#katerina plotnikova

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Katerina Plotnikova

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Katerina Plotnikova

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Katerina Plotnikova

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Katerina Plotnikova  500px

[enchantedliving]

Whispers from the Hedgerow

Lessons From the Deer BY MONICA CROSSON

Photography by Katerina Plotnikova

There are souls whose hearts beat out an unkept rhythm that can’t help but keep them on the margins of our ordinary world. She was one of those wild souls—the young lady in the park who spied dragons in the clouds as her peers organized baseball games. She was the one who spent more time reading fairy tales than studying her algebra, and the one who would rather hold a conversation with a nature spirit than with most people she knew.

It was her grandfather who told her of the ones who teeter between this world and the other—the ones who have honed their intuitive skills and can journey beyond the veil to gain insight from their animal spirit guides.

“But I don’t have a guide,” she said, disappointment pulling at the corners of her eyes. “Aww, but you do, my girl,” he replied. “You just need to let your animal find you.”

She thought for days about who her animal guide may be. “Is it you?” she asked a raven who squawked madly from its post on top of the mailbox. “I will call you Merlin, and you could ride on my shoulder and whisper to me of shapeshifting and magic.”

But the raven saw something more interesting on the other side of the hedge and left her in a flurry of flapping and feathers.

When wandering down a country lane, she saw a horse nibbling on tufts of fresh spring grass. “Is it you who will be my guide and tell me of endurance and freedom as I ride upon your back with the wind on my face?”

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Shapeshift

It is when life becomes difficult that we learn to shapeshift, to find a new skin, a new way of moving through the world. Maybe we learn to move more silently, to become a sleek thing, fox-like and amorphous against the many hedgerows blocking our path, eyes on the glinting wire, nose sharp.

Or maybe the way forward is to rear up from the thin, wavering path, to take up the space denied to you, to show your teeth and claws, to become the very thing they told you not to be.

Look at the monster before you; the river in flood, the locked door, the step into darkness, and choose your new shape. Use guile, words, wits or fury. Do whatever you need to do to pass through unharmed, to protect the wildness within. 

These are difficult days. Shapeshift.

Photography by Katerina Plotnikova.

“Metaphor, perhaps, is the tame, the civilised, version of shamanic shapeshifting, word-magic, the recognition of stories as toothed messengers from the wilds. What if we turned the old nursery rhymes and fairytales we all know into feral creatures once again, set them loose in new lands to root through the acorn fall of oak trees? What else is there to do, if we want to keep any of the wildness of the world, and of ourselves?"

by Sylvia Linsteadt.