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!

BOUQUETS TO STRONG WOMEN

My daughter, Lisa, and her brood

Stephanie

Bouquets to strong women:
to single moms with hungry kids,
who say "this is the pits,
but I'll do the best I can",
who work their hearts out
to make sure their kids
have food and shoes,
even if there's never
enough of anything, ever.

To women with bright minds and hearts
trapped inside of bodies that dont work,
who know that sometimes
when we cant choose
the situation we are in,
the only choice we have left
is the attitude
with which we live the life
we have been given,
and who do so with grace
and with a "yes I can!"
because the alternative
is death
and we choose life,
knowing it is a precious gift,
whatever package
it comes wrapped in.

To worn out women,
tired,
at fifty and at sixty,
after a lifetime of struggle
and hard work,
who have not just
survived
but have
transcended,
who face old age alone,
without money,
but with heart
and hope
and humor,
because when the choice is
to either laugh or cry,
we just crack up laughing,
life's so funny;
who gave up waiting for Prince Charming
and are outside chopping our own wood,
because we need the heat,
writing poems about courage
in our heads at the same time.

To all of us
who've come through the fire
and the pain
with whole hearts
still able to see
the beauty of the sky,
I send bouquets!!!
I love the day to day courage,
the smiling eyes,
the wise and worn out faces,
and the "keep on truckin'" attitude
of strong women.

WOMEN FOOD AND LOVE - and cancer

My sister sent me this as a birthday card - humorous because I used to make jokes about winding up a bag lady. I stopped joking about it when I recognized that living on the very edge of financial survival wasnt going to end any time soon, and I didnt want it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Just finished watching Oprah. Her guest was Geneen Roth who wrote Women Food and God. I recently read the book and she is definitely onto something, in stating when we eat when we are not hungry we are eating to numb ourselves from having to face the underlying issue we are trying to avoid.

At the end of the show, an obviously frustrated woman who wasnt climbing the corporate ladder as fast as she wanted to, asked "What do you do when you know help isnt coming soon?" A question of relevance to me, for sure.

Oprah provided a profound truth, and had some of her audience in tears, when she responded, as well as I can remember:

"Your relationship to the Source, to what you may call God, or may not call God, or that you may not even know is God, is what it is about. When you can surrender, and stand in that place honoring where you are, and where you have come from, and how far you have come, and stand in that honor, with gratitude for all your blessings, THE VIBRATION OF YOUR LIFE WILL CHANGE."

A profound truth that obviously resonated with everyone. Gratitude for blessings....surrender....acceptance.........not that we wont still strive, but just to not fight with the present, to flow with it. To be all right with ourselves, now, in this moment, in trust.

My son Jeff called today. I sat in my porch swing, watching the hummingbirds come to the feeder, listening to him sort through his processing. He is wondering when it is okay to be "done" with dredging up the past, if he should "just move on."

I said, "I remember reaching a point around your age where I was just tired of suffering. It doesnt mean the past didnt happen, that it isnt still there, in memory. It just means I was done with suffering about it. I wanted to move on and live."

"You just got over it?"

"It is a process, that seems to happen around forty" (where my son is today), "where you finally accept what happened, know it is behind you, become more comfortable inside your own skin and just let a lot of the old Stuff go."

Hopefully it helped. Friday I go over to the city to be with him as he goes through another round of chemo. He has his Cat scan tomorrow, to see how the lymph nodes are responding. Hopefully well. Two more chemos in August and then he is done. For now. They say treatment will give him a couple of years, and then the cancer will return and he will go thru chemo again. But he has what they say is a "highly treatable" cancer, "non-life-threatening". All good news.

I am always so impressed, when I visit the oncology ward, where my son sits in a row of tilted chairs, the IV hooked up to him, how positive and cheerful the atmosphere is. One might expect it to be a depressing place, everyone sad and grim. But, for the most part, the people we meet and chat with during his treatments are positive, cheerful Can-Do people, just doing what comes next, the next thing they have to do to be well and live their lives. I would call it courage but it feels more effortless than that - it feels life-affirming, it is "what do I do next to keep on truckin' this part of the highway?"

It is a privilege to be with them all. And one of those heroes is my son. We never expected, on the difficult journey we have made together, that we would be walking this particular bit of the highway. However, since we are here, we're taking it all in stride and staying in the Now. No room for negativity, no time to indulge in histrionics. No time for fear. What my son needs right now is a steady companion to sit at his side and be fully there for him.

As I drive down-Island, walk on the ferry, take busses and seabusses and skytrains to the hospital to be with him, I know it is my privilege and honor to be his mother.