The Story Behind The Wild Matryoshka
It began with a story. 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. On and on, until the tiny, unbreakable doll at the center.
Years later, while writing my coming-of-age memoir, I began to recognize the shape of my creation story.
A wild matryoshka emerged. 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.
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.
Body within landscape. A life within a lineage. Our individual stories within the stories of families, communities, places, and the more-than-human world.
Within this cosmology, I also contemplate the human being through the elements:
Earth. Body. Mineral.
Water. Life force. Etheric.
Fire. Animal. Astral. Soul.
Air. Ego. Spirit. Intellect.
These relationships give me further layers to enter and questions to live with.
Story is alive. Feral. Animal.
She has body, layers, weather, symbols, colors, places. She is an ecology.
Body meets image. Marrow, flesh, belly, memory. Soul. Spirit. Holy wild.
Why wild?
Cracking open a story is dangerous business. Dangerous 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. Our stories change shape. We shift our perspective. 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.
And…the 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. To allow the question. To come undone. To quest into deeper layers. To hold the questions silently beneath our tongues.
To sit with mystery and dreams. To sleep with stories past their years. To restitch new stories onto old cloaks. To embroider new possibilities, secrets in our pockets.
Some mysteries grow us a new tongue. A new language. A new way of seeing. A new way of 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.
Stasha Ginsburg
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