way by Robert Bly and Gioia Timpanelli at the Great Mother Conference.
The primary way we entered the stories was by asking the question, where do you find yourself in the story? For most of us, gender was an issue. I know I almost always identified with a female character in the story, and male friends of mine generally connected with male characters. This makes sense considering how many wounds we all carried (and still carry) around gender. I was able to do some deep healing with my personal biography as a female in a patriarchal society this way, and will never dismiss this approach. I also started to dive into my relationship to what the Jungians call anima and animus, my inner masculine and feminine.
However, as modern people, our reactions to what happens to the characters in the stories is filtered through a modern lens, distorted by centuries of empire, that simplifies the depth and power of the stories as they were told in their original context. To put it simply, the stories are not just here to get us to look at our wounds.
Recently, I’ve been taking classes with storyteller Stephanie Mackay, who studied for many years at Bolad’s Kitchen with Martín Prechtel. According to Stephanie, Martín was adamant about not overly-psychologizing the stories. He wanted us to know how they worked in their original cultures as ceremonies themselves, or in the case of European stories, as artifacts of the ceremonies ancestral Europeans once had when they were intact cultures, still receiving their instructions on how to govern themselves from the land, what Martín calls the holy in nature.
The idea behind this, as I see it, is that this knowing (I speak for those of us with European ancestry) will ignite an awakening of our ancestral memories that will inspire us to heal our lineages and come into right relationship with the land and the indigenous people who were here, and in some places still are, wherever we are right now.
Viewed through an indigenous lens, the Handless Maiden is not a story about a father being tempted by the devil who chops off his daughter’s hands for gold. It’s a story that preserves the initiation ritual of ancient Europeans in which a father must sever himself from his daughter to prepare her for her initiatory journey to the Underworld and back. Seen this way, the father’s betrayal is not evil. It’s necessary.
I have been fascinated hearing Stephanie unfold the old stories as the remnants of intact European culture, but to be honest, I haven’t been emotionally moved.
We are electrical beings. Emotions are created by electrical frequencies moving through us. On the path of aloha mā, they must all be experienced in order to complete the human experience. If we follow their instructions, they will stimulate us to move into the next necessary expression of our embodied soul. They can shake things up in order to get us to change.
In my opinion, I don’t think it matters how we respond to the stories. If the first thing that comes up for us is betrayal by a father figure, I’m not going to tell someone they are overly-psychologizing the story. I may advise they take those feelings outside and plant them in the landscape around them instead of going to a therapist’s office.
I’m saying there is room for both these approaches (Stephanie would agree I think). I’m saying knowing with our minds that we of European descent have a rich cultural legacy that was once connected to sun, and moon, and stars is important, and that exploring our psychological wounds is also important.
But what is really important, is how any revelations that come from both paths connect us to Earth in the here and now.
If we refuse this path, as electrical beings, we have no hope of grounding ourself in a way that honors Earth and we are doomed.
What do you choose?
The Handless Maiden: My Written Version
Once there was a miller who lived in the forest with his wife and daughter. They had fallen on hard times. Maybe it was because the water that had once rushed through his wheel had slowed to a trickle, maybe some ill-wishing neighbor dammed the stream upriver—we don’t know.
But we do know they were hungry. So hungry the miller’s wife cried in her sleep. He watched, feeling helpless as his daughter grew so thin it seemed the light passed through her. But the miller was not helpless. He was an able-bodied man with two hands. Even though he had always been a miller, he would use them to find another way to feed his family.
He went out into the woods with a little silver axe. It was the same axe he’d used to cut his daughter’s umbilical cord. Now he was going to use it to feed his family by cutting wood. He was a woodcutter now.
As the axe swung, he kept thinking he saw something out of the corner of his eye, but every time he turned and looked over his shoulder all he saw were shifting shadows, until one time he turned and the shadows took form. A stooped man wearing a wide-brimmed hat stepped out from the shadows. When he peered up from under the brim, the miller could see his skin was gray. The man looked sickly, close to death.
