Peregrina: the Road of Trials

The Fairy Tale Heroine's Journey 8

There are many different ways of looking at the Heroine’s Journey, and in this series I’m simply offering mine. As we progress now out of childhood and into adulthood, you might well see the structure of your journey as different from the way I’m offering it here, and that’s quite natural. I’m identifying different journey stages in an over-arching, very general way, and inevitably some parts will fit for you and some won’t. But even if the sequence we’re going to be following doesn’t directly reflect the structure of your life, there will still be some useful questions and ideas for you to think about, because they’re universal.

For the last seven weeks, we’ve worked through the first of the three stages that occur in any initiatory process, whether you break them down further into sub-stages or not. Those three stages are: separation, initiation, return. We’ve spent seven weeks thinking about separation, the point at which the Heroine answers the Call and walks away from her former everyday. As a prelude to thinking about the Call, we’ve delved quite deeply into the nature of that former everyday – our beginnings – looking especially at our early homes, our relationships with our parents and our places, the wounds we carry and also our gifts. These are some of the things that profoundly influence who we will become and the ways in which we will approach the rest of our journey. I’m incredibly grateful for the engagement here during that process, and the open and heartfelt sharing and support for each other.

Now it’s time to move on, and into the initiation phase of the journey. I’m going to split this into several stages, too. So we’re going to look at the temptations that we faced, and the ways in which we were tested. We’ll look at the allies and antagonists we encountered along the way, and what we learned from them. We’ll look at our strengths and weaknesses, and the ways in which we chose to embody the feminine – and the consequences. We’ll look at the mother archetype, and the ways in which we might have embodied it – whether or not we had children. We’ll look at ourselves in intimate relationships, and the archetypes we embody there too. We’ll talk about periods of descent, and the gods we have (knowingly or unknowingly) been serving. We’ll look at the cultural myths of selfhood and womanhood that have affected us, and the ways in which we refuse to, and then finally do, address the Shadow. And so much more, before finally we shift into the Return phase.

Image by Hannah Willow, for The Rooted Woman Oracle.

Peregrina

O mother of the sea
lend me a wave that is strong and true
to carry me from this Age which unbinds me.

I do not need a ship, mother,
but make it a buoyant swell
to bear me up and float me on the sea’s dreaming
then beach me on some lighter shore.

When I land there, mother, give me warp and weft again,
and an urchin quill to remind me
how the prettiest barb can lodge under your skin
and leave you undone.

Only lend me a loom and I will
take up the threads of this unravelled life.
I will weave a braid from three strands of seaweed
I will wind it three times around my finger
I will dig my salt-encrusted hands into the soil
and wed myself to the thirsty
brown roots of a new beginning.

Sharon Blackie