Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Sedna and the Necessity of Feminine Rage

Dear Readers,

Apologies for being late with this letter. Sometimes the stew needs a little more time to cook in order to be edible. I don't want to feed you raw meat so I took a couple of more days to let my emotions settle and the synchronicities to unfold so I could give you a meal that would really stick to your bones.

Here we go:

I have always seen the world through a mythological lens, even before I knew what mythology was. I was lucky to have parents that read to me and encouraged my imagination. I was surrounded by fairy tales that made the Connecticut woods surrounding our house a magical place filled with wonder. I’m not sure when my conscious journey with mythology began, but it really amped up around 2001, after September 11th when I met my first spiritual teacher Maria DeMarco and began to see the world through a multidimensional lens.

One of the tools to this way of seeing was astrology, the symbolic language of the stars that is actually rooted in astronomy. When we look up at the stars we are seeing patterns of energy formed through physical bodies that affect us here on Earth the same way a wind tunnel forms between two buildings. This language was translated by our ancestors into the language they used to speak back to the non-human world-myth and story.

Stories are real as facts, folks.

Here’s an astronomical discovery to back this up. In 2003, astronomer Michael Brown discovered a dwarf planet in the outer reaches of our solar system he named Sedna.

Here are his words on why he chose this name:

“Our newly discovered object is the coldest, most distant place in the Solar System, so we feel it is appropriate to name it in honor of Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea, who is thought to live at the bottom of the frigid Arctic Ocean.”

Once Brown had named the new planet, astrologers were able to step in to examine its effects us on historically and guess what they found? Sedna transits corresponded with the Inuit stories of this primal goddess, a goddess of rage and the deep shadows at the ocean’s bottom. Coincidence or synchronicity? It all depends on how you choose to see the world. Do you want life to be without meaning or do you want to live knowing you are supported by everything in existence?

Back to the astrologers. Once they knew of the planet and had determined its physical coordinates they were able to track it in relationship to other planets and stars and see how its path through the skies had affected us through history. The details backed the Inuit story up. Sedna transits were marked by times of rage, bitterness, and vengeance here on Earth. They were also able to make predictions based on the information about current or future transits.

Right now as I write Sedna is currently in the innermost part of her orbit around the sun. Friends, she is close. Rage. Bitterness. Vengeance. Can you taste them? Will you digest and compost or spit them out?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, the story. My version written from the perspective of the girl I was who lived this story through the events of a normal, every day life in the last days of the United States Empire. Maybe you have, too. If not, remember that Sedna is what astrologers deem a transpersonal planet. You may not directly relate to her, but her power is beyond the individual. She affects us all.

Sedna

I was born on the spring ice. First thing I heard: moaning and cracking, and the churning white paws of a great bear swimming across open water. As I slid into this world onto a blood-soaked sealskin, my mother slipped out of it. Nobody mentions that part of the story. As far as anyone knows I appeared as a fully formed rebellious teenager giving my father shit by refusing to marry the “suitors” he started foisting on me as soon as I started to bleed.

Maybe it would have been different if I’d had a mother. Who knows? I guess there’s no point in having regrets, but I do. I wish my father hadn’t said he was going to force me to marry the latest moon-eyed slobbering hunter who appeared at our igloo. I wish I hadn’t run away and “married” the village scum, Dog-Boy, in an attempt to punish my Dad. Things could have been way different. But they aren’t, so I just have to deal with it. We all do. Living in the Arctic helps. Surrounded by the frozen.

Dog-Boy was not frozen. He was hot as the steaming piles of shit he left all over the village. I’d been eyeing him since I was a little girl, curious about this boy who had the opposite story as me, a mother but no father. Nobody knew who his father was. His mother wouldn’t tell. Most likely he was a wandering hunter, but because she wouldn’t tell we made up stories, in the way villagers do, dooming the poor little boy who’s name we didn’t even bother to know. “Slut,” we said of his mother. “She was hungry for it. Nobody would marry her. She fucked one of the sled dogs, you know. That boy’s father was a dog. That’s why he shits wherever he wants.”

Dog-Boy did not know he was shitting where he wasn’t supposed to, so it was easy to conclude he was procreated by a dog, although the dogs were cleaner. He probably could have learned to control himself, but his mother, after giving birth to him in such disgrace, slipped into another world, though still in the same body that had given birth to him. She barely fed or washed herself, let alone her son, and would not have survived if her mother hadn’t taken pity on her and left whale meat at the opening of her igloo.

