What if one of the oldest fairy tales ever told has been describing the way we lose ourselves all along?
At first glance, The Handless Maiden is one of the most disturbing stories in all of fairy tale literature. A father cuts off his own daughter’s hands. It’s difficult to imagine a more shocking image.
And yet, this story has survived for centuries.
Why?
Because great stories don’t survive because they’re literally true. They survive because they reveal truths about what it means to be human.
Beneath the shocking imagery lies a story about something many of us know intimately. The slow ways we learn to abandon our own voice, silence our intuition, ignore our feelings, and sacrifice ourselves in the hope of preserving love, belonging, or safety.
In this episode, we begin exploring what I believe is one of the deepest maps of the human journey ever written.
Together, we’ll look at the symbolism of severed hands, tears, the father wound, self-abandonment, and the long journey that begins the moment we leave the place where we were wounded.
Because the Handless Maiden isn’t really about losing her hands.
It’s about remembering how to grow them back.
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Until next time, my friends…
May you know thy soul.
It already knows the way.
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The full episode transcript is below.
Hi Friends,
Welcome to Know Thy Soul, where we explore the stories, symbols, and truths that teach us how we lose ourselves and how we gain it back.
Last week, we talked about the tapestry I believe all of these stories weave together, and we began exploring The Handless Maiden alongside the story of Perceval and the Fisher King. We watched a young woman lose her hands and set out on the long journey to grow them back.
Today, we’re going to continue her journey. But before we do, I want to begin with another story. Because one of the things you’ll discover on this podcast is that the greatest stories have a remarkable way of speaking to one another. They come from different times, different cultures, and different traditions, yet they so often point toward the same truths.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus tells a story about a woman carrying a jar filled with meal, and as she walks along the road, the handle breaks. Slowly, the grain begins spilling out behind her, but she doesn’t notice. She just keeps walking, believing the jar is still full.
It isn’t until she arrives home that she looks inside and realizes there’s nothing left.
I think about that story often because I wonder if that’s what losing ourselves feels like. Not through one catastrophic moment that changes everything overnight, but gradually, almost imperceptibly. We give away a little piece of ourselves here, another piece there, until one day we wake up and realize we’ve become disconnected from the very person we were created to be.
And I think that’s exactly what The Handless Maiden is about.
Like so many of our oldest stories, no one really knows where it began. By the time the Brothers Grimm collected it in the early 1800s, it had already been passed from one generation to the next for centuries.
What fascinates me is that once you start looking for this pattern, you begin seeing it everywhere. You find it in the Gospel of Thomas, in Genesis, in the story of the Prodigal Son, in the Grail stories, in the Odyssey, and in myths and fairy tales from cultures that never had any contact with one another.
Now, I’m not saying all of these stories came from the same source. What I am saying is that they all seem to be wrestling with the same question. It’s almost as if human beings have been trying to understand the same mystery for thousands of years, with each culture telling it in its own language and through its own symbols.
That’s one of the reasons I love these stories so much. The more I study them, the less interested I become in their differences and the more curious I become about what they have in common.
Because when you strip away the different settings, characters, and symbols, they keep bringing us back to the same place.
This old German fairy tale isn’t really asking, “How does a young woman lose her hands?” It’s asking a much more personal question.
How do we lose ourselves?
Have you ever looked back on your life and wondered…
How did I get so far away from myself?
I don’t think most of us wake up one morning and decide to abandon ourselves. It happens gradually. We make one compromise, then another. We start living up to someone else’s expectations instead of listening to our own hearts. And by the time we realize what’s happened, we can barely remember how we got there.
Just last week, I was catching up with a friend from high school that I hadn’t spoken to in years.
She apologized for being so disconnected and then she said something that has stayed with me ever since.
She said,
“Jenn…my life is not my own.”
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about those words.
Because I suspect there isn’t a woman alive who doesn’t understand exactly what she meant.
