The Hanged Man: Part 5: Imbolc
Post #40: A new life begins, haunted by the old ...
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ROSE RED
With stony inevitability, Rose Red’s last week at home arrived. Each passing hour carried her further over the threshold into a new life. She knew the king and Queen Snow White couldn’t understand and gave up any attempt to explain herself. She didn’t ask permission, cry or plead. Artemis had spoken with both her parents and the king was resigned, indifferent.
“It appears I have no choice,” he said. That was all. Rose Red thought he wouldn’t miss her. She was no longer an obedient prop in his life. He was finished with her.
She spent time every day with her mother. One morning she drew a comb through the queen’s black hair with long, smooth strokes, soothing and gentling, feeling the bones of her mother’s skull with her other hand. Morning sun came in the window. The queen looked at herself in the mirror. Rose Red stood behind the stool her mother sat on.
“I know you hate me,” the queen’s reflection said to Rose Red’s.
Rose Red’s hands stilled, one on the comb and one on her mother’s shoulder. The queen spoke conversationally. Rose Red felt a sudden severing, as though she’d been divided deeply and part of her fell away. Queen Snow White turned away from the mirror, standing abruptly. She faced Rose Red like an adversary. Her eyes filled with tears and her white, smooth face cracked into angles and harsh lines.
Rose Red looked into her mother’s face and then over her mother’s shoulder into the mirror, that inexorable mirror. The room was reflected in the cold glass; the sunny window and herself, standing as though struck to stone with comb in hand. Her mother’s reflected back was rigid with tension, cloaked in black hair. Rose Red’s reflected face looked as white as the queen’s. Carefully, holding her own gaze in the mirror, Rose Red laid the comb down as though it was an object of unutterable fragility that might shatter into splinters. It made a click in the silent room. Her mother’s face was now streaked with tears, naked and vulnerable as a child’s.
“You hate me and the sooner you leave, the better! I don’t know how much longer I can bear this.”
Rose Red looked at her own face in the mirror and thought about the hours and days and years she’d spent in this room. She looked in the mirror and thought of the inescapable trap of her mother’s devouring need, and her own desire to be loved, to be good enough, to please. She looked in the mirror and remembered combing and brushing her mother’s thick dark hair until her wrist ached, remembered endless boredom of gowns and jewelry and hair ornaments. She looked in the merciless mirror and it reflected tragedy and futility.
“You hate me,” the queen repeated.
No, Rose Red said silently to the mirror, every day of my life I’ve tried as hard as I could to please you, and every day I’ve failed.
“You’ve torn my heart apart.”
No, thought Rose Red. I gave you everything I could.
“I’ve lost you!” The queen’s voice broke. More tears fell down her face. Her nose ran.
Rose Red understood her mother still wanted something, some response, some reassurance, something big enough to fill her emptiness, even as her words set Rose Red brutally and inexorably free.
No, thought Rose Red. You’ve thrown me away. In the mirror, she saw an expression on her own face she’d never seen before, an expression the Dwarves and Vasilisa and Jenny would have recognized. It was a stoic expression of pain, betrayed by a grim quirk of lips. The queen, however, made no effort to hide her anguish. The mirror showed -- Rose Red saw — Oh Gods! — I am the mother and she is the child — and that’s how it will always be …!
“No,” she said to her mother in the mirror. “No.” She turned and walked out the door.
After that Rose Red was respectful and pleasant to both her parents and went steadily about the task of turning out her room. She discarded nearly everything. The few possessions she kept went into a pair of stout wooden crates, to be stored with the Dwarves until wanted.
She was to go to the Dwarves for a time, while she studied with Artemis. After a period of training, she’d take her place as Artemis’s handmaiden.
When the moment of leave-taking came, she said good-bye to her father, who didn’t touch her. She hugged her mother, who stood stiffly in her embrace, told her she loved her, turned and walked away. That was all.
Blind with tears, trembling, she made her way through the grounds for the last time. Outside the gate, the White Stag waited. She leaned her forehead against his shoulder. The musky scent of him and the warmth of his body comforted her. He stood quietly, patient and untroubled, and after a time she found herself breathing with his breathing, the tumult in her heart lessening. She straightened up and they fell into step together. He stayed beside her all the way to the Dwarves’ cottage. As they drew near, Vasilisa opened the door and came to meet her. She kissed the stag on his soft nose and he walked away between trees. Vasilisa took Rose Red’s cold hand in her warm one.