There was not enough meat for the both, and Dog-Boy’s mother, crazed and ashamed, did not share it. He was left to fend for himself, and since none of the villagers would take him in, he learned from the dogs, who eventually, in the way of the pack, began to share bone scraps with him. He was one of them. He even slept curled up nose to tail, huddling for warmth. Everyone thought he was crazy, but I came to know he actually believed he was a dog and didn’t understand his shitting wherever he wanted was a problem.

He also had the instincts of a dog to hump and rut. When puberty hit this became a problem. You can imagine. Irate fathers and outraged mothers decided they were going to have to kill him once he started accosting their daughters. He was so horny and without self-judgment he even humped some old granny’s legs and once knocked down a bow-legged hunter and mounted him before some women who heard his cries dragged him off. You couldn’t really get much lower.

I could. And that’s what I did when my father insisted I marry his chosen young hunter from across the ice. I stormed out of the igloo and ran straight to the dog pack on the edge of the village. “Dog-Boy!” I yelled. “Marry me!” Dog-Boy had no idea what marriage was, but he did know how to fuck, which is exactly what we did, ruining my reputation and my marriage prospects in one thrust.

It did not last long, though at the time it felt like it went on forever. My virgin blood stained my sealskin pants.  The smell of it crusted on my legs did not repulse the Dog-Boy, it aroused him further. Pretty soon I was sleeping in the middle of the dog pack with him and growling when he mounted me. Pretty soon I was enjoying the neck nips and the way his tongue slobbered all over me. Pretty soon I was growling and nipping and slobbering myself, even turning over on my back sometimes when he fucked me, which shocked us both when our eyes met and we remembered for a few moments we were humans, not dogs. His shock shifted to wonder and I think he would have stayed like that looking deep into me, but I flipped over and thrust my ass toward his eyes and the dog rose up in him again, dominating, and our chance to regain our humanity melted away like spring ice.

As long as I could forget being human, it wasn’t bad being a dog. I slept in the pack so I was never cold and Dog-Boy started stealing the whale meat left out for his nearly comatose mother. Once my father stood outside his igloo and called me.“Sedna!” he yelled with such anguish I almost ran back home to him with my head between my tail, but I resisted. I was ruined now. No one would ever marry me. My only choice if I went back would be to live the rest of my life as his servant. I’d rather die fucking and the smell of shit no longer bothered me.

And that would have been my history if one of the other dogs hadn’t taken an interest in me. I’d slept so long with the pack I no longer smelled like a human. Poor Dog-Boy, my lusty, devoted husband had no chance against the blue-eyed alpha who ripped his throat out before he could mount a defense. I know he would have, and I’ve always remembered that look between us when I flipped on my back with my spread legs and faced him. I wasn’t ready yet to fuck an actual dog, so when the alpha came for me I fled. I glanced over my shoulder once and saw him tearing into my mate. I should have been sad, but I couldn’t really feel anything any more, not since I’d heard my father call my name into the dark night. No more pain. I understood why Dog-Boy’s mother never left her igloo, even if I didn’t know the details of her story.

The villagers all wondered what had happened to Dog-Boy, but I didn’t tell them. For three days I walked past the pack and watched them gnawing his bones, and then they were gone. I no longer smelled like a dog because my father had taken me back. He’d rubbed me down with snow, not saying a word about the dried blood between my legs. For a time there was peace between us, but eventually he started up with his plans to marry me off. At the time I thought it was his pride, but I think he may just have wanted grandchildren. A part of me wishes I could have given him what he wanted, but I wasn’t born to fulfill his life.

Of course, defiled as I was, no one in the village would marry me. My father had been pretending nothing had happened. His talk was all of how one day I would marry a great hunter and have my own igloo and he would come visit me on his sled and play with his grandchildren. I was not ashamed of what I’d done with Dog-Boy, but I didn’t have the heart to disillusion my Dad. Let him believe what he needed. When I looked at him in the light coming down through the smoke hole I saw more gray hairs on his head every day. Sometimes his voice shook, and once his hand slipped when he was scaling fish and almost sliced off his index finger. He was not pointing it at me. His rage was spent. I was too sad to blame. So I said yes when the strange, cloaked hunter came to our igloo and asked to marry me. My father was overjoyed and even planned a wedding feast. I was not sure who would come since I was the village disgrace, but I went along with his plans. Maybe my father would be so deluded with delight he wouldn’t notice no one had joined us for toasts and whale meat.

