Women Who Run With the Wolves

[image from whitewolfphotos.blogspot.com]

I am reading Clarissa Pinkola Estes these days, in response to the stirrings and mutterings of my inner wolf woman, who had been sleeping for a time, and who seems to have awakened. Here is a stirring quote from Clarissa, whose life has been a study of the wildish nature of women:

"Once women have lost her and then found her again, they will contend to keep her for good. Once they have regained her, they will fight and fight hard to keep her, for their creative lives blossom; their relationships gain meaning and depth and health; their cycles of sexuality, creativity, work and play are re-established; they are no longer marks for the predations of others; they are entitled equally under the laws of nature to grow and to thrive. Now their end-of-the-day fatigue comes from satisfying work and endeavors, not from being shut up in too small a mindset, job or relationship. They know instinctively when things must die and when things must live; they know how to walk away and they know how to stay.

When women reassert their relationship with the wildish nature, they are gifted with a permanent and natural watcher, a knower, a visionary, an oracle, an inspiratrice, an intuitive, a maker, a creator, an inventer, and a listener, who guide, suggest and urge vibrant life in the inner and outer worlds. When women are with the Wild Woman, the fact of that relationship glows through them. This wild teacher, wild mother, wild mentor supports their inner and outer lives, no matter what......

Wild Woman is the health of all women.....She is what she is, and she is whole....If they are suppressed, she struggles upward. If women are free, she is free.....no matter how many times she is pushed down, she bounds back up again. No matter how many times she is forbidden, quelled, cut back, diluted, tortured, touted as unsafe, dangerous, mad and other derogations, she emanates upward in women, so that even the most quiet, even the most restrained woman keeps a secret place for Wild Woman. Even the most repressed woman has a secret life, with secret thoughts and secret feelings, which are lush and wild, that is, natural. Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape."

Sounds good to me, kids!