Maybe you’ve spent years making everyone else happy. Maybe you’ve checked all the boxes you were told would make you feel fulfilled, and from the outside your life looks just fine. But somewhere deep inside, you know something is missing. You can’t quite name it, but you can feel it. Your jar is empty.
I’ve come to believe this is one of the most universal human experiences there is, at least for women.
And I don’t think it’s an accident that one of the oldest fairy tales ever told begins with exactly this journey.
I remember the first time I really understood this story.
I had just finished reading Here All Dwell Free by Gertrud Mueller Nelson, and it was as if I understood something about myself for the very first time.
I closed the book and immediately knew that one day my first book would be called Growing Hands.
But I wasn’t even close to ready to write it yet but something in me knew.
And ever since that day, this story has continued to unfold.
Every time I return to it, I see something I somehow missed before.
In fact, I was thinking about this episode last night, and I noticed another connection I’d never seen.
I think that’s one of the marks of a truly great story.
It doesn’t change.
We do.
And as we change, the story reveals another layer of itself.
Almost like a lotus flower, unfolding one petal at a time.
The story opens with an impoverished miller out chopping wood. That one word, impoverished, tells us more than we might think. It doesn’t just tell us he’s poor. It tells us that, like so many great stories, this one begins in what many traditions call a wasteland—a place where something has already fallen out of balance.
One day, while chopping wood in the forest, he encountered a mysterious man who promised him great riches in exchange for whatever stood behind his mill.
The miller thought this was an easy bargain. Surely the man meant the apple tree in his garden.
So he agreed.
The stranger promised to return in three years to collect what was his.
Every time I read this part of the story, I find myself thinking about a question Jesus asked:
“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and yet forfeit his soul?”
I don’t think he was only talking about wealth. I think he was asking us to consider every bargain we make in life. What are we willing to trade away in order to get what we think we want?
Because that’s exactly what the miller is doing. He believes he’s making a simple business transaction. But like so many bargains we make, he doesn’t yet understand what it’s really going to cost him.
The miller thought it was an easy bargain. As far as he knew, the only thing behind the mill was an apple tree, so he agreed without a second thought.
And I don’t think that’s an accident either. He doesn’t even recognize the value of what he’s trading away.
The two shook hands, and the stranger promised to return in three years to collect what was his.
The payment does not come due immediately. Often, when we sacrifice something deeper, the consequences do not appear right away. At first, the bargain may even seem worthwhile, exciting actually! Like we made a really great decision.
When the miller arrived home, he found his household overflowing with wealth and his mill running effortlessly. But when he told his wife what had happened, her face immediately grew pale.
“You fool,” she cried. “That was no ordinary man. It was the devil. And our daughter was sweeping behind the mill when you made the bargain.”
That line always makes me stop.
The wife sees immediately what the husband cannot. Had he simply paused long enough to listen to her, the bargain would never have been made.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this pattern appears again and again in our oldest stories. The feminine often sees something before the masculine is ready to. Whether we understand that as intuition, wisdom, or something else entirely, the stories seem to return to this pattern over and over.
And yet, in this story, the mother is powerless to stop what has already been set in motion. I often wonder if that’s part of the symbolism too. Perhaps she is handless in her own way. She can see the truth, but she no longer has the power to act on it.
And it’s easy to judge the miller, thinking , “I would never make a bargain like that.”
But when we take a deeper look at our own lives, is that really true?
Let’s look at just a few ways we make bargains like this every day.
A young woman knows the relationship she’s in is slowly silencing her own voice, but she’s terrified of being alone, so she stays.
A husband sacrifices evenings with his wife and children because he believes one more promotion will finally make his family secure.
Someone spends years pursuing a career they never wanted because it earns them the approval they’ve always longed for.
A man watches other men degrade a woman and says nothing because he doesn’t want to lose the acceptance of the group.
A woman stays silent while someone is excluded or gossiped about because speaking up might mean becoming the next target.
A teenager laughs along with the crowd instead of defending the kid who’s being mocked because belonging feels more important than doing what’s right.
Another person keeps saying yes when every part of them is screaming no because disappointing others feels more frightening than abandoning themselves.