“Miller,” the gray man spoke. “I see you’ve fallen on hard times. What if I told you I could not only relieve your family’s hunger, but give you all the riches you could ever desire in this world?’
Now the miller was not totally naive. He knew this sounded like a deal that was probably too good to be true, so he asked the man, “What would I have to do in exchange?” The miller knew that life sometimes required knowing how to bargain, and he was willing to do it.
“Oh, hardly anything at all,” said the shadow man. “All you have to do is give me whatever is behind your house right now.”
The miller pictured the back of his house. There was only an old apple tree out there. It hardly gave any fruit, so they wouldn’t miss it. “Deal!” he proclaimed.
The two men shook on it, and the shadow man said he’d come back in three years to collect.
The miller made his way back to his cottage. As he left the woods, he spied his wife running toward him. “Husband, husband!” she shouted. “You’ll never believe what’s happened!”
The miller could see she was wearing an emerald green velvet gown, not the patched homespun she’d had on when he’d left that morning. He could also see a rope of pearls around her neck, so he had a pretty good idea what had happened.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said as his wife trotted toward him.
Gasping and clutching at his shoulder, she shrieked, “We’re rich!”
“So, it’s true then.”
“We’re rich! We’re rich!” They shouted together.
“Wait till I tell you what happened,” the miller said to his wife when they’d calmed down. “This man stepped out from behind a tree when I was chopping wood and offered me untold wealth. All I had to do was agree to give him whatever was behind our house!” The miller kicked up his heels in a little dance of jubilation.
As soon as he saw his wife’s face, the grin left his face. She was staggering and clutching her throat. “Dear, are you choking? Is it your heart?” His wife, too stunned to speak, slumped on the ground weeping.
Wife,” he said softly, “What’s behind our house?”
Though tears, his wife managed to get the words out. “Our daughter is behind our house. She’s been there sweeping under the apple tree all morning. What have you done!”
The two of them sobbed at this realization, but went back to the cottage, half-hoping all the wealth was gone, but their table was laden with delicacies they’d only dreamed of, there were fine clothes for all of them, and coffers of gold they could use to buy whatever they wanted from the village, which is what they proceeded to do.
“We’ve got three years,” they whispered to each other at night, thinking their daughter couldn’t hear them, “We may as well enjoy what we can before the reckoning comes.”
They thought they’d hidden the truth from their daughter about what was to come, but she knew. Some secrets are worn on the face, and when she looked at her parents, she could see they’d sold their souls.
On the day the shadow man said he’d return, while her parents wrung their hands and muttered to themselves in a corner, she bathed herself, put on a white dress, and walked out back to stand under the apple tree. Before her parents even knew what she’d done, she drew a white circle around herself with chalk, a line between her and what was to come.
All day she waited under that tree, inside the chalk circle she’d drawn with her own two hands. All day, her parents wrung their hands, watching from the back door of the house. “Maybe he won’t come,” They muttered quietly to each other. Neither of them comforted their daughter, or met her eyes, as she stood inside the chalk circle. Why didn’t she run? Somehow she knew there was no escaping the shadow man.
He came at sunset. They all saw him step out of the forest. He wasn’t in a rush. As he came closer, he reached his hands toward her. Just as he was about to snatch her, he sprang back, as if he’d been burned.
“What is this?” he roared. It was the chalk circle. He couldn’t cross it.
“You’ve tricked me, miller,” she shadow man fumed. “She’s too clean. I can’t touch her. I need her dirtier, on her knees. I need her begging. Don’t let her bathe for a week. Let the grime smear her rosy cheeks. I want to see that white dress dingy and torn. Do as I say… or else.” And with those words, he strode back into the forest.
No water touched the girl that week. When the shadow man returned, her skin was coated with grime, her hair tangled as a briar patch, and her white dress was a dingy gray, like the color of unwashed socks.
