When all false stories had been heard and discerned as untrue, when hope was disappearing that a girl in a nest exists, a disturbing  old woman appeared at the closed gates of the King’s palace. The old woman was unkempt, ugly, wobbling, stinking and babbling incoherently. Her appearance is revolting. Yet, the armed guards, trained to keep her out of the palace, could not resist her. They brought her into the Court. She said she knew where to find the girl. Her voice and her presence overwhelmed the guards with awe. Everything changed with her arrival. The possibility is that the Prince saw a girl in a nest. It is true.

We know the girl is real because we have seen her in our imagined forest. But the presence of the hideous old woman emerging  in the story shocks us with her outer disguise of ugliness, and her seductive promise of genuine knowledge. She is the Dakini¹ that tricks one’s mind in Tibetan Buddhist stories. Dakinis are the shape shifting female aspect of our being that wakes us to the essence of reality through her myriad of forms each needed in each situation. She is a trickster, informer and transformer. She can change forms because she, as our own imagining heart mind, has been released from the tyranny of belief in solidity. Having given up hope, she rises from space “like a fish rising out of water.

The old woman is the nature of unobstructed wisdom fired by compassion and love. She is old with experience, producing revulsion and attraction. Her presence stimulates the guards and takes us by surprise.

The insides of a not yet opened bud consist of many interrelated parts. If any one of those parts is absent, the flower loses its ability to open and reproduce. The stamen and pistil are the two main elements responsible for the fertilization of the plant that will produce the energy which opens the petals. The Pistil, the female sexual organ of the flower contains the pollen. It is centrally located and has a swollen base. It is bowl, nest, oven, and cauldron. It is the ovary containing potential seeds, or ovules. A stalk, or style, arises from the ovary. A pollen-receptive tip, the sticky stigma, grows from it. It must however receive the pollen and produce the flower, and the future seed and fruit. Stamens are the male reproductive organs that do just that. The Stamen consists of an anther which is the site of pollen development, and the stalk-like filament, which transmits water and nutrients to the anther and positions it to aid pollen dispersal. The active relationship between pistil and stamen is necessary. If we leave the old woman out of the alchemical equation of becoming, our lives are limited.

I relate to this section of the story where one wears out solutions and learned habits that have produced dangerous behaviors which have left me bereft of inspiration and joy. With the appearance of the vile old hag a different kind of immediacy of knowing breaks through. And when she appears a thousand myths, stories and dreams creep up the stamen of our minds and instigates our flowering.

If the old woman’s voice and presence had not startled the guards out of their conditioning, she would not have entered the palace. The story would end. Or another episode might bring us face to face with something more disruptive – a global virus, a nuclear war, a child wielding an AK47 killing other children in a school. No bud can open without her. We have been waiting for her! We pull her up from the part of our mind that is not addicted to surface interpretation. The aspect of our mind that is not disassociated from nature, feeling and being comes alive. We are getting sticky. She urges us to fall in love with the appearance of strangers on our streets and of life itself. She invites those we would have liked to ignore or destroy.

Every morning one winter before dawn I took a yoga class ten streets from my building. I scurried past the steps of a church where homeless people spent the night. One morning, a white haired woman caught my eye I smiled politely. She pulled up a filthy wool coat covering her legs to expose a raw stump cut off at the knee. I rushed away, disgusted. After that I passed by the church swiftly, not looking at her, on my way home. But one morning, as I busied my yoga-calmed mind with plans for the day, I heard the sound of something fall in the snow. I ignored it.

At the door of my building as I put the key in the lock, someone tapped my shoulder. I turned to see the old woman from the church steps. She held out cupped hands filled with coins. “You dropped something,” she said gruffly. I thought, ‘she needs it more than I do.’ Thinking I was generous, also wanting her to move away, I said, “You should keep the money.” She pushed her hands towards me again, “God helps those who give to others. You take it.” I was about to argue, when she said, “Lady, I think you better take better care of yourself.” I took the coins. I watched her hobble away. She was right.

“It emphasizes that if full spiritual life is to be attained, ‘nature must come first’ as the necessary foundation for any sound future development.” 

The old woman enters the palace where the King and the Prince await. Up to this moment, we have not had a female presence mentioned in the palace. Who is she? 

Hekate, once a tripart prehellenic Greek deity of birth, death and regeneration (maiden, woman and crone) was transformed into a Goddess of death and madness. Her three aspects were divided into separate deities. Hekate was divested of her multi-tasking powerful activity in stories that rendered her dangerous only. She was depicted sitting alone at the gates to the underworld, laughing and crying, with  six barking dogs. In truth, we discover that no one could enter Hades without her agreement. No one could see into the darkness without her torches of pine branches lighting  to death and back again. 

Likewise, wise women who had knowledge of magic and medicine in fairytales were renamed as ugly. They were called witches. Their depiction is deranged, and dangerous, terrifying or ridiculous. Wild haired aging women wearing black pointed hats and sharp toes boots. The role of the hag, once revered as sacred gardeners, oracles and sorceresses is forgotten. We tend to write them off as wicked. As fairytales were leaked of profundity and symbolism, becoming more literal and fanciful, she became spooky and destructive. Meanwhile, it is always the encounter with the witch that brings about the ultimate consciousness of hero and heroine on a quest. The old women cannot be banished from the story, or from our world. It takes a revisioning intelligence to see her fierce compassionate function.

