I met the Baba Yaga in Africa. She came in the guise of that forceful, disrupting furor, El Nino. She grasped at me through that lost baby gazelle I had to turn over to forces I didn’t understand. She flashed her toothless grin at me beside that Hadza hut where I unconsciously released my grandchild to the whimsical forces of life. 

The Baba Yaga is a goddess figure in Russian fairy tales for the dark side of the Good Mother. She eats people who think life should bring them only happiness, people who ask “why” in the face of suffering, people for whom the dark side is not acceptable. She meets us in any descent into the underworld where we are temporarily overwhelmed by unconscious forces that disorient and leave us breathless. Her intention is to disorient us so we may stop and listen.

I learned of this Russian goddess/hag from Marion Woodman and Robert Bly in their book, The Maiden King. The Baba Yaga is a fairy tale metaphor for sacred energy — the life force that pulls us to the Center and makes us look beyond the illusions we create in our efforts to feel safe. Encountering her is our initiation into wholeness: death in the service of life. She holds the wisdom of what our dark moments are trying to teach us. She knocks us around, causes a shift at our center, and demands we face her and answer her question. 

Baba Yaga questions abound in spiritual history. Like the question posed to the Rich Young Man in Jesus’ parable: You say you want to live? Can you give up – let go of — the one thing you prize most? Or, the question to Abraham: You want life’s fullness? Can you give up, let go of your only son, your heart? Unless you’re first willing to give me your heart’s delight, she taunts, your last holdout, you’ll never be free to understand the full mystery of what I have to teach you. Give up control and I’ll empower you with a life far beyond your present understanding.

Baba Yaga’s question is posed to each of us: Do you live your life out of an awareness that your very breath is something given you from beyond? That every day, every choice, invites you to deeper living, to be used to its fullest, with grateful heart? Or, do you live your life by random acts? As Woodman suggests, if we answer with a simple answer and not with the subtlety of our whole life experience, the Baba Yaga will devour us and spit us out. She is no easy lady.

I went to Africa to see the wonders of nature uncontaminated, to see wildlife grazing in pastoral beauty, to experience something beyond my usual way of knowing. What I got was something I could never have consciously chosen. The Baba Yaga chose it for me.

She spun me around in my soul like El Nino spun around our plans until I had no resistance left for her questions: Can you let go of your expectations of what you would experience here and live in the moment I give you? Can you give over to life your precious grandchild and allow him the life meant for only him? Your own vision of what your life is supposed to be? Do you trust that the universe provides exactly what each needs in order to be whole?

There was no simple answer to hold her at bay. I have to answer with my life, with the ongoing, unknown, unpredictable drama of my life. I have to look in the mirror and answer those questions every day. She stands right behind me, her cackle ever present in my soul.

I am reminded of something Carl Jung wrote in his Memories, Dreams, and Reflections: “The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise, I am dependent upon the world’s answer.” (318)

Jung mused that an “impersonal archetype” was “pressing in on him,” a question he couldn’t clearly articulate. It’s as if the universe wants us to figure out, with her, more appropriate questions that open up possibilities ahead for the future of all of us. We are not personally picked out to do this by ourselves, for the human race, but our piece of the truth – our experience of archetypal energy, our personal coming to consciousness – opens a door for all of us.

This happens with our inevitable encounter with the Baba Yaga, in whatever form it takes in our life. She knocks us around, forces us to look at questions we wouldn’t choose ourselves, pushes us to grapple with eternal questions we’d rather not have to face, always sacrificing for the new in us that is trying to evolve. She comes in the service of our wholeness.

“Don’t take my harrowing interventions into your life personally,” the Baba Yaga, according to Bly, shouts at us. “It’s not personal; it’s archetypal.” It is that sacred energy in life that leads us from the Center from which we came back to the Center, the Still Point, into which we return at the end of our days — that sacred space in which Mother has been all along.

Don’t clutch or cling to anything, she reminds us. Trust in the eternal wisdom that everything flows, is supposed to flow, into that eternal river, as it should, and as you will, at death. These daily deaths you experience along the way – Don’t take them personally. They are for your good, a holy remembrance of that sacred arch we all have to journey as part of life’s unfolding.

The Baba Yaga had roughed me up enough in Africa that, by the time I arrived at the airport in Atlanta and was met with my daughter’s unexpected news, there was nothing left in me to take her decision to move from Atlanta personally. I knew this was not a personal bad joke played on me by a menacing universe. It was just one more visitation from that sacred life energy that burns away in us anything that is not essence. 

I know she’s out there, the Baba Yaga, just around the bend. It doesn’t have to be in some exotic land or obvious display of disruption that she spins her magic. She knows just when you need for her to drop down into your life. She knows just what question you need to address.

Remember. Don’t take it personally.