***
On the first day of her training, the White Stag met her. Rose Red greeted him, laying a hand on his muscled neck. He looked into her eyes before leading her through the woods. It was a cool, cloudy day. Everywhere she looked she found the repeated intricate knotted pattern of the stag’s antlers, in the bare branches overhead, leafless rose and berry bushes and a woven magpie’s nest. They climbed a rise and descended the other side into deeper, dimmer woods where trees grew close together. The stag led her to a narrow cleft in the forest floor. The cleft widened into a small valley. The descent was steep and banks rose on either side as she followed the stag. Bare banks showed layers on which the forest stood, layers of stone, of something that looked like bones — or was it antlers? — of earth, of matted roots and a damp layer on top of rotting leaves and wood. She’d never thought about the ground beneath her feet before. It was something she walked on and the forest was planted in — that was all. But here the earth opened before her eyes like a book. It lived and breathed and told an old, old story.
She stopped and reached out a hand, touching the exposed forest floor. Life of roots, grace of hidden water, musky scent of dark places, all spoke to her. Her flesh thrilled, as it had to the sound of the piping. What of her own structure of bone, blood and tissue? What of the smell of her own roots? She shuddered, uncomfortably aroused, and took her hand away, turning to follow the White Stag.
It led her to a hollowed-out place beneath a ledge of forest floor. A spring bubbled to itself, falling into a stone basin. She saw Artemis’s silver bow and a pile of skins. A young woman stood with her face turned up to the sky and her eyes closed. Her hair, the color of honey, swung in a thick long plait. She wore a plain linen robe and her face wore an expression of joy. She opened eyes the blue green of a shallow sea.
“It’s good to be under the sky again!” she said with such pleasure that Rose Red smiled in sympathy.
“I’m Persephone. Artemis is a friend of mine and now a friend of yours, I think?”
Rose Red didn’t know what to say. Artemis filled her with awe, certainly, awe tinged with reverence and not a little fear that she wouldn’t prove an adequate student.
Persephone laughed. “Well, no, probably friend isn’t the right word just now! She’s intimidating at first, don’t you think?”
Rose Red relaxed slightly. “Yes, she is. I’m afraid of letting her down,” she said candidly, giving voice to this fear for the first time.
“Oh, no,” said Persephone. “You won’t. You’re the right one—the only one—for the time and place. If you weren’t the right one, she wouldn’t show herself to you, and neither would he.” She bowed her head briefly in front of the White Stag in acknowledgment, then leaned forward and kissed him between the eyes.
The stag turned and made its way out of the sheltered hollow, moving out of sight along the valley floor. Persephone caught Rose Red’s hand.
“Artemis asked me if I’d meet and talk with you. She thought we might find things in common. Will you hear my story and then may I hear yours?”
They made themselves comfortable, piling up bracken to lean against and draping animal skins around their shoulders against the chill of the sunless day. Persephone talked of her girlhood, her mother and her journey to Hades while Rose Red listened in wonder. Persephone had brought food with her and they ate, and then Rose Red, for the first time, told her full story from beginning to end. Under Persephone’s gentle questioning, she allowed her feelings to surface, guilt and shame, anger, frustration, and the hollow knowledge that nothing could be fixed or changed, not herself, not the queen, not the king.
When she ran out of words she leaned against the cushion of bracken, feeling empty and peaceful. The two sat in silence for a time.
“Do you know who Artemis is?” asked Persephone at length.
“She watches over woods and wild places,” said Rose Red. “She protects the wilderness.”
“Yes. She also teaches us about autonomy and independence. She’s a doorkeeper between life and death, and in this role, she works with Hades and me. But here in the upper world she aids young women and men as they come into adulthood. Artemis initiates us into our own individual power.”
Rose Red looked away, uncomfortable. Unconsciously, she passed her hand over and over the grey wolf skin draped over her knees.
“I don’t feel powerful,” she said quietly. “I feel a failure. I feel ashamed I’m so happy to have left my parents and I can’t convince myself my mother’s unhappiness is not in some way my fault. I don’t know how I could’ve made things different, what other choices I could’ve made, yet I keep thinking there must have been a way.”
