Welcome to A Wild Green Heart. It's always so wonderful to have folk reading these words - thank you for your presence here.
This piece focuses on my recent encounter with an old story - a Norwegian fairy tale called Valemon the Bear King. If you haven't heard it before, I would strongly encourage you to take a little time to listen to it. You couldn't do much better than this fabulous version from myth-teller Martin Shaw, curated as three short videos (about 12 mins in total) by Emergence Magazine.
If you've clicked the link, heard it before, or feel you want to carry on regardless (all are welcome options!) here's my curious recounting of a night out into story and the rodent teeth that picked it up the morning after…
And I want to be super clear that this was an excellent telling of the story, in a space that was superbly held. Sometimes, though, I get extra curious and want to dig around in the cracks and crevices, and this writing is all about that!
Picture of the third daughter holding the golden wreath and riding Valemon, given out at the storytelling event. I can't find the artist to credit, much to my frustration
A Storytelling Expedition
I travelled to the otherworld in a light coat. In the right-hand pocket was a hat, anticipating the journey home, the chill of the autumnal night air. In the left, three rats teeth, taken from a skull I found in a magical place.
Since they took up residence in my pocket, I have never been able to bring myself to remove them. They seem symbolic, though I cannot say of what. At the most basic level, they are so small that I forget their presence, until those moments my fingers make contact with them unexpectedly. Each time this happens, I feel a gentle upwelling of reassurance to find them there. When I rediscover them like this, I cannot help but gather them together, still hidden in the dark well of my pocket, rubbing them between thumb and forefinger. This is exactly what I found myself doing as I made my journey. They are delightfully tactile, smooth yet sharp. Somehow ageless.
I arrived at my destination, a hidden upper room, dimly lit, crammed with treasures and curios. Each of us sat in one of the mismatched assembly of old yet comfortable chairs, arranged around the teller in a circle; awaiting the story.
Before it began, he handed each of us a silver coin. These were pleasing to hold, heavily embossed on one face with a Greek cross, not quite round. But all identical, artificially old. As we held them, we were encouraged to place in them our day, our troubles, our worries, before putting them into a small wooden chest for safekeeping. The teller locked the chest and nestled it next to his feet. A small ritual, designed to help us immerse in the story, after which we sat back in our seats to listen.
“Once there was a king and a queen, who had three daughters…”
Storyteller’s chair and locked chest
Eventually the story was over. The last notes of the accompanying music subsided, and the gentle conversation in response to the tale burned down to embers. Quietly, we parted ways. Each member of the circle opted to leave their coin in the box, following the suggestion of the teller.
As I left the cosy building, cold and rain had me reaching for my hat right away. My body's fatigue, and the lateness of the hour meant I spent the journey cocooned in the tram, warmed by ale, listening to music, keen for the comforts of home.
Next morning, I reflected on the previous night, considering the story again. I had enjoyed myself, certainly; enthralled by the unusual room, buoyed by the company, heartened to be with a myth. I had noticed its patterns, savoured its wholeness, shed some tears at the end.
But my heart - accustomed to stories leaving their mark - was strangely unmoved. My body - familiar with the tendency of myths to become a formidable opponent - did not carry the ache of the wrestled. I pondered why this might be.
Only then did the elements align. The ritual of the coins, I realised, had, for me, produced a counterintuitive effect. For this observance had worked to insulate the very real difficulties of life from the exact medicine that might best have enabled their navigation: the potent magic of story.
Thus the tale - ancient and true, masterfully told - had landed in my mind, but did not proceed to my body. It could not locate the adverse elements it might otherwise alchemise.
Then I heard a low murmuring from the hall.
It was the teeth. Calling to me with curved, incisive words from their soft and shadowy cave. Compelled, I rose from my chair to retrieve them from my coat pocket, placing them on the printed image from the myth, given to us at the telling.
I found myself drifting between worlds. For though I had placed my troubled thoughts with the silver coin, still safely stored in the chest, I realised I had also entrusted them elsewhere. In three rats teeth, rubbed like charms by my worrying fingers on my outward journey.
