Wood Sisters Samhain 2011
The Wheel of the Year turns, bringing the Wood Sisters back to Samhain, where we began a year ago.
This is the darkest and deepest of the three harvest festivals that move from celebrating the grain harvest at Lughnasadh, through the nuts and fruits of the Autumn Equinox, to this final gathering in as the nights lengthen at Samhain. This year it was especially good to celebrate a full circle of Wood Sisterly exploration and to welcome our sixtieth sister!
For this Samhain we dived deep into the story of the Handless Maiden. It’s not much over a year since Sue and I listened together to this story as we sat around a fire in the wildwood with the Westcountry School of Myth and Story. Hearing about the wise and womanly support that the Handless Maiden receives from the wood sisters in the story, helped initiate our own seasonal gatherings for sharing meditation, myth, story, sacred time in nature and ceremony. Now we can look back over a year with the Wood Sisters and appreciate all the healing and inspiration that has flowed around and through this unfolding circle of sisters.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes presents this story as an ancient initiatory tale for women that is best explored over days or months; so it seemed a fitting gateway into our next year of women’s Mysteries. The first stages of the story were both disturbing and familiar to many of us; as the beautiful soul of the young woman and the vitality and bounty of the apple ‘tree of life’ she stands beneath, are not cherished or protected but instead given away.
In the story it is the family and especially the father that ‘does a deal with the devil’ and unwittingly trades his daughter for wealth and comfort. While many of us can relate to such dysfunctional dynamics running through our own families, the story also challenges us to reflect on how we ourselves give away our own wild and creative soul. Though the deep power and purity within us actually can’t be taken away (and the devil in the story repeatedly fails to win the soul), there is still a wounding and a loss symbolised by the cutting off of the maiden’s hands. But this dismemberment is also the beginning of an awakening that, with time, brings the deepest healing.
The handless maiden finds the inner strength to leave the family home and make her own way in the wilderness, coming at last to a beautiful orchard where she finds both nourishment and unexpected love, as the King and keeper of the orchard sees and loves her wild and wounded soul. She is helped to cross the moat and enter this healing garden by one of the wood sisters. We took these images of the wild wood into meditation and made our own inner journeys through water into a sacred garden, grove or orchard, where we could encounter and seek guidance from our own inner wise Self.
The story continues through first the marriage and then separation of King and Maiden, who soon bears a child. Once again the ‘Devil’ plays his part in creating misunderstanding, opposition and suffering that keep the family apart from each other for seven years. During this time each must discover their own Self in the wild wood, with the support of their wood sisters and brothers. The King goes through his own process of loss and wandering, while elsewhere the Maiden grows back her hands and reclaims her full creative powers as wild woman, mother and Queen. The story comes to completion in the ‘alchemical marriage’ of the now mature King and Queen.
After such a rich feast of story and meditation, we enjoyed a somewhat simpler bring and share feast of homemade bread and pumpkin soup. Then, with all the above rich motifs in our minds and hearts, we made our own wandering journey through the local woods to meet another kind of Wood Sister in the form of a great grandmother yew tree in an ancient graveyard on the Dartington Estate. There is something surprisingly moving about walking in the woods in meditative silence with others and simply taking time to be with such an ancient tree. The day then concluded back at the fireside as we laid the natural tokens we had gathered on the stone hearth, lit candles and shared prayers and poems. Once again, another wonderful day with the Wood Sisters!
The Stature of Waiting
(by Abigail)
Being nothing
Beneath the sun
Drinking warmth and light
Weighted by the Earth
Within my own dark cloak
Silently listening
A gesture of dying
Open handed
Surrendering
Tenderness
Touching
the
Infinite
Bread hands and pears - with thanks to Abigail