Kissing the Hag
It is Autumn again, the season of slowing down, gathering and turning our focus inward. It is also a season of truth telling, encountering our shadows and monsters and maybe even kissing the hag.
What do I mean by “kissing the hag”? The hag is a symbol of the parts of us we have deemed impossible to love and so impossible to want to live with. I have found that this odd visual of ‘kissing the hag’ is a powerful invitation to radically love the ugly, scary, and often crazy parts of myself.
In folklore and fairy tales I see this invitation in moments as in Beauty and the Beast when the prince would not accept a rose from the poor, ugly, old woman. Or in Bluebeard, when the young new wife opens the forbidden cellar door to find the gruesome scene of a multitude of women’s corpses with their throats slit. In Vasilisa the Brave, Vasilisa brings home Baba Yaga’s skull fire and burns her step-family to ashes. And the moment in Cinderella when her stepsisters' are willing to cut off their own body parts in hopes they’d marry a prince.
There is a method of reading stories as where the reader is all of the characters. This can also often done with dreams as well. When I am willing to hear stories this way I’m invited to notice my own scary parts. These parts are my “hags”, warty, crazy and repulsive. They are the parts of me that feel most terrifying and unwelcome. Offering radical love sounds like an impossible proposition. “For who could ever love a beast,” goes the opening monologue.
This is the invitation that Halloween and Autumn offer, to meet the “villainous” and unwanted parts of ourselves, to let them be seen and to learn how to radically love and forgive them.
Radical love needs to include forgiveness. To kiss the hags with our eyes closed, grimacing and counting the seconds until its over, is not love. That is endurance. To truly love these parts of ourselves the invitation is to acknowledge and bring compassion to what they/we have done in the name of normalcy, love, safety and belonging. When I can look my unwanted parts in the eye and not shame them, turn away or make excuses, then radical love is possible and the kissing can commence.
When I can hear the wind singing and the moon shows her face then I know it is a good time to practice gathering the bones that I have left to be forgotten in some dark cellar. It is a good time to accept a gift from an old, ugly party crasher. It is a good time to ask why did the fire burn away those voices and not mine? It is a good time to pause before I cut off a part of myself to be loved and accepted. It is a good time to listen to the stories, gasp at the scary parts, laugh at the ridiculous and cry for the loneliness of being forgotten, unwanted and shunned. Let go the myth of normal and allow how it feels to be seen, forgiven and loved, warts and all, kissing a few hags in the process.
Inspired in part by Sharon Blackie’s Hagitude
