Cabin on Chicken Legs

In searching for Baba Yaga tonight, I Googled her. I hope the old witch doesn't mind being Googled. I've heard it only tickles a little bit.

I found her on, of course, Wikipedia. I found some Christianized versions of the fairytale, too, but I like the version Clarissa Pinkola Estes printed in her book the best so far.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Yaga

Her cabin on chicken legs is interesting. According to the Great and Powerful Wikipedia, the cabin was a common construction among hunter-nomadic Siberian peoples, invented to protect supplies from animals during long absences. A smaller version of the cabin was used by Siberian pagans to house their gods, or rather, their goddesses, because at one time the society was a matriarchy. The goddess was represented as a bone-carved doll as big as the cabin, barely fitting inside.

Feels like my spirit is a house on chicken legs, windows closed and boarded, waiting for me to come back. Baba Yaga protects what is inside. It can be scary to return to a place that's been boarded up for a long season, to pry open the locked window and look inside and dust off the cobwebs and take inventory of what the mice have eaten and what is still salvageable. It is scary to approach the house of Baba Yaga, who can bring death as surely as she brings wisdom. I'm being melodramatic. But she does threaten to eat children.

I'm coming back to these ideas I packed away as a young girl: idealism, creativity, trust in others, bewildering confidence. I'm here at the doorstep as an adult all too familiar with cynicism, a woman with a soundtrack of self-directed negativity playing in her head. I'm hoping this negativity will suffer death and some trust in myself will replace it - providing a balance for the loss of innocence and disappointments over the years.

Baba Yaga

There's the old Russian story about Vasalisa visiting Baba Yaga in her house in the forest. I read a version of this story in "Women Who Run With the Wolves," by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. I highly recommend this book to any woman who knows there is something better out there but has no clue how to find it.

Baba Yaga is the old hag, the wild witch who makes Vasalisa cook and clean and do impossible tasks, and screams at her and tells her she will eat her. The underlying tasks:

Being able to stand the face of the fearsome Wild Goddess without wavering.

Familiarizing oneself with the arcane, the odd, the "otherness" of the wild.

Taking some of her values into our lives, thereby becoming ourselves a little odd.

Learning to face great power-in others, and subsequently one's own power.

Letting the frail and too-sweet child die back even further.

-p. 91 Women Who Run With the Wolves

I wish I wanted more to search for La Que Sabe, the One Who Knows, the seed of powerful intuition buried in every woman. Or La Loba, the Wild Woman, the matriarch of the wolf pack. In fact, I would want someday to look around and say with perfect honesty, I am Osa Madre, Mother Bear. I "can be reticent and valuable....protect [my] territory, make [my] boundaries clear, shake the sky if need be, yet be available, accessible, engendering all at the same time."p. 358.

But for right now, I'm searching for Baba Yaga.