But the girl was not on her knees. She was not begging. She was under the tree, still and straight as before, but this time, she was weeping. A torrent of silent tears streamed from her broken heart. Tears poured down her face and arms, drenched her dingy dress, and most important to this story, cleansed her hands.
Clean hands was the first thing the shadow man saw.
“Miller,” the shadow man screeched like a thwarted banshee. “What is this! Her hands are clean! I can’t take her.”
He stopped, was quiet a moment, then looked up from under the low brim of hat and snarled, “Cut them off.”
“Oh no, oh no!” the miller pleaded. “Please don’t make me do that. Please, I’m her father. I’m begging you!”
But the shadow man, even though he loved to hear a man beg, was hearing none of the miller’s entreaties.“Do it,” he said.
“I can’t,” said the miller.
“You must,” said the shadow man. “If you don’t, I’ll kill you, your wife, and everyone in this village.”
After the shadow man skulked back off to the forest the miller approached his daughter, still standing beneath the old apple, a silent witness to all that had occurred beneath its gnarled branches.
Before he could apologize or make an excuse, before he could say one word, his daughter held out her hands. Looking him right in the eyes, she spoke.“Do it.”
Her words were a strange and disturbing echo of the shadow man’s command.
“No, no, I can’t.”
Her father cowered before her like a beaten dog hoping for a scrap. His daughter didn’t comment on his abject state. Her eyes were far away.
When she spoke, her voice seemed to belong to someone else.“You were supposed to be my protector and you let the wolves in. Do it.”
The miller swung that little silver axe he’d used to cut his daughter’s umbilical cord. The sound of the blade split their world in two. In two swift strokes it was done. His daughter’s hands landed in the dirt with a thunk.
Her mother ran to pick them up, bound the stumps in cloth to staunch the bleeding. The girl lived. All that week she waited in her dirty white dress for what she knew was coming. He would be back.
A week later, for the third time, she stood under the apple tree, erect beneath its knotted branches. With her back against its bent trunk, she felt a quiet strength move through her, radiating out from the tree like a deep bell. The sense that the tree stood with her in the trial brought tears to her eyes, tears that flowed once again down her cheeks clearing trails on her dirty face to flow down her arms. Tears that washed the blood off the stumps where her hands had once been.
This time when the shadow man saw her clean hands, he didn’t rail at the miller. He knew he only got three chances. He spun and stomped off back to the forest, shaking his hand at the sky. If you’d been close enough, you would have heard him hiss, “You haven’t see the last of me!”
The miller and his wife ran to their daughter as soon as the forest swallowed up the shadow man.
“Don’t worry, my darling girl. Don’t worry,” her mother crooned. “We’ll take care of you. You will never have to worry about a thing. We are rich. Come in the house. Let us recover from this ordeal together.”
The girl, the Handless Maiden, regarded her parents in their velvet and silk. “I cannot stay here,” she said, and with no more words than that, walked away from her childhood home into the forest.
No one’s sure how long she walked, the Handless Maiden. Some say a few months, others a few years, but all agree it was a long time. Long enough for her hair to mat like a sheep in need of shearing, and for her feet to become tough as a goat’s. It was hard to feed herself with no hands. She had to pick berries off the bushes with her mouth, and to drink, she had to lower herself to the stream and plunge her whole face in the water. She grew so thin it was hard to see her in certain lights. She looked more spirit than human.
At first she wept as she walked, but over time as her feet toughened and her belly grew used to being hollow, she began to sing. It got to be so the birds would follow her because they liked her song so much. Sometimes they even joined in.
When she first entered the forest, she used to find shelter as soon as she could sense the sun would soon go down, but as she grew in confidence, she walked into the night. Sometimes she even walked on until the sun rose, when the moon was full. It was a night like this, that she finally came to the end of the forest.
There it was, like a dream. A castle perched on a hill, full moon rising above the turrets, fat and gold as one of the pears in the King’s orchard she could see behind a high wall. She walked toward that sweet aroma.