We tell ourselves it’s only temporary.
We tell ourselves we’ll come back to what really matters later.
But little by little, we begin trading away our awareness of the deepest wisdom within us. And as we’re about to discover, that’s the one thing no bargain, no wound, and not even the devil himself can ever truly take away.
And sometimes those bargains become larger than any one person.
A company discovers that using cheaper ingredients will make its shareholders more money, even though it knows those ingredients aren’t what’s best for the people eating them.
A company hides research because admitting the truth would cost billions.
A journalist chooses clicks over truth because outrage keeps people watching.
A church becomes more concerned with protecting its reputation than protecting the people who have been wounded within its walls.
A spiritual community silences the people asking difficult questions because certainty feels safer than truth.
A culture begins to value productivity more than wisdom…
success more than character…
appearance more than authenticity.
Every age has its bargains.
The question is always the same.
What are we willing to sacrifice in order to get what we think we want?
Or as Jesus asked it two thousand years ago,
“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and yet forfeit his soul?”
Because I think that’s the very question this fairy tale is asking too.
Like so many of the bargains we make, the consequences don’t come due immediately.
We often live with them for years before we realize what they’ve taken from us.
At first, the bargain even seems like a good one.
The mill grows prosperous.
The household overflows with wealth.
The father’s life becomes easier.
And isn’t that often how these bargains work?
They usually reward us before they reveal what they’ve cost.
Outwardly, the family has everything they once thought they wanted.
But beneath all of that prosperity, the debt is still waiting to be collected.
And so, just as quietly as the bargain was made…
Three prosperous years pass.
And on the day the devil returns, the maiden washes, draws a white circle around herself, and waits.
Every time I read that scene, I stop. It’s such an unusual image. Why washing? Why a circle? Why white? Fairy tales are incredibly economical. They almost never waste details like this.
And here’s what’s even more interesting. Nobody tells her to do it. There isn’t a priest standing beside her. There isn’t a ritual she’s been instructed to perform. Somehow…she just knows.
The father doesn’t know and the mother can’t stop what’s happening but the daughter knows exactly what to do.
Throughout Scripture and in sacred traditions around the world, water is much more than something that cleanses us. It almost always symbolizes something flowing from above to below, bringing life wherever it goes. It’s no accident that wisdom, spirit, grace, and revelation are so often described as living water. Water reminds us that our deepest knowing doesn’t originate with us. It comes from God.
The circle has no beginning and no end. Again and again, it points us toward wholeness, toward the sacred center, toward the One from which everything comes.
And white isn’t the absence of color at all. It’s the fullness of light, holding the entire spectrum within itself. Once again, the story seems to be pointing us back to the One who contains the all.
I don’t think the story is teaching us to perform a ritual. I think it’s showing us a relationship. Before anyone in the story can protect the maiden, she’s already rooted in something deeper than her circumstances.
When the devil reached for the maiden, he couldn’t take her.
Her father cannot save her and the mother cannot stop what’s coming.
The king hasn’t even entered the story yet.
And yet the devil cannot touch her.
Why?
Because she’s already connected to the one place the devil has no access to. Her direct relationship with God.
And I think that’s one of the most beautiful truths hidden in this story. Before anyone else can tell us who we are, protect us, or rescue us, we already have access to the deepest source of wisdom we’ll ever need.
The story tells that the devil cannot take her because she was pure of heart and because he dared not cross the white circle she had drawn around herself.
I think the story is quietly revealing something we’ll see again and again throughout these ancient stories. There is a place within every human being that can never be separated from God.
The circle isn’t magical. It’s symbolic. It reminds us that while the world can wound us, betray us, and even convince us to forget who we are, there is something at the very center of us that remains beyond the reach of everything outside ourselves.
The father can make a selfish bargain. He can betray his daughter. He can wound her deeply. But he cannot sever her relationship with God.
The devil then said to the father “Keep water away from her, so she cannot wash herself any more. Otherwise I have no power over her.”
The father obeyed. Every bucket of water was taken away so the maiden would have no way to wash herself.