And that’s what happened, only with a twist even I hadn’t seen coming. Did I ask my husband to reveal his face under that cloak? No. I never wanted to meet a man’s eyes again. He could have my body, this cloaked man, but not my heart. That would remain frozen, not even thawing in spring when the polar bears swam across the sea. We were married. No one came to the feast, but as I predicted and much to my relief, my father didn’t notice. He gorged himself on whale meat and the three of us passed out by the fire.

My new husband didn’t touch me. He must want to wait until we’re alone, I thought to myself, though nobody in the village ever had much privacy. Having to live in igloos to survive, we generally humped in full view and sound of each other, though under furs and sealskins. Nobody took it out in the open like Dog-Boy and me. The last thing I remember is the sound of my father snoring and a greasy finger parting my lips and pouring a liquid that tasted like dark berries and caribou dung onto my tongue. I gagged and tried to spit it out, but the finger became two hands that clamped my jaws shut. I swallowed and then I was gone, descended into blank space.

I expected to wake up wrapped in furs. Instead I found myself in my tattered, stinking seal skins in a giant nest built in a crag on a thousand foot cliff above the sea. My husband was perched on the rim, and when I saw him I understood why he’d never removed his cloak. He was a giant, greasy, squawking fulmar with a vicious, terrifying beak. “Not what you expected, eh wife?” he laughed.

“How did I get here?” I cried out in horror, scrambling to the far side of the nest until my back was against the cliff wall. A thousand feet of rock above me, another thousand below to the sea. There was no way out of here except for growing wings or leaping. Looking down, I knew I would never survive the leap. “You flew,” my new husband informed me. I checked my back. Had I spouted wings? Was I going to be able to flee this nightmare? He laughed and dashed my hopes with his next words, “I gave you a sleeping potion on our wedding night and grabbed you by the back of the neck with my beak. You can try to escape, but you know where that leads.” Far below I could hear the waves crashing on the rocks. “Please, take me back to my father!” I pleaded. “Never, my dear. I’ve been waiting a long time for a wife. Believe it or not, nobody would have me. I finally found someone desperate enough to give his daughter away.”

“Did my father know?” I asked in horror. Was this his punishment for my refusal to obey and for defiling our family name? How could he do this to me? He wouldn’t even get grandchildren out of me because unless a miracle occurred I couldn’t lay eggs, even if the fulmar and I did manage to mate. “Why, Father!” I sobbed to the sky.

“Save your voice, he can’t hear you,” my new husband scolded me. “Nobody likes a shrill woman. Not even a fulmar. And yes, of course your father knew, though we didn’t talk about it. Who else would take a daughter who had defiled herself with a shit-smeared dog?”

“He wasn’t smeared in shit!” I protested. “He just acted like a dog because nobody loved him. Except for me!” And with that I burst into inconsolable tears, thawing tears that burst my dammed heart and reached my father’s. “Sedna! I’m coming!” I heard in my mind from far, far away. Too far.

I settled into my corner of the nest and pretended to submit to the monster I’d married. He left me alone for most of the day, soaring over the waves to hunt, returning with raw fish he fed me with his beak. I had to open my mouth and let him stuff it down my gullet. I gagged, but got it down. I had to keep up my strength. My father was coming for me. It was bitterly cold in the nest. My husband was warm in his water-proof feathers, but I had nothing to cover me. If my father didn’t come soon I would freeze to death. “I can keep you warm,” he cackled, lifting his wing and nodding me to come over.

“I’d rather die!” I spat. He was not offended, on the contrary. It gave him more opportunity to mock me. His sheen waxed the more desperately I pleaded, and I did plead. I had no pride left and would have gladly married a normal village man if one would have still taken me.

“I can’t give you children,” I reasoned with the fulmar.

“I don’t care. I’d push them out of the nest anyway.”

“I’ll never love you.”

“Hate me please. It only makes me soar.”

“I fucked a Dog-Boy for 1,001 nights.”

“I’m a porn freak. You’re making me horny.”

“That’s bestiality.”

“My fetish exactly. Are you into BDSM? You’re giving me a boner.”

“I’ll cut off your dick like Loreena Bobbitt!”

“Ha ha ha ha ha!” he howled. “I don’t have one. But if you want to scrape your knife along my cloaca I’m into kink!”

At that I gave up, hunching into myself like a dying polar bear. Maybe my father was coming. Even if he was, I didn’t think I’d make it.