There was a moat around the castle. How could she cross it? She couldn’t swim. As she gazed into the water, a vapor rose off the surface, cohering in a shape that might have been a woman, or a daemon, or an angel. If you looked close you might have seen this being had feathers sprouting from its shoulders, if you looked even closer, you might have seen wings. This was a spirit from another dimension, one who could part water, which is what it did for the Handless Maiden, who walked across the moat and slipped through a crack in the stone wall that was just wide enough for her starved body.
The Handless Maiden was now in the moonlit orchard. Down the rows she walked, tipsy from the sweet smell of fruit and flowers. Finally, she stopped at a tree in the very center. The branches, heavy with gold fruit, were just out of reach of her stumps.
Her face turned skyward, mist wet her cheeks. The moon on her face was a radiant blessing after walking so long in the dark forest.
She stood there a long time, long enough for the tree to see into her soul. That’s the only explanation for what happened. The tree saw how suffering had deepened the Handless Maiden, had made her patient, not cynical or stoic. The tree sensed in her a rare contentment. This was someone who had learned the hard way to be grateful.
As she stood under its branches, looking up through them at the moon, content with her longing, a branch lowered itself toward her upturned face. One pear, the juiciest of them all, touched her lips. The Handless Maiden opened her mouth and sunk her teeth into it.
The branch released its fruit, and as she held the pear between her stump the juice dripped down her chin and arms. She didn’t waste one drop.
Absorbed in the sweet satiation of her long hunger, she didn’t realize someone was watching her. A gardener. He was a small man, close to the ground. In some times, he might have been called an earth god, or a gnome. In the place where I, the storyteller live now, he’d be called a menehune, one of the little men who built fishponds and stonewalls in one night, tasks that would take humans weeks or even months.
The gardener was considered a bit eccentric. Most gardeners worked by daylight. He worked under the moon. He was skilled and wise, and had the King’s trust. Instead of going to sleep when the sun rose, he went to the King and told him what he’d witnessed in the night.
The King was curious. “You say you can’t tell if she’s a woman, or an animal, or a spirit?”
“Yes, your Majesty. But whatever she is, she has no hands.”
This intrigued the King even more. “I will join you tonight, gardener. Let us find out the identity of this thief.”
The King brought along a magician, too, in case she wasn’t human. A magician would know how to talk to a spirit.
When they got to the orchard, the King started his usual routine, counting the pears to see if one was actually missing. He took his oath to provide for his people seriously. He had to count to make sure there was enough. No one under his rule would go hungry.
Sure enough, there was one pear missing. Once he discovered that, he settled down and sat with the gardener and the magician to see if this wild creature would appear.
Just after dusk, when the last of the sunset had faded to a purple-black, the Handless Maiden stepped out of the forest and walked toward the moat.
Once again, she stood looking at herself in the water. This time a prayer fluttered from her lips. The same figure rose out of the mist on the moat’s surface. The water parted, then the wall. The Handless Maiden stepped through.
And once again, the branch lowered itself toward her upturned face under the fat, gold moon. She gripped the pear with her teeth, held it to her heart between her stumps, then raised it to her lips and devoured it.
The King felt like he was intoxicated. Had he drunk too much at dinner? The gardener was right. It was impossible to tell if she was a woman or a spirit, or even an animal. He didn’t care. He had meant to ask the magician to speak to her, but he couldn’t hold himself back, He walked toward her without thinking, clearing his throat to signal his approach so he didn’t startle her.
“Are you a woman, a spirit, or an animal?” he asked straight forth.
Startled, she dropped the pear, and turned toward the King, and in all her wild dignity said, “I’ve been in the wilderness so long I don’t know anymore.”
No shame, no fear, no explanations. She met the King’s gaze and he knew immediately, he was in love.
“It doesn’t matter what you are,” he said. “You must come and live in my castle. My mother and I will take care of you.”