“How would you know if you’d done it right?” asked Persephone.
“Oh…” Tears thickened Rose Red’s voice. “If I’d done it right, they would have been happy. They would have loved me.”
“How do you know they don’t love you?”
“They don’t know who I am,” said Rose Red simply. “They don’t care who I am. My father only wanted me to make him look good and my mother wanted me to be her. She didn’t want me to be anything separate. I felt so…devoured!” Angry tears fell down her cheeks.
“Do you think your parents were happy before you were born?”
“No,” said Rose Red. “I don’t think they’ve ever been happy. But I think my mother thought I would make her life better — and I wanted to, but I didn’t. I can only be myself and that’s not who they needed me to be. The Dwarves helped me see that.”
“’Me! Not Me!’” said Persephone, smiling.
“Yes. Now I recognize what is me and what isn’t, but most of what is truly me seems to be…unlovable.”
“Yet the Dwarves love you, and Vasilisa and Jenny and Rumpelstiltskin.”
“Yes. They do. And Artemis seems to think I can do and be something important for the forest. I want so much to be something good in the world!” Her voice rose passionately.
Persephone wrapped her fingers around Rose Red’s wrist. “You already are!” she said with some force.
Rose Red quieted under Persephone’s grasp and took a deep breath.
“So,” said Persephone, “let me see if I understand. Two unhappy people came together in an unhappy marriage, had a child, and went on being unhappy — and it’s your fault?”
Rose Red smiled in spite of herself. “When you put it like that it sounds ridiculous. But yes, that’s how it seems.”
“Very well. And you believe each of your parents wanted something from you that you can’t give, and aren’t interested in what you are able to give, right?
“Right.”
“And your conclusion is you’re unlovable. You see your parents loving others?”
“No,” said Rose Red slowly. “I haven’t thought of it before but no, I don’t know if either of them loves anyone, or even themselves.”
“Including you.”
“Including me. But if they can’t love anyone, then being unable to love me isn’t about me at all!”
“It’s about their own limitations, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Rose Red in wonder, and she fell silent, turning this over in her mind.
“It’s not my fault,” she said slowly to herself.
Persephone smiled, loosened her grip around Rose Red’s wrist and slid her hand down to interlace their fingers.
“I’ve heard so many stories,” she said musingly. “Hundreds. Thousands. Each one is different because each person is different. But every single story is about relationship with others. The souls who’ve lived a full life, a healthy, vivid, engaged life, talk about what they learned. In order to find and open the kernel of learning they needed to let a lot go.”
“Like what?” asked Rose Red.
“Like blame and bitterness, anger, taking on the role of victim, being afraid to see clearly. What we do in Hades is part of an ancient piece of wisdom that’s everywhere at work in the world. It’s an essential but difficult aspect of balance. As you care for the earth, you’ll join us in keeping this wisdom.”
“And what is it?”
Persephone met Rose Red’s eyes directly. “Let die what must,” she said.
***
Rose Red, if she thought about it at all, assumed her training with Artemis would include caring directly for the forest and life within it. She expected to leave her sense of failure behind, to lose herself in a new life and forget the past.
The reality was quite different. In Persephone, she found a peer, another young woman who’d left home and parent to make a life for herself. They explored, not life, but death and decrease. They hunted fungi and excavated insects from rotting trees and mats of leaves. They identified sick trees, and hollow trees sheltering birds and animals.
“You’re like the forest,” Persephone told her. “Your feelings of anger and grief, the tension of being who you are instead of who you — and others — think you should be — all this makes up a whole person. Those parts of you are important. They’re part of your balance. What’s over, or not useful, will break down to feed the rest. New things will grow in you. Old things will weaken and die. Be a good guardian. Be an observer. Let it all happen. Hold space for the forest, and for yourself. Neither of you need interference.”
Persephone raised rabbits for meat and fur. “Hades and I built a big barn for other animals, and I wanted to try rabbits. I love working with them. They have more personality than you’d think. They feed us and we can trade with their fur as well as their meat.”
“Is it hard to see him kill them?” asked Rose Red, imagining it.
“Oh, Hades doesn’t kill them,” said Persephone, amused. “He hates blood and gore. I’m the one who harvests them.”
Rose Red was taken aback. “And you don’t…mind?” she asked cautiously.