But when the devil returned the following day, her hands were still sparkling clean not because someone had secretly brought her water, but because she had washed them with her own tears.
I think that’s one of the most beautiful images in the entire story.
The father could remove every external source of water, but he could not remove the well that God had already placed within her.
We will see tears become a defining moment in many stories, including later in this one. But for now, simply notice what the story is showing us.
Tears are water.
And throughout Scripture and sacred traditions, water is one of the primary symbols of our connection to God. It brings life wherever it goes.
If the maiden represents our inner world, then her tears become the way that inner world begins to flow outward.
She isn’t numbing what she feels, pretending she’s okay, or hardening her heart. She’s allowing herself to experience what is happening within her.
One of the greatest tragedies of our culture is that we’ve forgotten how to do the same. We stay busy. We distract ourselves. We numb ourselves with work, entertainment, food, sex, alcohol, social media, or whatever helps us avoid sitting with what we’re actually feeling. We push grief away, suppress anger, and bury sadness, often without even realizing we’re doing it.
The story simply asks us to notice that the maiden doesn’t.
She allows herself to feel.
Now, I know… none of us woke up this morning thinking, “You know what I really hope I do today? Have a really good cry.”
If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably reorganize a closet, answer emails, scroll social media, fold three loads of laundry, and convince yourself you’re being incredibly productive before you’ll willingly sit down with what’s actually going on inside.
But maybe that’s exactly the problem.
Our emotions are a little like those notifications on your phone. You can keep swiping them away all day long, but they’re still there. In fact, the longer you ignore them, the more they seem to pile up until eventually they demand your attention.
Remember the words from the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
Tears are one of the ways we bring forth what is within us.
When we cry, we’re allowing what has been hidden to come into the light. We’re no longer pretending we’re fine when we’re not. We’re allowing ourselves to acknowledge the grief, the fear, the loneliness, the heartbreak, the anger… whatever has been waiting patiently beneath the surface.
I’ve already dedicated an entire episode to this once we finish walking through the Handless Maiden because learning to feel my feelings has probably been one of the most transformative parts of my own journey.
But I’ll tell you this much…
There was a time in my life when I was so disconnected from what was happening inside me that I often couldn’t even name what I was feeling. I could analyze what was happening all day long, but actually recognizing what I was feeling was an entirely different story.
Today, it’s almost the opposite. My inner world has become one of my greatest guides. But that didn’t happen overnight. It happened because I slowly learned to stop running from what I was feeling and start listening to it.
And isn’t that really what Know Thy Soul is about? Learning to stop running from what’s happening within us so we can begin hearing the quiet wisdom that’s been there all along.
Feeling our feelings is one of the most powerful things we as humans can do and tears help us do that.
Tears aren’t weakness, they are honesty.
Enraged, the devil demanded that the father cut off his daughter’s hands.
The miller was horrified and answered, “How could I chop off my own child’s hands!”
Then the devil threatened him, saying, “If you do not do it, then you will be mine, and I will take you yourself.”
Terrified and unable to face the consequences of his own bargain, the father turned to his daughter and said that he had no choice and asked her to help him in his need, and forgive him of the evil that I am going to do to her.
Every time I read that line, I find myself talking back to the story.
No…you did have a choice.
It just wasn’t the choice you wanted.
The father wasn’t trapped. He was being asked to bear the consequences of his own actions, but instead he placed them on the shoulders of the one person who loved him enough not to refuse.
His own daughter.
This is the beginning of what many would call a father wound but that wound can come from more than just a biological father. The father in this story is more than a single man. He represents the patriarchal way of seeing the world itself—a way of living that values control over relationship, external success over inner wisdom, and power over relationship. For many, that wound begins with a biological father. For others, it comes through a mother, a teacher, a church, a spouse, a workplace, or an entire culture. The people may be different, but the pattern is often the same.
And the young maiden, in all her innocence, has been taught that obedience is what makes her worthy of love. That sacrificing herself for the people she loves is simply what a good daughter does. She doesn’t yet know that love never asks us to betray what is sacred within us.
