Over the years of saying the rosary, I have taken up the practice, suggested by Perdita Finn, of considering the three parts of the Hail Mary as invocations to the tripartite aspects of the Goddess as Maiden, Mother, and Crone:
Hello Maiden, full of grace, Love is with thee,
Blessed art thou among women, Wild Mother, and blessed is the force of thy desire, all life.
Holy Grandmother, Queen of the Wild and the Wellspring, pray for us now and in the hour of our Death/Struggle.

Lately, however, I have been pondering the way the Maiden has, for centuries, been packaged as the object of male desire, how the paedophilic trope has been coded into our stories and culture for millennia–think Virgin Mary, Maiden Persephone, Little Red Riding Hood. The Maiden/Virgin who steps onto her path, makes her way in the world, and chooses her own bodily autonomy has been subverted and caged by male desire. Her pinnacle desire, according to the cultural molding, is to be desired. Her goals and plans and ambitions are subverted into submission to the male–she must want what he wants: Herself in gilded cage.

Before the Maiden, however, is the Girl Who Breathes Fire*, the Wild Child, the youngster who believes she can do anything: win, fly, travel through time. She is Pippi Longstocking, not defiant for the sake of defiance, but simply because she has time only for her own wild path. Now I pray:
Hello Fire-Breathing Feral Girl, Love is with thee. . .

(*I borrowed this term from the Nurjahan Boulden, a Tanzanian-American Dancer and Fierce Advocate for Women’s Selfhood)

Wild Girl lives in a garden populated by fantastical creatures, exotic plants–all of it fierce and dangerous, whimsical and friendly, ready for adventure. I’ve decided that I need to reconnect with my Wild Girl as I explore more deeply how the Maiden in my own story fell asleep. Here in the landscape of my personal fairy tale, the Maiden had encountered enough feminist ideas and retained a little of the wildness of the Girl; even so, she became a little intoxicated by the exchange of desire for desirability. Fortunately, she fell in love not with a prince but a kind and gentle farmer, and they made a life together–much safer than the life of a sleeping Maiden awakened into life as a prince-bro’s servant and plaything. Good fortune met me in a shared life with a good man–we have lived outside the realm of the cultural fairy tale as fully as we are able.

Still, no matter how well I’ve escaped the hegemony of the cultural trope, it reaches everywhere, trying always to lull me into the gilded cage, into performing femininity, into questing for desirability rather than desire, for being of service rather than belonging to the reciprocally woven community, for wishing for the slender beauty of youthfulness rather than the fulsome beauty of age.

This morning on Substack, I encountered Sharon Blackie’s latest post, titled “The Fairy Tale Heroine and the Wild Girl Archetype.” I have only read the first little bit because it hit me between the eyes, and I wanted to make sure I wrote some of my ramblings on the matter before reading her analysis. I have been wanting to read her book Hagitude, but now I think I have a whole stack of Sharon Blackie books to read. After my own explorations of what it means to be a shapeshifting woman in midlife, I also want to read her Foxfire, Wolfskin.

As I have stepped over the threshold into my crone season, I have been pondering how all the former seasons of my life continue to be part of the season I am in. I never left the Wild Child behind, or the Maiden. Even now, as I enter a somewhat late-blooming croning, I am Mother to my own young adults, and nurturing growth in my students. The intermediary season of Queen, that perimenopausal period that seemed to last for fifteen years, that season of Becoming more and more myownself, that too continues into this crone season, this shedding of old expectations, this time of settling more deeply into my body. I claim not only sovereignty of my Queenself, and the tenderness of my Motherself, but the self-possession of my Maidenself, and the absolute wildness of my Childself.