She accepted his offer and went to live in the grand castle with the King and his mother. The Queen Mother was a bit taken aback by the wild creature her son had brought home, but after a bath they discovered she was just a girl, though a bit wilder than they were used to at court.
The Queen Mother could see she had suffered greatly, not just in body, but in spirit as well, and approached her with tenderness and patience. In time, the Handless Maiden began to come out of her shell, and soon enough, in the way of things between young people in close proximity, she returned the young King’s love. When he proposed, she accepted. The marriage took place and there was a great feast.
As a wedding gift, the King gave his new Queen a pair of silver hands made by the castle’s finest smith. He tied them on her stumps with purple velvet ribbons, looking pleased with himself. The Woman with Silver Hands smiled politely, but as soon as she could took them off, putting them away in a drawer without comment. Her new husband was too shy to ask why.
They were happy together for a time. Soon it was evident the Queen was with child. The kingdom rejoiced at news of an heir. But war came, as it does to every Kingdom. The King had to leave his wife and defend the ramparts. He said goodbye to his wife, and told the Queen Mother she must send their swiftest messenger on the kingdom’s fastest horse to let him know as soon as the heir arrived.
When it was time, the Woman with Silver Hands gave birth to a perfect baby boy. All his fingers and toes, and a smile just like his father’s. The Queen Mother did as her son had asked and sent the fasts rifer on the fastest horse to bring the King good news.
The rider galloped full force toward the front. When he came to a stream, he could have plowed right through to the other bank, but he decided to dismount to let his horse drink. As the horse drank, a sulfurous vapor wafted out of the bushes. The messenger inhaled it, and suddenly felt so sleepy. His mission couldn’t be that urgent, he thought. Surely the Queen Mother wouldn’t begrudge him a brief rest. He would ride all the faster upon awakening. I’ll just lie down for a bit. On the bank, asleep, he didn’t see the man in the wide-brimmed hat slink out of the shadows.
Did you think the shadow man had forgotten what the miller owed him? If you did, you don’t know the nature of shadows. The whole ride he’d been tracking the messenger, waiting for his chance. It had come.
Low he bent to the sleeping messenger’s ear. These were the words he whispered: “Your wife gave birth to a monster. The child is half-boy, half-dog. What should we do with them? Please advise.”
And that was the message the King heard in his tent on the battle front on the very edge of the kingdom.
At first, he was taken aback. Shocked even. Of course he would be, but when his heart stopped pounding, all he could think of was how much he loved his wife. He recalled that first time he’d seen her in the moonlit garden, pear juice dripping down her face. He spoke. “Tell the Queen Mother to take care of my wife and son until I return. I love them both.”
The messenger mounted his horse and sped back toward the castle, but when he reached the stream, instead of forging on, he again dismounted to let his horse drink, and was again overcome by a sulfurous languor. Surely, it won’t hurt if I have just a little nap.
You know what happened. When he awoke, the message he was carrying back to the castle, was not the one the King has spoken.
This is what the shadow man spoke in the sleeping messenger’s ear: “Tell the Queen Mother to kill my wife and this abomination she’s birthed. Tell her to cut out my wife’s tongue as proof she obeyed me.”
The Queen Mother nearly fainted when she heard these words. Surely, her son had gone insane. He must be battle-crazed. He couldn’t mean this. She would sort this all out. First, she sent for her daughter in law.
“My dear, I fear my son has lost his bearings being so long at war. You and my grandson are in danger. Until we can get things straightened out, I’m afraid you’re going to have to go into exile and hide.”
The Queen Mother paused, knowing just how much her daughter-in-law had been through before she’d found her way to the King’s moonlit orchard. “You’re going to have to go back into the forest.” Her voice was firm, to give the young Queen courage.
The Woman with Silver Hands, the Young Queen, shivered when she heard those words. She remembered those hungry years, the thorns in her feet, sleeping on the cold ground.