Three rats teeth that had remained in my pocket throughout the tale. Listening. Absorbing. Then, accompanying me home, back to my day to day life. Making their way into my troubles.
The deep magic of story will always find its way a little deeper, to those who are hungry for its transformative power.
"Once there was a king and a queen, who had three daughters..."
The astute among you will notice that these are rabbit molars. And even if you didn't notice, I've given the game away now. Rats teeth just sound cooler, no?
My deeper ponderings then took me in various directions. First, I obsessed over all of the threes that show up in the story and the things of which there are only one:
Three princesses.
Three daughters of Valemon and the young princess.
Three cottages, three young girls, three old women.
Three magic gifts - each of which is used three times in the story.
Three clandestine visits to her king, in return for the three magic gifts.
Three carpenters in the next room, coming to help the lovers.
And, of course:
Three rodent's teeth.
One golden wreath.
One bear king.
One hag troll queen.
One curse, with one month of its power left when it is enacted.
One candle and one drop of tallow.
One sheer glass mountain, one dwelling at the foot of it, and one blacksmith to fashion claws.
One wooden bridge, one trapdoor.
One True Wedding celebration.
And, of course:
One silver coin.
I also wrote a poem to help process what I was exploring, (that's coming later) and I read some of Michael Meade’s excellent book, “Fate and Destiny - the Two Agreements of the Soul”- these two activities weaving in and out of one another.
My hunch was that the wreath in the story - for the understanding I needed at least - was something to do with the human soul. But I wanted some deeper insights into this.
Here's Meade:
Soul is the essential intermediary and subtle go-between that connects unlike things. It holds the physical in touch with the divine and keeps the immediate contemporary with the eternal. Soul is the connecting principle of life, the 'both-and' factor, the unifying third between any opposing forces. As natural intermediary and go-between, the soul is the magical third; it is the narrative force that keeps the story going; it knows how things are secretly connected and that the third time is a charm.
“Fate and Destiny” pp128-9
I was intrigued by the naming of the soul as both a singularity and a three in this passage. I'm very much an ardent believer in the principle of “both/and” in all of life: the unifying of polarities, and the search for a mysterious “third way” in any dilemma. I was in the right place.
Here's more from the same chapter, exploring why souls are drawn to incarnate:
In imagining cosmological origins and cosmic connections of the soul, Siberian tribes describe a central, mystical tree of life with roots that descend deep into the underworld and great branches that stretch across the upper regions of the heavens. This mythic tree forms the unseen axis that connects heaven and earth. Human souls were said to rest upon this origin tree, perching upon its sky branches before descending to the earth to be born.
As yet-unborn souls wait in silence, watching like birds until something in the world below intrigues them enough to cause a sudden descent. Pulled by a certain image down to the earthly realm, the bird-soul seeks to become incarnate and enters a womb where human life is about to be born.
“Fate and Destiny” p132
Here was the passage that something in me had been seeking. This notion that it is an image or symbol of some kind that attracts the soul to enter an incarnate life on earth.
Connecting back to the story, my sense was that the golden wreath is this image glimpsed by the soul - the compulsion that the girl's soul was drawn by. And in the story she beholds this once again, in life, and finds it to be in the possession of the great white bear in the forest. This is why she must have it. This is why she has no hesitation in paying the price that Valemon asks for it: “come and live with me in my tower.” In other words, it will cost you your whole life.
For me, this echoes words from the sacred text that I am most familiar with. Here's Yeshua speaking:
“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a merchant on the lookout for choice pearls. When he discovered a pearl of great value, he sold everything he owned and bought it!”
Matthew 13 verse 46
And again, here:
“If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?”
Mark 8 verses 35-36
I believe these words are pointing to the very same thing that the Siberian myth is telling us - namely that our soul has brought us into this life for a very specific purpose, and we must follow it faithfully! Surely our lives only begin to take on the deeper sense of meaning we so desire once we begin to follow the mysterious but persistent voice of the soul’s longings?