He came at dawn in his kayak, crossing the dark water as my husband flew off to hunt. My relief when I looked down out of the nest and heard his voice booming up at me—I can’t even find the words for it. My father had come. He loved me after all. My broken heart strained from holding in years of tears, exploded in sobs of grief and relief that rained down on my father’s kayak. “Sedna! I’m here! Stop crying!” He shouted up. I gasped for breath, trying to calm myself. He loved me. “Listen,” he shouted. “I can’t climb up there to get you. The rock face is too sheer. You’re going to have to leap.”

The gravity of this reached me through my tears and I looked down at him as my eyes cleared. There was a thousand feet between us. If I missed the kayak where my father would catch me, I’d drown or be smashed to bits on the rocks. How could I do this? I didn’t have the courage. Then I thought of my fulmar husband’s greasy stink, and of how his depraved thoughts had already wormed their way into me and further tarnished my already bitter heart. Without hesitation I stood up and stepped off the nest rim, arms out like wings.

Maybe I had invisible wings. Maybe my unknown mother’s spirit was watching over me. Maybe it was Dog-Boy’s ghost breaking my fall by the ankles with his teeth. Somehow I made it safely into my father’s uplifted arms without knocking him out of the kayak, sending us both to sure death in the Arctic. Wrapping a fur around my emaciated bones and tucking me between his legs, my father turned the kayak and headed back across the ocean toward the village on the ice I’d once hated, but could now not get back to fast enough. Homeward bound. My blood sang.

My father did his best. He was a strong paddler, but the waves were against him. He had spent years getting to know their ways, but my Fulmar husband belonged to them, winging over the crests and into the peaks day and night. When my husband discovered his plaything had escaped he summoned a storm, and the wind and waves obliged him, batting our kayak about like two battling walruses. “Sedna, you filthy whore! Dog fucker! I own you! There’s no escape!” he shrieked into the wind. His great wings beat the air like a gong, rippling and distorting our vision. The air churned as much as the water. We couldn’t tell up from down. “Father!” I screamed, turning back to reach for him so that he’d know I loved him too, as the kayak overturned and sank.

I’ll never forget the look in his eyes. It pierced through my furs and froze and burned simultaneously, until I was nothing but a loosely bound bundle of bones tied together by cartilage that rattled in the wind when he lifted me over his head and threw me into the waves. “Take her!” my father screamed to my husband, who shrieked in triumph as he finally caught up with us, plunging toward me to peck out my eyes. “You’ll pay, Sedna,” he screamed. “You’ll pay!”

My father had thrown me over. He wanted to live more than he wanted to love me. I wanted to die now so he would get what he wanted. I would make it easy. I would not be the Fulmar’s wife. I don’t know if it’s because I was wearing a sealskin, but when I let go and tried to slip below the water, it wouldn’t take me. I kept bobbing up while the Fulmar circled above trying to grab onto my hood so he could lift me above the waves. I don’t know why my arms shot out of the water and grabbed onto the gunwale of my father’s kayak, or why the word propelled itself out of me, “FATHER!” I yelled into the wind through a mouthful of seawater.

What did my father see looking down at his daughter’s hands clinging to the gunwale in the worst storm he’d ever seen? Did he see a filthy whore who’d disobeyed him and fucked like a dog in full view of the village, shaming him forever? Did he see his wife’s blood on snow and sealskin as I slipped from between her legs as she died in a hot gush that branded me forever with the weight of blame?

I never learned, and I never saw him again. I still don’t think I could find the words to ask him, even though a thousand years and more have passed. I still have a hard time describing how he looked at me, not away, so his aim would be sure. How he raised his paddle above his head and clubbed my frozen fingers clinging to life, despite wanting to die.

I didn’t die. I shattered like a baby seal’s skull.

Shattered, I let go for the second time that day, first the leap, and now this-sinking. Down, down, down I traveled. At first I didn’t realize I had no fingers, but when I looked around me and saw eels and dolphins and narwhals and every manner of fish you can imagine, the ghost pain reached out of the abyss and pierced me. I looked toward the pain, ready to face it. There was nothing there.

My hands were gone. My fingers. My frozen fingers had snapped right off when my father’s club had struck them. Down I looked, even further, hoping I’d catch a glimpse of them as they sank to the bottom, a memory so I’d have something to grieve. My hands that could skin a seal, peel blubber off bone, paddle a kayak, pet a dog, stroke the skin of a dog-boy under furs when he slept and his fury was calmed. Gone. I howled.