In a Russian fairytale about the loss and retrieval of fertility, an enraged prince meets an old woman at the edge of a forest. She is dressed in filthy rags, leaning against a gnarled tree. In her hand she holds a cowrie shell. She is far from any ocean. She not only instructs the prince to what direction he must travel but tames his aggressive speedy mind and instructs him to reconcile with his father. She, like the old woman in our story, knows how to instigate the journey that a young male has to make to bring back two goddesses from imprisoned darkness. The stamen vibrates. The pistil swells. The remnants of the Old European Great Mother worshipped for thousands of years, endures not only in stories, but on our streets, and in our minds.

Whether the old woman who arrived at the gates of the palace is the same old woman who we met in the first half of the story does not matter. The first old woman, an image as old as the goddess Venus, waiting in the cottage after the loss of a child that was almost hers, is resting in the back of memory. The old woman who emerges at this part of the story is older than the goddess Venus.

The old woman’s arrival at the gate reminded me of my mother a year after her stroke. She was no longer a beautiful well dressed woman, a concert pianist and head of a woman’s organization. She was unkempt. Her hair turned white and was undone. She gained weight and leaned on a cane, leaning to one side as she walked. Again and again she awoke crying in the mornings after dreaming she was running. I shuddered when she slurred her words and hit her cane against the kitchen door. And, I loved her. And, as an adolescent, I was embarrassed.

Shortly after her death I dreamed that she telephoned me. I stood in a transparent phone booth. She told me she was still alive, living in Coney Island on the beach. I ran to the ocean. I saw her. She was seated on a stone, wearing a flowered dress. She turned to me. The side of her face was young and beautiful. Then she turned again and the other side of her face was grotesque and wrinkled. I screamed and awoke. A young Tibetan Buddhist teacher was staying at my house. I waited all day for him to return. At the door on the top of my stairwell later in the day I told him about the dream. He moved past me saying, “It was just a dream.” I was infuriated with his lack of compassion. When he asked me to bring him a cup of tea I raged under my breath at his callousness and patriarchal insensitivity. I would carry the cup of hot tea into the room and throw it at him. But when I entered the room, he said with immense kindness, “Monks spend years in retreat to uncover that all of this life is a dream.” My rage vanished. I sat beside him. He poured the cup of tea. I drank. We sat in my living room where green plants grow profusely by the windows, in silence for a long time.

The old woman is the archetype of the old feminine mother who “shares with other earth goddesses such as Isis and Demeter, the high distinction of bringing uncontaminated femininity (the productivity of nature) into the service of human beings.”² She is disguised as other. The gate that separates, open. Nature enters. “It emphasizes that if full spiritual life is to be attained, ‘nature must come first’ as the necessary foundation for any sound future development.”³

My seemingly damaged mother dared to drive, and to play the piano with one hand. She left me her gold wedding ring engraved with Hebrew words from the Song of Songs, “I sleep, but my heart is awake!”

False stories of our separation from nature leave us barren of genuine knowledge, and joy. Beware of sound bites and stories told to prove a point.

Question explanations of wild roses, that do not include the marvel  of pistil and stamen, of the insides of plants singing and responding, and the necessity of the authority of experience as truth. “Data gives us the illusion that we know the world. But the world is more than we know.”⁴ 

I sat down next to an old woman on the subway at rush hour. No one wanted to sit beside her. She was wearing layers of coats, a flamboyant turquoise blue plastic shower cap over an navy blue wool hat. Overstuffed shopping bags were by her feet. And vivid red wires hung from earbuds and disappeared into the top coat. I was on my way to a private elementary school in Harlem where the children had requested stories about fairies. The empty seat gave me a chance to review my notes. Out of the blue, at 42nd street, as the train filled up, the old woman started singing loudly. Her voice was beautiful.

Everyone on the train seemed to awaken from the usual  train trance and look towards her. Even two teenagers holding on to leather straps, lost in iPhones where there was no service, looked up. But by 57^th street she stopping singing. I tapped her on the shoulder, “Why did you stop singing?” She never looked at me, but said under her breath, “People will think I am crazy.” Without thought, as the train moved forward, I tapped her on the shoulder again, “Have you ever considered that people who do not sing on trains are crazy?” She pulled out the ear buds, turned and looked at me directly and said, “People like you and I have to be careful.”

In the school, I told three tales. One from Romania, another from Ireland and a story about a fairy who overcomes the arrogance of a cruel ruler, from Korea. The children savored the tales. Afterwards, however, they asked questions: Do you think fairies are real? I attempted an answer, “They are real, but they live between worlds.” Another question, “What do they look like?” I answered, “They are always changing shapes.” “Have you ever seen one?” “I think I sat next to  one on the subway this morning.” I told them about the old woman singing. “Did she know magic?” “Yes. Her singing was miraculous. Everyone paid attention on the subway. People were smiling at one another.” The children seemed satisfied. They asked to draw and began to create a huge communal mural of flowering vines.  Suddenly, a boy asked, “Was she really real?” “What do you think?” I answered. “Yes” they shouted and continued drawing.

With the old woman’s entrance into the court, through the guarded gates, the pistil receives pollen. Feminine principle, returns. Her disguise is the shocking disarray of unconventional appearance. “The feminine energy makes the non-manifest, manifest….feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.”⁵

We are in the realm of myth, where image instigates truth beyond thought to take ephemeral shape between us.  Her presence is visceral reminder of a revelation expanding the borders of explanation. Something wild and real is occurring. We feel it. Curiosity produces energy. We let the old woman enter our hearts and we walk across borders, through locked doors of ideas of how things should be. We remember that if she is forgotten, she is dangerous! Her actions are always in the service of opening and flowering. Moving toward the King and the Prince, the heart of the bud is awakened.