An image I named “Follow Your Soul or Be Dragged” in my DIY oracle deck
In “Fate and Destiny”, Meade goes on, drawing on a West African myth, to explain how the soul meets spirit, its “divine twin”, which “clarifies the image that first moved the soul and describes the terms through which this particular life adventure will be shaped.”
“At this point, the soul has not yet been born, but has agreed to live a certain kind of life once it arrives on earth. It has made its original agreement for coming to life and its first deal with the world. This first agreement becomes a kind of divine contract that binds each soul to a core imagination before it can enter the body and begin to live on earth. This… keeps each soul secretly connected to the eternal realm throughout its life on earth.”
“Fate and Destiny” p133
However, there's more to come before the embodied soul is born, standing at the crossroads between the eternal and the earthbound. It once again encounters the Tree of Life it previously rested in, but from its other side - here becoming the Tree of Forgetfulness:
“Entering the common world means leaving the divine realm behind and forgetting the very thing that first moved it towards life as well as the original agreement just made with the divine twin. There is a central image and primary orientation towards life, but it has been forgotten in order that life on earth might begin. The rest of life will be a drama through which the soul attempts to remember why it came to life and what it agreed to do with its allotment of time on earth.”
“Fate and Destiny” p134
After birth, Meade says, “the divine realm becomes a deep memory; something that seems left behind, but also remains buried deep within us.” He describes how the most genuinely human moments are those “in which the soul awakens to its original dream of life.” Moments where “time breaks apart and eternity seems near.”
Such a moment occurs in the story of Valemon, when the young princess beholds the golden wreath - a mirror of the original image seen by the soul from the Tree of Life. But we would do well to note that, once she has accompanied Valemon to his forest tower, the wreath no longer features in the tale. The wreath, compelling as it is, is not the goal - merely the means to help the princess move from the predicable safety of her parents’ castle, out into the wilds of the forest. The ultimate goal - which she achieves in limited fashion, then loses, then pursues and achieves in fulness - is union with her king, Valemon. The wreath and her desire for it is what brings them together.
This union can be understood and considered in many ways. But few would argue that, at its heart, it is about love. Love for self, love for other, love for the aliveness of life, fully lived - for the world we dwell in.
Perhaps, to bring us to a close, I will state the reminder that, in spite of its necessary forgetting, the soul remains connected to the eternal realm. In dark times such as these, we each urgently need to be as connected to our soul, and what it carries for the world. One of my favourite poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, finishes his poem “Just as the Winged Energy of Delight” with the line:
Because inside human beings
is where God learns.
A beautiful, necessary reminder that the divine is seeking to become manifest in the world through us, and that, when that happens not only are we changed, “but something in the world begins to change.”1
I feel there is much more to explore here, and indeed I’m sure I shall continue my musings and diggings around this story, and what it means to me, for a while yet. But for today, I feel that's plenty.
So I'll bring this post to a close with the poem I penned while under the thrall of those three, small rodent tooth charms in my pocket. It deals with deep and complex themes, which somehow seemed to call for a simplicity of form and words in retelling Valemon from a soulish perspective. Here it is:
The Pearl of Great Price
One soul that dwells in each of us,
beyond all human harm.
Three elements to mythic tales:
soul knows that three's a charm.
One image from before our life,
a golden wreath to seek,
a treasure that we'll gladly pay
our life to find and keep.
The image leads us to our king,
to purpose and to love;
the curse will steal this king from us
and hide him high above.
The work of love produces gifts
and these will help our quest -
to overcome the curse's hold
and pass through every test.
The inner union that we seek
is won through many things:
the gifts we give, the love we share,
the song our soul still sings.
We cannot keep our lives away
from suffering, longing, grief:
we must not lock ourselves away
to try and foil the Thief!
Allow the magic of the myths
to wrestle with your sorrows,
and by the road of grit and soul,
create your best tomorrows.
Thanks for reading. As always, I'm massively curious to hear your thoughts and reflections on any of this in the comments.
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