Of all the places we can visit on earth, the beach is the one place that is made by the Moon. The gravitational pull of the moon is so great, that twice daily, she pulls the tide, sculpting the land. Sand is the result of this relentless pummeling of shell, stone and skeleton. The creatures of tidepools live in the daily ebb and flow of water, eating and being eaten in the cycle of submergence and exposure. Shellfish are tossed, without ceremony, upon the land to be consumed by shore birds. Seal, sea lion and walrus lounge on rocks and hunt in the sea. Seaweed and kelp form an underwater forest just off shore. And all the while, the waves endlessly crash, spray and foam, and a salt breeze scours the land. It is a place that can be both calm and wildly tempestuous.
The ocean itself is deep and full of mystery, yet where it meets land, it becomes an environment that strips away pretenses. To endure in the space of relentless crash of wave on land, one is inevitably worn down to the essentials, even amidst the bounty and beauty of seaside life.
The seashore is also home to mythic creatures who are bound to the sea and invariably long for land—the selkie and the mermaid. Tales explore these shapeshifting creatures, letting us imagine what it could mean to belong to both land and sea, or perhaps neither as the story goes. These hybrids are allusive, alluring, and as curious about us as we are about them. It is fitting that a setting that both demands authenticity and maintains its mysteries becomes home to stories of creatures uncertain how to settle their competing desires, changing identities, or diverging nature.
Recent social scientists interested in both psychology and mythology have found the selkie stories of Scotland and Northern Europe fertile ground to discuss “returning to one’s self.” Selkies are seals who can shed their skin and walk the land as humans. While there are many versions of selkie stories, the most common is that a man meets a selkie in human form and falls in love with her. The man, fearful of her returning to the sea, keeps her pelt hidden to ensure she will not leave him. Unable to don her skin, the woman languishes. In many stories, she finally recovers her pelt, and indeed dives back into the ocean, never to return.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés in her book Women Who Run with Wolves, imagines that we all have a sealskin and donning it is “what replenishes [our] psychic reserves.” In our contemporary lives, a stolen skin might occur as the result of an unhealthy relationship, trying to be someone you are not, or having one’s resources and time overdrawn. Without one’s authentic skin, it’s easy to become what you think people want you to be. As Estés says, “We learn the world, but lose our skins.
Similarly, Sharon Blackie in her book If Women Rose Rooted, writes, “The selkies song is our song. 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 never knew. How many of us have lost skins to this super-rationalistic world in which we cannot feel at home, in which we cannot feel as if we belong? No matter…how cleverly we shed our own fragile skins and clothe ourselves in…[skins] which do not fit us…we cannot hide the fact that it does not work. We do not thrive.”
Much newer than the selkie folklore, but very much a part of contemporary ideas of folklore, “The Little Mermaid” was published by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837. It tells of a mermaid who wishes to be human and sells her voice to the witch of the sea to gain human legs. She fails to win the love of the prince, and as a result she dies, returning to the sea as foam. Andersen has the mermaid’s foremost desire be the quest for an immortal soul (according to the story, mermaids do not have immortal souls; I disagree of course); therefore, we don’t really know if the mermaid denies or confirms her identity in becoming human. Whether tragedy or cautionary tale, the story makes plain there are risks to shapeshifting, and many believe this tale explores Andersen’s unrequited love for a man. Indeed, moving away from heteronormative interpretations and traditional gender roles, selkie and mermaid tales are rich ground to explore ideas of shapeshifting, safety, societal expectations and identity.
The demand for authenticity that pervades these seashore tales reminds me of Mary Oliver’s poem, “I Go Down to the Shore.” The speaker in the poem goes down to the beach and speaks aloud their misery: “Oh, I am miserable, / what shall— / what should I do? And the sea says / in its lovely voice: / Excuse me, I have work to do.” There are different ways to read this poem, but if we read it as the ocean providing an answer to the speaker’s question, then perhaps the ocean suggests that getting on with the work of being oneself is what will keep us from misery.
