Still More Seeds to Sort…

I thought I was ready. Truly, I did.

The manuscript was complete, or so I believed. Years of writing, rewriting, and refining had brought me to this threshold. I had held dreams to the fire, turned fairytales inside out, walked the forest paths with Baba Yaga’s voice whispering from the birch branches. I had listened. I had labored. I had offered her and myself on the high altar. I had, in my own estimation, earned the fire.

But the archetype is stronger than my egoic thoughts or even my holy intentions. Baba Yaga, that ancient, bone-legged guardian of truth does not care for self-congratulation. I should have known. She does not clap when you think you’re finished. She waits at the threshold of the next task, broom in hand, gaze unflinching.

So it was that I found myself sitting across from my first professional editor. A woman I had carefully chosen. I had read her words, listened to her deep questions, felt their sharpness and their grace. I knew that she was someone who would not flatter or falter. I knew, too, that this stage of the journey required a companion with a spine as steady as mine and a gaze perhaps even more discerning. I had chosen her because she was the kind of woman who would not lie to me.

And she didn’t.

That first meeting was not a gentle welcome. It was a reckoning. A truth-telling. A disrobing of my careful sentences and layered intentions. She told me at the outset that the book could, in its present form, be sent out. As it is it may well earn a publication contract. But…. and worlds are created and destroyed on this simple conjunction. It became painfully clear. She did not approach my work as a cheerleader, nor even as a critic. She approached it as a midwife to something larger than either of us. She sat across from me and invited the archetype to speak.

“Who is she?” she asked, not about me, but about Baba Yaga.

I stammered, somewhat defensive. “She is the dark feminine. She is initiation. She is the devourer and the guide.”

She nodded. “Then why are you still hiding her? Why are you still tempering her voice with academic polish? Why is your head leading the way instead of your belly?” and then the clincher, “Why is Jung her spokesperson?”

Oof.

I wanted to argue. I wanted to prove that I had done the work. That my footnotes and carefully layered analysis were part of the offering. That I was holding the archetype responsibly. The words died before they were fully formed. Baba had come alive in the space between us. She was now chairing the meeting.

The truth of the archetype is this: she is not asking to be held. She is asking to be released.

She will not be dressed in intellectual silks. She will not be captured in the language of scholarship or neutered by careful argumentation. She will speak in riddles, in hungers, in bone-speak. And if I want to serve her truth, I must let go of the voice I spent so many years cultivating. This is the voice that earned degrees and sat on panels. Dare I return, and I do mean return, to the voice that knows how to kneel on a dirt floor, sorting seeds by candlelight.

This is the cost of devotion. This is the cost of initiation.

My editor, who, I realize, has accepted not just my manuscript but my soul task. She speaka with clarity and compassion. “You have to let her speak through you. Not about her. Not around her. Through.”

It is no small thing to find someone who will hold you to the fire, not to burn you. Though it burns. But, to temper you. She is not an editor in the traditional sense; she is a truth mirror. A bone collector. A boundary holder for the sacred.

And so here I am again: sweeping the corners of my prose, culling the academic voice that once kept me safe, returning to the work not with shame, but with reverence. Because it is a privilege to be corrected by the truth. It is a sacred encounter to be told, “Not yet. There is still more bread to bake.”

This is not failure. This is fairytale.

This is not rejection. This is recognition.

I had believed I was ready to carry the fire to the world. What I discovered in that first meeting was that I am still in the hut. Still sorting. Still kneeling. Still listening for the crackling voice of the old one who will not let me lie. Baba Yaga will not let me lie to her, to myself, or to my readers.

Baba Yaga is not done with me.

And I am not done with this work.

Not yet.
But soon.
After the next pile of seeds.