The Queen Mother saw this and searched for the words that would buttress the new mother’s heart. “My dear, I know you’ve suffered. I know, more than anything, you don’t want to go back into that forest. But I have lived a long time, and one thing I can assure you, the second time is not as hard. Take courage in that.”
The next morning she walked to the edge of the forest with her daughter-in-law and helped her bind the child to her breast, since she had no hands to carry him. When they had been swallowed up by the trees, she sent a hunter to take a deer, whose tongue she placed in a little box she kept in the throne room, waiting for the King’s return.
It was true. The second time in the forest was not as hard. The Young Queen and her son didn’t even have to spend one night on the cold ground. As dusk fell, and the forest light dimmed, she smelled smoke. Not the smoke of burning brush. This was not an out of control conflagration. It was the smoke of a cooking fire. A hearth.
Slow and steady, without urgency, she walked toward that smell.
When the trees opened, she found herself looking at a cottage whose walls seemed to inhale and exhale like a living being. She could hear laughter coming from inside, smell the aroma of baking bread and the bubble of simmering lentils.
She knocked on the door. Right away, it opened. A woman with long white hair, and twinkling eyes blue as a robin’s eggs spoke, “Come in. We are the Wood Sisters and we’ve been waiting for you. And your son, too!”
And so the woman who had been the Miller’s Daughter, the Handless Maiden, the Woman With Silver Hands, the young Queen, now became one of the Wood Sisters. They worked hard the sisters, but there was much joy in their tasks. If you happened to be nearby in the forest, you would have heard them sing as they planted and harvested, milled and kneaded, as they spun, wove, and embroidered. Our heroine wove a new life for herself and her son.
She stitched patterns on their garments that bound them to the sacred patterns of nature. She tended hives and made beeswax candles. She made tinctures and salves. And always, like all the women, she went to the well for water.
No one can say for sure, but most of the Wood Women would say it was the day her son, now a toddler, fell into the well, that the Handless Maiden, she who had taken off the silver hands made for her by her well-meaning husband, grew her own hands back. They sprouted from her stumps like flowers, miraculous as every young shoot coming up through the soil, so she could reach into that dark water to save her boy.
Seven years, she lived there with the Wood Sisters. She was one of them, and her boy was bright-eyed and merry from growing up amongst such goodness. What she didn’t know, was that her husband, the King, had returned not soon after she’d entered the forest for that second time. The enemy vanquished, he had galloped home to be reunited with his wife and their child.
He wasn’t thinking of a half-breed monster when he finally arrived at the castle. He ran up the spiral stairs to the throne room, eager to be reunited with his beloveds, but no one was present except his mother, who walked toward him slowly and handed him a small box. He noticed her hands shook.
The King took the box from her and opened it. He beheld the severed deer’s tongue. “What is this, Mother?”
“What is this? It’s the tongue of your wife that you had cut from her mouth to prove we’d obeyed your orders!” spat the Queen Mother. Her whole body shuddered with the words. The King blanched and dropped the box like a burning coal.
“What have you done, Mother?” He wailed. The whole castle shook. Stones fell off the ramparts.
“What have I done? Only what you commanded. I killed your wife and the child you deemed a monster.”
The King fell to the floor. When he began tearing his clothes and hair, the Queen Mother began to wonder if she’d been right about her son all along. Surely, this was genuine grief, not some show he was putting on to get back in her good graces. Her relief at seeing his despair had her on the floor with him. The true story came out.
“There, there, son, I didn’t do it. She’s alive. So is your son—a perfect baby boy. This is just the tongue of a deer I had the huntsman cut out to show you. I sent them into the forest until we got this mess sorted out. You must go and find them.”
The next morning she accompanied her son to the edge of the woods. They said goodbye without words, a brief hug, before he slipped into the trees alone. No horse, no armor, no sword. There was nothing to identify him as the King. He was dressed as a simple man, without status, nothing but his own two feet to carry him on the same path his wife had walked.
