The Selkie 8x10 Art Print

I have always loved folklore and the lessons I can take away from them. Lately I have been thinking about the story of Selkies. Selkies are seals in Celtic mythology that are similar to mermaids. Selkies are usually female that can take human form once a month, removing their seal skins under a full moon to dance together on a beach, in community. One day a fisherman spies them, steals a skin, and the seal-woman who owns that skin cannot return to her ocean world with her sisters. She agrees to stay with the man and be his wife for 7 years; then, he promises, he will give back her skin so she can rejoin her former life at sea. In that time, she has a child and is pulled into domestic life, but her light is dimming – she is growing thinner, drier, more lifeless. After 7 years, she asks the man where her skin is, and he claims to not know. The child worries for his mother and learns she is Selkie. To help his mother, the child seeks out a Wise Woman.”Your mother must help herself” the wise one tells the child. In some versions, the child finds the skin, worn and threadbare, and returns it to the mother. In another version, the seal-woman sings her lost seal sisters back to life and obtains a skin from them.The woman wants to stay with her child but something calls her, something older than she, older than he, older than time. The woman puts on the seal skin and returns to her home with her sisters, in some versions bringing her child with her to her under water home for a time; in other versions, she returns to the rocky beach in human form to reconnect with her child once a year.
This Selkie tale resonate strongly with many female experiences. It is a song of yearning – yearning for a part of ourselves that we feel we have lost – or maybe a part that we feel we might once have had, but have never known. The Selkie story is a story of a woman who breaks. Taken literally out of her element, trapped on the land, where she cannot find a way to belong. She has lost her place in the world, and consequently lost her stories. Like the Selkie, so many of us lose our skins, and all too often we lose them early. This can happen in so many ways: it might be stolen by another who does us harm; we might give it away to someone we trust, who then betrays us; or we might hide it for safekeeping and then forget where we hid it.
The word “Sealskin” can easy be traded for “soulskin’ The story serves as an initiation to explore what parts of our souls have been stolen, to make self-discoveries, and provide directions on how to develop a healthy wildish soul. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; working a full time job, human relationships with their myriad pulls – woman’s normal occupations in general can run counter to a creative life. The only way to hold on to this essential soulskin is to return home to ourselves. There are many ways to go home. Such as- learning about our own women’s history, connecting to the feminine divine, a girls night out, spending even a few minutes in nature, being able to speak and to feel like we were really heard, planting our bare feet to the earth, having time for ourselves. It is an internal place, a place somewhere in time rather than space, where a woman feels of one piece. Home is where a thought or feeling can be sustained instead of being interrupted or torn away from us because something else is demanding our time and attention. Home is the pristine instinctual life. Whatever revivifies balance is what is essential. That is home.

This digital art piece is printed on high quality photo paper.