So how does one return to one’s self? What does it look like to rediscovering one’s authentic skin? Estés and Blackie focus on interrupting societal expectations, especially those placed on women, and in seeking one’s own mythic meaning and calling in life. Drawn to myth and folklore, I certainly see the wisdom in this approach, but I think there is a more fundamental and practical strategy to pursue first: grappling with one’s inner critic.
Our very humanness often seems to get in the way of being oneself. I’ve written before about wildness and how it need not mean one is fierce or loud, bold or unruly. It’s not exclusively about climbing mountains or hiking hundreds of miles. Being wild is about being authentic. Other creatures, who lack the expansive imagination of humans, are not beset by the same wonderings and what-ifs. They do not worry what others will make of their fur, or the size of their belly. They live in the moment as themselves, unburdened by made-up stories of what others think.
As I discussed a couple month ago, our imaginations are exceptional because we can envision what is not actually in front of us. It is our imagination that helps us generate stories about who, when and why people will let us belong. Those imaginings are certainly based on what we see happen to others and what has happened to us in the past, but they persist in us as an imaginal state.
The “inner critic” arrives on the scene to safeguard us. It is not our intuitive, wise self, but rather an aspect of ourself very worried about what others think about us. It is the piece of us that seeks belonging above all else, because belonging ensures survival. Its approach to providing safety is not always wrong, though it can grow outdated and linger long past its usefulness. When it shows up when we are children, the deductions can be skewed and overly self-centered. If we carry on through life, unaware that some of our stories are whispered by our inner critic, these stories can turn into truths we believe about ourselves. What begins as a moment-in-time survival suggestion, becomes a truth about who we must be all of the time. The suggestion that we shapeshift in order to belong (or deny a need to shapeshift) that comes from the inner critic, can easily become an internal expectation.
It’s possible to distinguish the voice of the inner critic. I gave mine its own name to further emphasize the separation (she’s an uptight dragon named Bernadette). If you have a hard time telling the difference initially, there are clues. The inner critic is never satisfied. It often speak in extremes like “you always” and “you will never.” It’s the voice that encourages us to be smaller than we are, likes to dwell unhelpfully on mistakes, and is convinced we are falling short. It doesn’t like to acknowledge our strengths. It takes our fears and makes seemingly logical cases for why we should avoid them at all costs. This, at worst, keeps us from pursuing our heart’s desire, when a successful outcome cannot be ensured, or because failures in similar situations have occurred before.
The only way to deal with the inner critic, since it’s part of us, is to love it into silence: thank it for its input, then rock it to sleep, or send it out to play in the yard. Over and over and over, until perhaps it subsides, which it may or may not do. The inner critic is persistent and will try new tactics, so the practice of interruption must be as relentless and clarifying as the waves at the beach. “Thank you, now go take a nap,” is my common, daily, sometimes hourly response to Bernadette when she isn’t tricking me into thinking she is me.
We often see the moon as gentle—the softer, reflective face in the sky. But the relentless waves at the beach show us a different side of how she works. The beach holds great treasures, but only for those who can ride the waves of fear, the waves of inadequacy, and still surface as ourselves. The new moon each month brings higher high tides and lower low tides, the amplitude increased as if emphasizing our need to return to our true selves to rest, recharge and recommit to our intentions.
So this new moon, like the speaker in Oliver’s poem, let us go down to the shore. There in the home of the shapeshifting selkies and mermaids, we can let the ocean waves get to work, sloughing away at the things we tell ourselves about perfection, our fixation on our shortcomings or mistakes, and the insecurities and falsehoods we tell ourselves. We can let the salt breeze scour us, until we once more see our authentic skin, luminous, reflected back to us in the tide pools.
Questions for this month:
When do I most feel at ease in my skin? Where or with who do I feel most myself?
What shapeshifting am I doing to please others or belong?
What shapeshifting am I avoiding in order to please others or belong?
What has my inner critic been saying to me lately?
What desire am I avoiding?