We have heard how the second time in the forest is easier, but this was the King’s first. He met all the trials and tribulations head-on. He was hungry, close to starving. His tongue was parched and shriveled from thirst. He walked so long he was nothing but sinew and bone. He had been a warrior before, but now he was a beggar, pleading with leaves for a drop of water. He was so haggard, bears took pity on him and left him a scrap here and there, which he ate raw. Some nights he forgot why he was in the forest, but he never stopped moving forward. His body told him what to do when his mind left, and he followed it. Finally, after seven years, the trees grew less dense; the brambles stopped tearing at his clothes. When it rained, he raised his mouth to receive the water’s blessing. The birds seemed to sing just for him—keep going.
In scraps, emaciated, but with a look of pride in his eyes that only comes from sticking to a purpose against all odds, the King came to a clearing. There was smoke streaming from the chimney of a cottage. Hearty laughter streamed out the windows. As he got closer, he smelled roasting meet and sourdough loaves baking in the oven. He heard the clink of mugs. The hoppy smell of ale tickled his nose. This was the home of the Wood Brothers.
The door opened right away to his knock. There stood a man with long white hair and eyes blue as the wings of a kingfisher. “Come in,” the man said, “We’ve been waiting for you.”
The King entered and broke his fast with the Wood Brothers. A few silent tears slid down his cheeks, which the Brothers did not ignore. One patted him on the shoulders and handed him a mug of ale. Another ladled another scoop of lentils into his bowl. Another man placed his hand on his own heart and met the weeping man’s eyes. The King felt seen for the first time in his life.
After they’d eaten, the King found the words to say why he’d come. “Has anyone seen my wife and child? I’ve journeyed a long way to find them.”
The Wood Brothers knew there were stories within stories in that simple request, but they, too, kept their reply simple. “We have!” They exclaimed as one. “They are with the Wood Sisters who live the next clearing over. We are going to visit them tomorrow. Would you like to join us?”
“Yes,” said the King.
The next morning the Wood Brothers arose and began walking toward the Wood Sisters. They sang as they walked. Their chorus delighted the birds in the branches and the light danced to their sweet notes on the forest floor. Even the shadows were dancing. No man was going to slip out from them and offer them a bargain that would damage their souls. Brothers, firm in their path, they were committed to life in all its inherent goodness.
I don’t know what happened to the shadow man who started this story years ago when he slipped out from behind that tree and offered the miller that hard bargain, that at the time had seemed so sweet. I don’t know if the miller and his wife ever truly enjoyed their riches. I do know, that as the Wood Brothers walked, encircling the King with their song, the Wood Sisters were walking toward them, and that the Woman Whose Hands Grew Back walked with them, and that everyone was singing.
I do know that when the Brothers and Sisters met in a third clearing, they merged like two river currents, and a space opened up in the center of their circle, an eddy of rightness in the world that had so often seemed against our young lovers. In this space of higher justice, the King and the Queen were reunited. Tears of joy fed the trees’ roots. There was not a dry eye in the forest.
It was decided that another wedding must take place, right there and then, with the forest as witness. The oldest Wood Brother and the oldest of the Wood Sisters would hold a veil between the bride and groom. When the veil dropped, the Queen and King were to look at each other as if they were beholding the divine itself.
“But remember,” said the oldest brother. “It is not the divine you marry. It’s an actual man and woman. A husband and wife are meant to live in this world. We need a King and Queen who know this in order for the Kingdom to flourish. Can you do this?”
We can, they nodded.
Before the veil dropped, the eldest Wood Sister said, “Behold the holy spirit in each other well, my dears. This one glimpse, if you stay true to it, will see you through when trouble comes.”
Everyone gathered there knew that trouble would come again, except for perhaps the little boy, whose time yet to learn that hard and necessary truth had not yet come. The eldest brother and sister each held a corner of the veil. The Queen had never looked more radiant, the King more noble. When the veil dropped it sounded like the swing of that little silver axe that had taken the hands of the miller’s daughter years ago, or the sound of falling water, or a lover’s sigh.
