Saxyn Dance Works

“A study of water is a study of woman.”
–Thryn Saxon

When an old story enters your life, sit up and listen. Trust that the myth comes to fetch you at precisely the right time. Remember that “right” is not always “convenient.” Perhaps you imagined a tidy life for yourself; perhaps the industrious Swiss clock of your mind had other plans. But suddenly there it is, gracing your threshold: the Story.

Behold a story blossoming for its own sake, and yours. You attempt to decipher its mysteries in the offerings of kelp and keening that it lays at your feet. For this is a very particular story inscribing your name in its flesh. The selkies do not reveal themselves for a lark. O no: the story itself is one of longing, of heeding the call of the high seas. Plaintive and inevitable, it begins
with a sense of unbelonging and of restless tides.

Yet you come to find that even the unbelonging has its rightful place inside this tale. The story enfolds you in its deep pleats and you don it like a new skin. So enfolded, you find you can bear the swell of how the story might unfold. In answering the call of this story, you say yes to getting tossed about, you say yes to discovering your shape, you say yes to seeing how you wear myth once you writhe about in its pelt.

Pry open this story and slip inside. Make your new skin crawl. Take a brazen sip of your destiny.

A word of caution: this story will not be comfortable. It honors you but will not accommodate you. Here at the beginning, the life that once seemed so glorious and full of promise has disappeared beyond the rocks. Now you are asked to inhabit another reality, and growing into it feels uncomfortable. But surely, if you can change shape, such literal metamorphosis helps you expand; exposes some essential part of you that needs air. Trust that everything—literally everything—is inspiration in the grand invagination of your transformation. This story is quaking with miracles.

A word of advice: occasionally men will appear, bobbing on the surface of this story. Pay them no heed. Do not center the men; it was never about the men. Sure, they captured your skin to try to understand what made you gleam, what made you wild, what made you free. But this story is not concerned with any men who may have been smuggled into it. You may relegate men to the
footnotes of this tale, swiftly and playfully.

The biggest myth is believing that a man can set you free; believing that by exchanging one element for another, one habitat for another, you might finally feel at home within yourself. Submit neither to the stifling domesticity of the shore nor the unruly tempest of the sea. As you rise to meet this story, you’ll find that where you belong is dancing naked with your sisters beneath a ripe, swollen moon; your skins peppering the ground like shadows.

An entreaty: Please, O please, seek the company of women. This story has scoured the farthest reaches of the earth and can assure you: nothing is safer, more grounded, more rapturous. Feel the women at your back. Feel their calm unity, their single collective breath. Feel their steady gaze sliding though, over, and beyond you. Allow yourself to get swept along in their current.

A stage direction: The orchestra swells; the story plunges onward. The selkies breathe as one. They are listening, listening. They appraise the horizon with round, dark, curious eyes. Storm eyes. They’re impartial, courteous; a speckled choir. See how they revel in the plodding, pleasant
blubber forbidden to human women. See their courage in surrendering everything to become Neither or Both. O glossy power, liquid motion, sleek fluency of the fathomless deep! The selkies are alert; sensing each other. They lay their skins upon the rocks—which is to say, upon
the altar of the story—and therein court possibility.

A note on ancestry: This story may sound the depths of you; it is familiar. Every so often, your mother—that first watery vessel—gathers up her hide and sets out for a secret place within herself. And you are glad, so glad, that you cannot go with her, even as it smarts. For each woman deserves a terrain unto herself, a vast tumult in which she can hurl herself repeatedly and
with abandon. You do not wish to know her terrain, just as you do not wish to share yours.
Together you bask in the Unknown, in mystery without duplicity. You are content to stare at the moon, side-by-side.

A prayer to seal the story:
May you dance with danger in order to be wild.
May you strip your skin in order to be wild.
May you be Otherwise and Mother-wise to learn what is underneath.
May you approach the well of mystery alongside your kin.
May you let the temple burn and trust yourself to remember.
May you seek answers against the worn rocks.
May you honor the fallen pelts.
May you worship the moonlight.
May you kiss the tides each dawn.

Nothing is holier than that feminine shade of grey refusing to give up her secrets; a grey containing the coming storm.

Fling your answer to the world.
Let your story skin you alive.