Bu somehow instead of sinking to the bottom and being eaten by crabs my fingers were turning into sea creatures-and somehow I was not drowning and could breathe underwater. Sinking, sinking, sinking-until I reached the bottom where I’ve lived ever since, in a world beneath the sea floor. 

Here I live without fingers. Somehow I survive on bitterness only. I’m not sure why. My hair is a tangled nest, rank as my husband’s home. Every now and then when the people who live on the ice are close to starving they send someone down to comb it. I know they don’t really care about me, but it feels so good I forget for awhile what my father did to me, and I open the gate at the back of my hut where a finned multitude dwells and out they all pour again: the squid and octopi, swordfish, marlin, herring, mullet, cod, belugas, humpbacks, shrimp, sea lice, seals and walrus. They won’t know hunger for a long time, those people on the ice. Somehow I live. Someone must feed the people.

Conclusion

I think most of you readers understand by now why I’ve chosen to share this story now, but in case you haven’t I’ll spell it out. The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade is a call to the rage of the maimed and wounded Divine Feminine.

I’m never one to encourage reducing the primal images of a story into the personal and political, but in this case the planet Sedna, orbiting so close, is inviting us to look at the story through a transpersonal lens. Her story-ours taking place right now-cannot be forgotten, denied, or pushed down any longer.

Lonely, motherless Sedna (disconnected from the wild feminine) follows her instincts and finds connection and fulfillment with Dog-Boy. Her father and the village completely reject her, but she is willing to live without them. Eventually, the animals reject her, too. When another dog kills her lover Dog-Boy she must return to her father to survive. For centuries, this has been the choice for so many women in the patriarchy. Rebellion means death, sometimes literal like in the witch burnings of Renaissance Europe or the many current victims of domestic abuse, but it’s also a death of the spirit that has maimed the hands of human beings of all genders. The world we create has been shaped by wounded hands.

We should rage at that. We need rage. The overturning of Roe v. Wade is a call. Republican legislators and fundamentalist Christians are not just trying to control women’s bodies, they are trying to keep the power of the feminine principle down. I’d go so far as to say they want to eradicate it from Earth. Up until now, they’ve been doing a pretty good job giving us, who as gendered females are a literalization of the feminine, just enough rights to make us feel secure that we have some control of our bodies so we don’t rise up, but that’s over. The gloves are off.

Will we retaliate and chop off their tender, white, exposed fingers the way they did to us?

It would be tempting, but we should resist. If we can, we should thank them. You may not like the sound of that, but it’s true.

Rage is not healthy compost. Food grown in rage will only sustain us for so long. Eventually it will consume us like cancer.

All this time since the beginning of time, Sedna has been at the bottom of the ocean allowing her rage to be transformed into food for the people.

Are you tired of eating rage? I am. I want Sedna to let go of her rage, to stop withholding. (In some stories we hear how she’d withhold food from humans until they send someone down to the bottom of the ocean to comb and braid the tangled wrack of her hair.)

Let it rip, Sedna. Swim back up the surface and launch yourself back onto the ice. Your mother’s birth blood is frozen there, layers down. Turn your nose to that and burrow until you taste something hot, furious and real.

You are not alone. There are helpers. The Handless Maiden is waiting for you in the forest. Walk with her through the trees and let her tell you how she grew her hands back through patient and humble service to the holy in nature, how she found her husband again after he too had wandered for seven years in the woods.

Sedna, I know it hurts-the blood coming back into frozen flesh. It’s excruciating. Look up at the sky where the planet named for you is coming the closest in millennia to the Sun. Now we know how much we missed you while you were gone. We’re sorry we didn’t realize how much we needed you, that we accepted food from your maimed stumps. No more.

We will fight because it’s necessary. We may have looked like victims, but all of us, no matter what body we are born to, what gender assigned at birth, are here to become food, too. Rage is our way back to this knowing. Acceptance will follow. That will look different for everyone. I can’t predict the political or the trajectory of your personal destiny within time, but I do know the Feminine, mirrored in the sky by the newly discovered dwarf planet so aptly named by Michael Brown, will no longer be controlled. Our blood is boiling. Prepare for sovereignty to unfurl.

Note: Some elements of this version of the Inuit story are my creations. I invented the back-story of Sedna’s birth as well as Dog-Boy’s backstory and ultimate fate in order to provide motivation to them as characters who could speak to humans of our time.

“90377 Sedna,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.

Image of Sedna by Susan Seddon Boulet.

Kō aloha la ea,

Concentrate on love by way of the light,

Jen