I will leave it for you to hear it for yourself, the sound of two beings realizing nothing can truly ever divide them, or anyone else, when they abide in the holy spirit.
When the veil dropped, the King and Queen beheld each other the way God sees us on the first day she created us. But they didn’t linger in that space. There was work to be done. The kingdom needed them.
They returned with their son to the castle and were reunited with the Queen Mother. Their reign lasted for many years, and the land was fruitful. They were of this Earth, and not of it. They held fast to that glimpse of the divine for their entire marriage, and just as the Wood Brothers and Sisters said, it carried them through all the trials of marriage and ruling a kingdom. They ruled well, and passed their wisdom on by example to their son and their many children. One of them, a daughter, grew up to be a storyteller who embroidered their story into altar cloths and table cloths, into vests and skirts. She passed down the patterns for us to wear and follow if we choose.
I have chosen to adorn myself in those patterns. I am a storyteller. I wear them with humility, gratitude, and honor, praying that I am up to the task of whatever they ask of me, even when the path gets thorny.
And now that I’ve told you the story, how will you share it? Will you spin and weave, embroider, plant, harvest, cook, or brew, with what you have heard here?
Who inside you, or right next to you, maybe just outside your window, or maybe on the other side of the world, needs to hear this story? How will you answer its call?
And if you feel this task is a burden, take heart, the forest is deep and dark, but others have gone before you.
In blessing, we bless ourselves. The whole world rejoices when we come home to our own goodness.
And so I ask you, at the end of this story, and the beginning of yours, where do you find yourself in it? How will that image or place be the genesis of your own journey into true safety and belonging?
Private Sessions
For those wanting personalized guidance in the Coracle, I am offering private sessions on Zoom at $113 for 60 minutes.
Private sessions can be especially illuminating through going through the Nine Currents in conversation. Things sometimes come out in dialogue that you can’t see on your own.
I am committed to holding an honest, trauma-informed mirror of a space, to help you move from Current One, Revelation, to the Ninth, Completion.
Respond to this email or reach out at jen@jenniferlighty.com. [https://www.jenniferlighty.com]
Resources
I am a thinker. I enjoy elaborating on how I create, and I love to share the esoteric structure of my creations. It is perfectly fine to navigate the Coracle without understanding how it works as a spiritual technology, though I do suggest committing to all or some of the ways to collaborate I’ve listed here so the stories, and the holy in nature, know you are serious and committed to this process. For those who would like more background on this process, there is a wealth of info on my website jenniferlighty.com [https://www.jenniferlighty.com]. Check the Coracle and Resources pages.
I have also shared extensively about the underpinnings of the Coracle here on Substack if you want to peruse the archives. Here are a few links to articles:
The Spiritual Technology of Fairy Tales [https://jenlighty.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/161762549?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts%2Fpublished]
What Do I Mean By Safety? [https://jenlighty.substack.com/p/what-do-i-mean-by-safety]
What Do I Mean by Magic? [https://jenlighty.substack.com/p/what-do-i-mean-by-magic]
Ceremony is Somatic [https://jenlighty.substack.com/p/ceremony-is-somatic]
Resources
I am grateful for the teachers and mentors who have shared their methods and insights with me that have contributed to the Coracle.
Here is list with links if you’d like to explore their bodies of work:
Ke’oni Hanalei of Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals [https://www.pohala.net]
Storyteller and Writer Martin Shaw [https://drmartinshaw.com/about-martin-shaw/]
Storyteller and Teacher Stephanie Mackay [https://stephaniemackay.ca]
Writer and Coracle Witness Lola Wilcox [https://lolawilcox.com]
The Great Mother Conference [https://www.greatmotherconference.org]
How You Can Help
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The Gift Economy
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I also welcome any other gifts you want to send me!
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
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