The Story Behind The Wild Matryoshka
I opened one story, and discovered many more inside.
When I was nineteen and living in Moscow, during a cross-cultural study abroad amidst the fall of Communism and the rise of so-called democracy, painted wooden matryoshkas were everywhere: on street corners, in markets, and in underground passageways.
“Devushka, matryoshka?”
I was drawn to the handmade dolls painted with fairy tales. The largest doll introduced the story. Open her, and another image appeared, another character, another part of the tale, until the tiny, unbreakable doll at the center.
Years later, while writing a mythopoetic, coming-of-age memoir, I recognized the shape of my creation story. A wild matryoshka emerging.
I’m still finding my way to the center.
Stories within stories
I couldn’t enter the most hidden story directly. I needed to follow clues, stories, mythopoetic threads: the lake that is really a sea, a primitive old-growth forest, spiderwebs, bones, Grandfather’s hands, chicken-legged huts, the call of the fae, a bone on a stick with a fire in its skull.
Stories nested in body, place, memory & imagination. A memory opened into place. Place opened into its histories. A story I thought belonged only to me carried the lives of others.
The stories were sleeping inside of me. Writing made them come alive. Movement, image, solitude, and nature helped me when I could not find words. Dance gave flesh and bones, blood and sweat to my words as I wrote and danced my way through fractured stories in self-designed, embodied (w)rites of passage.
I wrote about this process in my MA thesis in Transformative Language Arts. I have been navigating and tending the threads of living Story ever since.
A living cosmology
Over time, The Wild Matryoshka has become a way of understanding the relationships we live within: storybody within story; body within landscape, the eco story of place; life within a lineage, individual stories within our conditioning and within the stories of families, communities, places, and the more-than-human world. We are nested. We carry lives within us, and our lives are carried by something larger. We carry a multiplicity of parts, pieces, stories, expressions, emotions and more. We are interrelated with the wider anima of the world.
Within this cosmology, I contemplate the human being through the elements and bodies - through a rewilded orientation to anthroposophy & eastern and western mystery school conceptions of the human being.
Element Relationships I contemplate:
Earth Body ·Mineral
Water Plant Life force · Etheric
Fire Animal · Anima/Soul · Astral
Air Human Ego Spirit · Intellect
These relationships give me further layers to enter and questions to live with. I return to them through the body, through story, and through attention to the living world.
Story is alive, feral, animal. She is Mystery. She has body, layers, weather, symbols, colors, places. She is an ecology. When we enter her, we bring our own marrow, flesh, belly, memory, soul, and spirit. What happens between us may take years to understand.
The turning year
The Wheel of the Year gives my writing, my offerings and this work a rhythm that I trust. Solstices, equinoxes, and seasonal festivals offer recurring places to gather, notice, remember, and make beauty. In Ancient Greece, the word Festival meant Shining Day. We return to the wheel to be in deeper, more meaningful relationship with season, threshold, and what the Shining Day illuminates in our lives. In ancient times, initiates would encounter the same story, year after year, but discover something new about it and themselves. The stories and the wheel season us. The season returns, but we meet it differently.
My years as a Waldorf teacher brought me into daily relationship with story, song, artistic work, and the making of festivals with intergenerational communities and children. A story could be told, sung, painted, moved, or carried outdoors and turned into an ancestral craft. There are many ways to enter the wheel and the stories of the wheel, and time for it to become part of our lives.
This remains close to the heart of my work with children, youth and adults. I long for occasions to gather across generations, to enter the stories and songs that accompany a season, and to make room for our own responses. To be in reciprocity with the natural world, time, and the mythic imagination. I want children to have time to wonder, make things, hear old tales, and come to know the places where they live. To make meaning out of the trials and challenges, edges and growths that they encounter.
A festival or threshold asks something of us. We listen for the story it brings. We prepare the table, the food, learn a song, make a lantern or craft, tell the story. Our hands take part. We create an occasion through which our relationship with season, place, and one another can deepen. We feed the wheel of the year. It feeds us back. This connects us to our Ancestral Imagination.
Why wild?
Cracking open a story is unruly business— in the sense that we do not know what we will encounter or how it will shape us. Our fixed ideas, our fixed selves may shapeshift. We enter unknown places: the wolf’s belly, forbidden rooms, the forest edge, the Soul of Story.
We never know what we will find, retrieve, reStory. A thread, a pomegranate, a wild voice, an elixir, something forgotten. An apothecary of becoming.
The mythopoetic belly of the wolf is more than danger. It is life–death–life gestation. There are times when we need to sit in confusion and unraveling, allow the question, come undone, quest into deeper layers, and hold the questions silently beneath our tongues.
We sit with mystery and dreams. We sleep with stories past their years, restitch new stories onto old cloaks, embroider new possibilities, carry secrets in our pockets. Some mysteries grow us a new tongue, a new language, a new way of seeing and listening—a deeper relationship with self and Story, with self and the more-than-human world.
The Wild Matryoshka continues to crack open. How she cracks open in you will also change how she moves in me. You never know how telling or reStorying your story might move another or shift your relationship to your own stories.
Stasha Ginsburg
Follow the threads
The Wild Remembering · On Substack
Poetry, mythopoetic reflections, and writing through the seasons.
Read The Wild Remembering →
Marrow Song · Poetry
Continue into my poetry collection, Marrow Song.
Find Marrow Song on Amazon →
More of my story
The people, places, and experiences that have shaped my life and work.
More about Stasha →