I imagine the maiden looking at her father and saying, “Okay, Daddy. If this is what it takes…” She isn’t fighting him or trying to protect herself. She’s trying to protect him. She’d rather lose her hands than lose her father.
And isn’t that what so many of us have done? We become the good daughter, the good son, the good wife, the good husband, the good employee, the good friend. We convince ourselves that if sacrificing a part of ourselves keeps someone else from hurting, then that’s what love requires.
But this isn’t love.
It’s self-abandonment.
And with that, the maiden willingly raised her arms, and her father severed her hands.
I just want you to sit with that image for a moment. (pause)
A father cutting off the hands of his own daughter.
It’s one of the most disturbing images in all of fairy tale literature. It’s probably not hard to understand why The Handless Maiden never became one of Disney’s classic fairy tales. Even Disney, with all of its difficult stories, may have decided that watching a father cut off his own daughter’s hands was simply too much.
And yet, somehow this story has survived for centuries.
Why?
The greatest stories don’t survive because they’re literally true. They survive because they reveal truths about what it means to be human.
The central image of this story is the hands but the physical hands are not really the point. They’re the symbol.
I want you to think for a moment about how much of your life happens through your hands. They’re how you pick up your child when they’re crying, wipe away someone’s tears, prepare a meal, write the words you need to say, reach for someone you love, and pull away when something no longer feels safe.
We use our hands to build things, create things, care for people, protect ourselves, and shape the life around us. They are one of the main ways we take what lives inside of us—our love, our ideas, our choices, our boundaries—and bring it into the physical world.
So when the maiden loses her hands, the story isn’t asking us to imagine a young woman with a physical disability. It’s asking us to look beneath the surface.
It’s asking what happens when the deepest part of ourselves can no longer act.
What happens when we stop listening to our feelings…
when our compassion no longer moves us to act…
when our intuition is pushed aside…
when our deepest knowing is no longer the voice guiding our lives…
What happens when fear becomes louder than love…
when control becomes louder than trust…
when survival becomes louder than wisdom…
when the ego becomes louder than the soul?
The soul doesn’t disappear. It simply loses its ability to govern our lives.
For many people, those wounds begin in childhood. Sometimes they come through a father. Sometimes through a mother. Sometimes through abuse, neglect, manipulation, or control. And sometimes they come through schools, religious communities, relationships, or a culture that teaches us certain parts of ourselves are not welcome.
The people and circumstances may be different, but the effect is often the same. We slowly learn that some part of who we are isn’t safe to express, so we stop reaching with it.
Whether it’s the exile from Eden, Israel wandering in the wilderness, the wasteland surrounding the Grail Castle, or the prodigal son in the far country, our oldest stories keep returning to the same place. They’re describing what life looks like when we become so absorbed in the outer world that we lose touch with the deeper source of life beneath it.
We begin living only for what we can acquire, accomplish, measure, control, or consume. We mistake the visible world for the whole of reality, while forgetting the invisible One from whom life itself flows.
And maybe this is also how these stories show us that wounds are passed from one generation to the next. The father has already forgotten what is truly precious, so without ever intending to, he teaches his daughter to do the same. His exile becomes her exile. His wound becomes her wound. And the pattern will continue for generations until someone becomes conscious enough to stop passing it on.
Then, on the third day, the devil returned to finally take the maiden. But once again she had wept over the stumps where her hands had been, and again, because of her tears, he could not take her. The story says that after the third day, he lost all rights to her.
I love that phrase.
Not because the devil suddenly became weaker, but because the maiden never lost the one thing that mattered most. She remained connected to the source of life itself.
She had been wounded. She had been betrayed. She had lost her hands. But she had not lost the deepest part of herself, the part that remained connected to God.
And I think that’s one of the deepest truths this story is trying to show us. There are things that can be taken from us, and there are things that cannot. Our circumstances can change. Our bodies can be wounded. People can betray us. But the deepest part of who we are remains connected to God unless we ourselves choose to turn away from that relationship.
