Learning How to Be Lost
Life lessons from nature and the story of the Handless Maiden
Let me tell you about the trees I knew.
Silver birch near my childhood home. The conker tree we gathered under every autumn near my Gran’s house in Dundee. The lime tree we could hide inside. The gnarly windblown one in my Grannie’s island garden, made small by Atlantic winds.
The one I lent against when the world could not hold me.
The one I placed my palm on to ask the way.
If I did not know autumn I would think someone had made it up. A story in a Hollywood movie about a day people opened their curtains, found the world turned bold; every tree gone wild with paint and protest.
I have just landed in Glasgow from Dubai. Out of the taxi window, there they are, the trees: roadside motorway trees. The gruff driver jokes about his bad driving and cranks up the heating when I say I come from the desert and don’t have a coat.
He doesn’t notice my eyes filled with tears as I drive past the familiar shapes of Glasgow, over the Erskine Bridge, black river and red leaves wild below, as I realise, even on the sides of busy roads: we are people who grow trees.
As I notice nature tucked in around Glasgow, in every place it could possibilily find shelter. I feel instantly certain I am not alone.
I notice what has been missing - without nature’s guiding and whispering, without the trees’ quiet comfort.
I know I am home.
At a time in my life when I was lost and rootless. I found a room to stay in, looked outside and there was a tree. Orange-leafed. Standing guard on the pavement.
I hired a life coach to help me find my way.
“I bet you have a tree looking after you,” she told me.
I did. I had my tree.
She told me to study the story of the handless maiden - which was strange as I had read it only a few months before and it had made no sense to me the first time.
But on the second reading I understood the dismembered maiden wandering, why she would not stay in her comfortable home.
I understood why when you have lost things so essential, so many times, that you might choose to walk the woods alone, completely bewildered by where life has taken you.
I lay in baths and stared at the ceiling, listening to this story. I sat on buses and read the text. I started to piece together the complex ways we can be broken. The depths to which we can wander.
The handless maiden came upon an orchard, where angels help her eat and a king cared for her with love, gave her new hands made of silver. She falls pregnant with his child, but this is not the end of the story.
And this again, is where I had been deceived. I thought we had only one long journey to go on. One dark forest to wander. I did not understand how many times you could face disappointment. I knew only the first face of the devil, not the many ways he could appear.
Because the devil returns, whispers and distorts their love. And she is cast out with her child, wanders again in the woods, until she finds an inn. A safe place which holds her. And in this place, her hands regrow.
Her husband, who realises the distortion, follows her into the woods, searches for her for seven years, becomes wild and untamed in the process of his own wandering, until he too finds the inn. And when he sees her again, he no longer believes it possible that she could be what he was looking for.
It is not in the first struggle, nor the second that she is repaired. It is not in the first year, nor the second, that he finds her.
It is a long road to find what is true in a mixed up world. A long journey through which the essential of us bubbles and churns.
When I read this story the first time I did not know how the disappeared parts of myself, the bits that have been cut off and maimed could, with time, with my attempts to live well, with atunement to my heart, with care and courage, regrow.
But the trees know this.
That is why they are the best of friends in times when we don’t know where we are going. They know how to release their beauty, enter winter’s quiet darkness.
The trees know we cast off the nonessential of ourselves many times, that we have many seasons of existence. To meet the next one, we might have to wander in darkness, with no knowledge of the gardens that will feed us, nor the people who will love us.
We must wander because what we have lost means there is no going back. And the trees show us, even when we have released our colours, the essential parts of us have not been stripped away.
We might not be certain where we are going. But that doesn’t mean we are not strong.
Notes
In this piece, I have used Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s teachings on the Handless Maiden, as my source. I have also only told only the skeleton of what is a complex story - cutting out some parts, for the sake of discussing this journey in a short newsletter.
If you want to read the full story of the handless maiden, there are lots of versions you can read and refer to to discover all its twists and turns.
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Do leave a comment to share your own experiences of being lost or working with stories to understand challenging times in your life.
See you next time,
Catriona
Fairy tales and old stories repeatedly show us the way home.
I didn’t know this story! Now it’s one I will gave to look up. Beautiful tree photos too!