“Killing is a hard thing to do. But our rabbits aren’t pets. We need them and I take their lives with gratitude and respect. Until the moment of death, they’re lovingly cared for, handled, fed and allowed plenty of room to run around and be a rabbit.”
“Let die what must?” asked Rose Red.
“That’s it. Their lives aren’t wasted.”
One day Persephone introduced Rose Red to an old woman shaped like a ball of dough. She beamed at Rose Red as though she were the one person in the world she most wanted to see. A few grey curls stirred on her scalp and her wide smile was nearly toothless. She radiated joy and humor.
“This is Baubo,” said Persephone. “She’s come to teach you how to dance.”
Rose Red tensed at once. She didn’t want to dance. Part of her education as a princess included learning formal dances. Being athletic and graceful, she’d mastered them, but she found the movements rigid and limited; the close proximity of a partner often distasteful; and the clothing involved extremely uncomfortable.
Persephone unwrapped her dumbek.
“The Cordax is an erotic dance sacred to Artemis,” she began.
“How is this caring for the forest?” Rose Red interrupted. “I’m not a dancer!”
“It has nothing to do with caring for the forest,” Persephone responded levelly. “It has to do with uncovering, shaping and taking responsibility for your own power. Think of love as a circle, and you a part of it. If your love only goes outward to the people around you, the circle has a gap in it. It can’t hold together. Only in loving yourself can you truly love the forest — or any other place or person. In dance, you’ll meet parts of yourself you meet nowhere else. Erotic dance acknowledges the totality of your female power to conceive, create, give birth and allow death. You know earth is a living being, made of blood and bone, life and death, endless cycle of transformation and renewal, just as you are. Passionate life must balance with inevitable death. Dance is a threshold into that awareness.”
“Everyone’s a dancer, my dear,” said Baubo. “Everyone has their own unique dance, waiting to be discovered.”
Rose Red shook her head wordlessly in rejection.
Persephone glanced at Baubo, who nodded. She put the drum aside and held out her hands to Rose Red.
“Come here,” she said.
Reluctantly, Rose Red gave Persephone her hands.
“You aren’t required to do this,” Persephone said to the younger woman. “Not unless you want to. But if you want to become a student of Artemis you must learn to dance. It’s a great pleasure and gift to be with yourself in this way. Why does it frighten you?”
“It’s not for me,” muttered Rose Red.
“It’s not for you,” repeated Persephone.
“This kind of dance is for girls with lovers, beautiful girls who want to attract a mate! I’m not that! I don’t know how to do that! I don’t want a lover! I only want to be left alone and quiet … and alone.” Her voice dropped.
Persephone cupped the other girl’s chin in her hand, forcing her head up to meet her gaze.
“Dance is an expression of self,” she said. “It’s a journey you take into yourself, like walking into deep woods alone at dawn with no path beneath your feet. It’s a private dance of personal power and love for yourself. Rose Red, it’s time for you to allow the love of your friends to teach you how to love yourself. The love of your friends is your dance floor. It supports you as you dance your way to self-love and true freedom. I can understand why you feel you only want to be left alone, but if you want to work with Artemis — and me — it’s too late for isolation. We’re here to help you enter into a life of your own — your own joy, your own strength, your own power. Do you want that?”
Rose Red met her gaze steadily, though tears slid down her face. “I want it,” she said. “I’m sorry,” she said to Baubo, so wretched about the impression she was making she missed the compassion in the old woman’s eyes.
Pull yourself together! she thought to herself sternly. Stop acting like such a coward! You’re going to ruin everything! She wiped her nose on her sleeve and rubbed tears off her cheeks, put on a smile, straightened her shoulders.
“I’m ready now,” she said.
To her relief, they taught her to play the drum first. She relaxed enough to make friends with it, and later to express the beat tentatively with her body while Baubo played. But when she watched Persephone demonstrate, her beauty and passion made Rose Red feel colorless and stiff. Silently, she despaired. She could never be so self-forgetful, so utterly at one with the drumbeat, so graceful and flowing, as Persephone. She was failing. Artemis, after all, had made a mistake choosing her.
For several days, they worked together, but neither Baubo’s earthy humor and affection nor Persephone’s encouragement could reach Rose Red in her miserable sense of failure.
(This post was published with this essay.)