Three days in a row, the devil came for her. Three days in a row, he left empty-handed.
Furious, the devil departed.
The father turned to his daughter and told her how he had gained great wealth because of her. Then he made her a promise that she would never have to want for anything again because he would provide for her and she would never have to work another day in her life.
And every time I read that part, I think, he still doesn’t understand.
He’s offering her almost the very same bargain the devil did. “Stay here, and I’ll give you security. I’ll give you comfort. I’ll give you everything you need.”
But beneath all of those promises is something much deeper.
If she stays, nothing has to change. The father never has to face the consequences of what he’s done.
He gets to keep the wealth while she still carries the wound.
As long as she stays, the old way of living survives. The father continues to govern while the daughter’s voice remains unheard. Nothing ever has to change.
This is a patriarchal way of living. Yes, it has often looked like a world ruled by men. But even more deeply, it’s a world in which the masculine way of knowing has been elevated while the feminine has been silenced. Authority is valued over relationship. Control over compassion. Certainty over intuition. The outer world over the inner one.
But if she remains dependent on him for everything, she’ll never discover that the deepest source of her life has never depended on him. She’ll never grow her own hands. She’ll never discover her own authority. She’ll never learn to trust the wisdom God has already placed within her. And it will come at the cost of her freedom.
The father still believes that what she needs most is someone to provide for her but something within her knows better. She knows that she cannot heal in the same place that wounded her.
But the maiden knew she could not remain, saying she must leave and seek people who would show her sympathy, to which her father replied that such people were seldom found.
Let’s be honest for a minute.
I think a lot of us hear those words and immediately translate them into something else.
We think, “She’s looking for a man.”
And maybe that’s because so many of us have been taught that the story ends when we finally find the right person. We imagine that love will be the thing that finally makes us whole, that if we can just find someone who sees us and chooses us, everything else will somehow fall into place.
Perhaps that’s why the pattern feels so familiar. In Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge, God tells Eve, “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” We’ll spend an entire series exploring those words because I think they’re among the most misunderstood in all of Scripture. But for now, simply notice the pattern. Already, the father has ruled over her in a way that costs her everything. And as we’ll soon discover, unless something changes within us, we’re often drawn into relationships that repeat the very patterns we’re trying to escape.
I think that’s one of the reasons so many fairy tales end with a marriage. And as this podcast will continue to explore, there’s a profound reason for that. Healthy partnership between two whole human beings is one of the greatest gifts we can experience. But wounded partnership is another story entirely, as The Handless Maiden is about to show us.
And I have to say, having grown my own hands back, the maiden actually has a pretty good dating strategy.
But in a wounded state, have you ever noticed how quickly our attention shifts from, “Do I even like him?” to, “I hope he likes me?” Suddenly we’re analyzing every text message, replaying every conversation, wondering if we said too much or not enough, and slowly handing someone else the authority to decide whether we’re worthy of love.
Modern psychology has a name for this. It’s called anxious attachment.
We’ve all been there. But ladies, as you’ll see in the next part of the story… this doesn’t work.
Let me show you the questions I ask myself now.
Do I even like him? Is he actually a good man? How does he treat people when he has nothing to gain? Can he listen without becoming defensive? Is he curious about who I really am? Does he celebrate my growth, or does he need me to stay small? Is he connected to his own inner world?
Because if you’re spending all your energy trying to get someone to choose you, you’re probably asking the wrong questions.
The first question should always be: Can this person meet me with compassion?
Because if they can’t… none of the rest of it really matters.
And spoiler alert… we’re eventually going to spend an entire series watching Perceval discover exactly this. Because I don’t think compassion is just what women are looking for. I think it’s what every human being longs to encounter, and one of the greatest qualities the masculine learns to embody.
