Healing From the Toxic Patriarchy: Symbolism of Grimms’ The Blue Light, part 2
We left off at the point where the soldier is taken in by a forest witch; she shows him compassion, the great archetypally feminine healing emotion of unconditional love:
“Yet will I be compassionate, and take you in, if you will do what I wish.” “What do you wish?” said the soldier. “That you shall dig all around my garden, tomorrow.” The soldier consented, and next day labored with all his strength, but could not finish it by evening. “I see well enough”, said the witch, “that you can do no more today, but I will keep you yet another night…”
The soldier has entered the transformational story zone of the three tasks, ubiquitous in transformational wisdom tales. These tasks are often performed for a female character, for they are supposed to be understood as inner tasks, and as I said, in is yin, feminine. They are often performed in the interest of integration, or learning how to combine our inner masculine and inner feminine. That’s how we become wise; we see the good, the useful, in both masculine and feminine modes of operation, and learn the proper use of them in any given situation.
The unwise king is a one trick pony; he knows only archetypal masculine values of power-over (your rights are always defined by me), rationality (I give my resources only to those who match my preferred level of labor output to their pay) and objectivity (people are just things that I shall discard at my own convenience with absolutely no concern for their welfare). The witch’s first task is a healing of this toxic masculine social norm; she asks him to dig all around her garden.
This is an interesting task, unique in my experience with these stories. If we knew what sort of garden it was, interpretation would be easier maybe. But then again, a lack of details can also be telling. In this case I decided that it’s the trench the soldier digs that is the point, not the garden. The garden represents cocreation with Gaia. For that’s what we are all doing here, is cocreating, cultivating, a human life, using the materials and laws that comprise all of Nature. For this reason, a garden can also be symbolically thought of as the individual soul, and it’s the eternal creative soul, in fact, that often lovingly orders our life’s cocreation, not the personality. The soul is both garden and gardener.
So this garden is an inner garden the soldier’s inner feminine (the witch) “owns”, because it represents his feminine creative powers. In his healing journey away from toxic conditioning, he has discovered this inner creative space, and it’s different from the malecentric, overcompetitive, objectifying way of creating that characterizes the abusive society I live in. For one thing, cocreating with feminine Gaia requires observing and interacting with the goal of understanding “other”. The feminine soulcentric “gardener” cares about how Gaia’s denizens function on all levels. The soulful gardener cares for more than what might profit them in the material sense; there are other forms of abundance in the soulful life-garden, such as joy and loving connection.
As cocreators soulcentric gardeners seek to understand and learn from life, from plants and animals and elements. The connection required for such understanding cultivates more compassion. We can think of the digging project metaphorically; when we garden, we “dig in” to our desire to know and understand and encourage and enjoy self, Earth’s amazing beings, the soil, the clouds, the insects, roots, the weather, the families of plants and animals and the wonder of it all. Can you “dig it”?
This understanding of the feminine creative mode is here combined symbolically with an archetypally masculine trait; the boundary. The reason the masculine is so good at objectivity is that it governs boundaries; I am separate from you. It uses boundaries for protection, whether in the form of outer war, or inner separation from feelings.
Boundaries are important on Earth, as popular self-love counsel knows too well when it popularly refers to “narcissistic” victim-tyrant relationships. Creating boundaries is crucial to our well being, but it’s also a joke that gets taken too far in toxic masculine society. When we treat each other as disposable goods, that’s too far, I say. Our health and joy, our thriving, depend on an intricate balance between masculine and feminine.
So the soldier’s inner feminine designs this task as an integration of masculine boundaries and protection, and the feminine cocreative powers that require compassion; that require some desire to understand, connect, lovingly support. He labors all day but cannot finish, and the witch doesn’t act the tyrant, as the unwise king would have done. She says “I see well enough that you can do no more today.” She looks at the situation, she looks at him and his actions (she knows he is trying his best), and understands it in a natural sense.
Anyone with a shred of self knowledge knows that they themselves have been unable to finish tasks. The key is to make a connection between self and other, though; to be fully conscious that this fellow is human, like me. We all quite naturally share this experience of falling short in goals. As I think we are all aware, hypermasculine authority and its hierarchy are incapable of making this connection, for believing oneself to be superior to others means we don’t consider the peons with empathy. The peons are always striving to get it right; that’s part of their position in the hierarchy. They’re looking to so-called authorities to throw them a frickin’ bone.
The witch doesn’t label him a slacker, and undeserving of her respect; in fact she treats him with justice of the sort we would all do well to self apply.
She doesn’t expect life to go according to her personal desires necessarily, but works within the natural limits that are essential to harmonious cocreation with Gaia. A human body can only do so much, and the human who occupies it should not be judged negatively for not accomplishing a goal. Masculine gets weird about goals, as they fall under the archetype. And whether or not we end up working for or conducting primary relationships with a tyrant, I wager that few people in my society have not internalized an it’s-not-enough voice in the head. It goads internally, and then, as though we didn’t do our homework, punishes us with negative emotions for not managing to accomplish the feats which our internalized unwise tyrant has assigned to us.
Integration events (the balanced combination of masculine and feminine opposites) are always healing, for we then see the woundedness that incites and perpetrates excessive masculine or feminine behaviors. The wounded soldier was actually too feminine in his actions, for he never said “no” to the abusive king, never drew a boundary. He just took the hit (his wounds). He stood up “faithfully” for the king, but never displayed enough self appreciation to stand up for himself; to have faith in, to respect and to protect himself. His protection services were coopted, whether inner or outer, by another authority, and he never developed the self compassion and/or self authority to say no to the king’s inhumane treatment. Now he’s fixing that.
The next task involves wood, which is actually a masculine material as evidenced by the slang usage meaning a male erection.
…I will keep you yet another night, in payment for which you must tomorrow chop me a load of wood, and make it small.
There is no further elaboration in the story about this task, to the point where I wonder again if some symbolic clue is lost. Cutting anything is archetypally masculine, as cleaving the one into two is what the intellectual mind does. It’s how we experience “other”. It creates separation consciousness, and it’s part of the boundary game, right? It’s an activity that precedes choice making, which is also archetypally masculine. We have to be able to compare and contrast, to add up the pros and cons, to make choices- from the masculine perception, anyway. The masculine intellectual mode unwisely applied ends up in the realm of constant judgement, of good and bad, of us versus them, who’s in, who’s out, thumbs up, thumbs down.
Feminine choicemaking is founded more on a systems theory mode of operation, of understanding how our actions fit into the highest good for that which we are responsible for, as in the garden. The other choicemaking mode is what we call intuition- a knowing beyond the senses and beyond the intellectual mind. It’s an overworked word in English because there are different kinds of intuition. Some intuition involves mainly the mind, what we might call inspiration; that’s masculine, I would say. The feminine counterpart is embodied; when we know something “in our bones.” It’s feeling sense.
Anyway, if we use the wood chopping metaphor to mean the masculine dualistic skill of this, not that, I guess this task represents a day of really examining our experiences carefully, to keep asking “why?”, to do a thorough investigation of who we think we are, who is really responsible for our misery, how we ended up falling for the trap we spent X number of years in, etc. etc. And in fact, the next thing that’s going to happen is that the soldier will indeed fall into a trap. Next installment begins with the third task, the retreiving of the blue light.