The only problem is that the maiden is still young. She knows she’s looking for compassion, but she doesn’t yet know what genuine compassion feels like. She has an open heart but undeveloped boundaries. She hasn’t yet learned the difference between someone who truly sees her and someone who simply needs her. She hasn’t yet learned that it’s not her job to rescue everyone around her or sacrifice herself to keep a relationship intact. She doesn’t yet realize that real compassion never asks us to abandon what is sacred within ourselves. It doesn’t require us to disappear so someone else can feel whole.
She has compassion, but she doesn’t yet have the wisdom to know when compassion has become self-abandonment. That kind of wisdom only comes through living, through suffering, and through the long journey she’s about to begin.
And I wonder if her search is really so different from our own.
When we’ve been wounded, which all of us have, isn’t there a part of us that believes if we can just find the right person… someone who finally understands us… someone who loves us enough… someone who chooses us… then maybe the wound will finally disappear?
And yet, perhaps one of the hardest truths any of us ever have to learn is that no other person can complete the journey for us. No one else can grow our hands back. That is something each of us must do for ourselves.
As we’ll soon discover in the next episode, the maiden’s journey isn’t over simply because another person enters the story. In many ways, it’s only just beginning, because the people we meet often reflect the places within ourselves that are still waiting to heal.
But at its core, her search for someone with compassion begs the question: Isn’t that really what every human being is looking for? Not someone to rescue us. Not someone to tell us who we should become. Simply someone who can truly see us. Someone who can meet our suffering with compassion instead of judgment. Someone who can hold space for who we are without asking us to become someone else first. Someone who wants to help us become more fully ourselves rather than needing us to remain who we’ve always been. Someone who isn’t threatened by our growth. Someone who doesn’t need us to remain wounded in order to feel needed themselves. Someone who rejoices when we grow our own hands.
Perhaps that’s why Perceval’s question mattered so much. Healing didn’t begin because he found the right answer. It began because he finally learned to ask the right questions. The right questions, asked from a compassionate heart, have the power to begin healing what years of silence never could.
And isn’t it heartbreaking that the father can’t imagine a world where people like that exist?
If you grew up in the same kind of world that I did, you’ll probably recognize the truth and sadness in his words. People who can truly see us…people who know how to meet another person’s suffering with compassion…they really are hard to find.
And maybe that’s exactly why these stories matter.
They don’t just help us recognize our own wounds.
They teach us how to stop passing them on.
They show us another way of being.
They teach us how to become the kind of people the maiden was searching for all along.
But I’m getting ahead of myself…
The maiden has spent her life adapting to the world around her. She has learned to remain pure, obedient, and willing to sacrifice herself for the people she loves. But she has not yet learned that her life belongs to her too.
She has not yet learned that love does not require her disappearance. She has not yet learned that she is allowed to protect what is sacred within her.
Maybe no one ever asked you to cut off your hands, but somewhere along the way you learned to set down your voice, your desires, your anger, your intuition, or your dreams because keeping the relationship felt more important than keeping yourself.
And when we live that way long enough, we can begin to believe that we no longer have a choice. We forget that we can speak, that we can leave, that we can create a different life, and that we can trust the quiet wisdom within us because we’ve spent so many years believing our survival depended on abandoning it.
But the story also reminds us that something within her is still alive, and that same something lives within each of us. It knows when we can no longer remain where we were wounded. It knows when the life behind us can no longer hold who we are becoming. And even when we cannot see the path ahead, it quietly calls us forward—not because we feel ready or have a plan, but because some deeper wisdom knows it’s time to go.
Despite her fathers warning about sympathetic people being hard to find, she left anyway. With her arms wrapped in white linen and nothing but the clothes she was wearing, the maiden turned and walked away from everything she had ever known.
Alone and handless, she wandered into the forest.
And that is where we are going to leave her for now because sometimes the deepest journeys don’t begin when we find our way. They begin when we finally leave behind the life that can no longer allow us to become who we were created to be.
There’s a line from Ted Lasso that I absolutely love: “Fairy tales do not begin, nor do they end, in the dark forest.”
Because the forest is where every great transformation begins.
And next week…
we’ll follow her there.
Until next time, friends…
May you know thy soul.
It already knows the way.
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