On Wild Woman,
Wounds and Wolves, and Beauty and Blessing
As soon as I heard that she endorsed aerial shooting of wolves, I knew. I did not need to read articles like this one: http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2008/09/08/sarah_palin_wolves/ to understand, to discern, to know. I did not need to read all the facts which have emerged regarding Sarah Palin's history or her current stand on other issues.
It was similar to when I learned of John McCain's vote for torture(http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/17/7110/) or when I heard McCain sing "Bomb Iran" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-zoPgv_nYg). I knew then, too. And perhaps I knew even more deeply that Sarah Palin, like John McCain, is a deeply wounded human being because of the wounds which I have faced, healed, transformed within myself. I know what it is like to live with a broken heart, a heart weighed down with unacknowledged, unresolved, unhealed trauma, loss, shame, rage, grief, and fear. I know what it is like to be instinct injured, to see through distorted eyes, and to cause harm to myself and others. And through this knowing, I can understand how it is that Sarah Palin can live in such a Wild Place and yet endorse the killing of wolves and the plundering of the environment. I can clearly see the paradoxes, the contradictions, the hypocrisy, and the vulnerability thinly veiled behind the "values" and the tough exterior she presents and the stated and not stated positions she represents within herself and in our nation and the world.
Because of my work of healing, awakening, and gradually becoming more conscious, I can recognize more easily today both the deep injuries and wounds and the authentic strength, beauty, and sacredness in others. I can sense when a heart is open or when it is closed down because I know what it is like to live with both myself. This journey of opening my heart ever more deeply is on-going and will continue throughout this lifetime and beyond...
Because of my work of healing, awakening, and gradually becoming more conscious, I can recognize more easily today both the deep injuries and wounds and the authentic strength, beauty, and sacredness in others. I can sense when a heart is open or when it is closed down because I know what it is like to live with both myself. This journey of opening my heart ever more deeply is on-going and will continue throughout this lifetime and beyond...
As a result of my own journey, it didn't take much for me to recognize the wounds, the injured instincts, the compromised truths, the arrogance shielding shame, the lack of substance hiding behind the surface veneer in both Sarah Palin and John McCain. In Sarah Palin I could see the paradox of a woman who comes from such wondrous Wild Land and yet who has surrendered her own Wild Nature to the forces that would have her tame, restrained, under control, and UNwild. And I know how dangerous a woman is who is cut off from her deeper knowing and her true instincts and power. I can recognize a captive woman. For I have been there myself.
So it struck me when I heard that Sarah Palin "is an enthusiastic hunter who has proposed legislation and cash incentives to encourage aerial wolf gunning" (http://www.slate.com/id/2199140/). When I heard this, what I felt was this deep pain in my heart. And, without knowing her, I knew her just the same. I knew that Sarah Palin, like the man who chose her to be his running mate, was a deeply wounded human being. I knew that this woman was not a healthy woman. And an unhealthy woman is not able to be an advocate for other women, for children, for the planet. Again, I know this not just in my mind or in the logical ways of knowing, but rather in my deepest being because this has been my personal experience. I understand when a heart is open, strong, and healthy and when it is not.
I am deeply respectful of the many paths which can lead to greater consciousness and a greater opening of one's heart and connection to one's soul. As Matthew Fox states, there is one River but many wells. For me, and several years into my healing journey, wolves began to appear. They were emerging in my clothing and jewelry, in the photographs and paintings on my walls, in figures and sculptures around my home. I went to Wolf Haven outside Olympia, Washington and howled with real wolves. I did not initially know why it was that I was drawn to wolves. And I did not need to know. I surrendered into the deep mystery of what I was drawn to.
Then I finally purchased the book a friend had been recommending to me for a year -- Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. And I couldn't put it down. I actually read it back to back. Twice. I drank it in. Deeply. I was given a deeper understanding of what in many ways cannot be described in words. That is the magic, the mystery, the power, and the soulfulness behind the great storytellers and what it is that they bring forward from the depths of timelessness and beyond. Through this process, I was forever and profoundly changed.
While there is much that is circulating that is of importance regarding the issues, character, and judgment of all those who are running for the highest offices in this country, for me it is important to not leave off my own small contributions to the on-going conversations. And in doing so, it comes to me strongly at this time to share the powerful voice, courage, wisdom, beauty, heart and soul of one of my mentors, Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Not many have spoken more clearly about wounds and wolves, beauty and blessing, and the Wild Woman who has embraced her injuries and awakened to her true power and her true knowing.
I will always be eternally grateful to Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Women Who Run With the Wolves. I leave you with this glimpse of what has personally held such meaning for me and what has been so helpful in a deeply soulful way on my journey in this lifetime...
Wildlife and Wild Woman are both endangered.
Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt. For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and the wildlands. For several thousand years, as soon and as often as we turn our backs, it is relegated to the poorest land in the psyche. The spiritual lands of Wild Woman have, throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed, and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others.
It is not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades. It is not so difficult to comprehend why old forests and old women are viewed as not very important resources. It is not such a mystery. It is not so coincidental that wolves and coyotes, bears and wildish women have similar reputations. They all share related instinctual archetypes, and as such, both are erroneously reputed to be ingracious, wholly and innately dangerous, and ravenous...
The studies of wolves Canis lupus and Canis rufus are like the history of women, regarding both their spiritedness and their travails.
Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mate and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.
Yet both have been hounded, harassed, and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors. They have been targets of those who would clean up the wilds as well as the wildish environs of the psyche, extincting the instinctual, and leaving no trace of it behind. The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar...
When we lose touch with the instinctive psyche, we live in a semi-destroyed state and images and powers that are natural to the feminine are not allowed full development... A woman's issues of soul cannot be treated by carving her into a more acceptable form as defined by an unconscious culture...
The wild nature has a vast integrity to it. It means to establish territory, to find one's pack, to be in one's body with certainty and pride regardless of the body's gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one's behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one's cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as we can...
From the viewpoint of archetypal psychology as well as the storytelling tradition, Wild Woman is the female soul. Yet, she is more; she is the source of the feminine. She is all that is of instinct, of the worlds both seen and hidden -- she is the basis. We receive from her a glowing cell which contains all the instincts and knowing needed for our lives...
She is the Life/Death/Life force, she is the incubator. She is intuition, she is far-seer, she is deep listener, she is loyal heart.
She is the one who thunders after injustice.
She leaves footprints wherever there is one woman who is fertile soil.
With Wild Woman as ally, as leader, model, teacher, we see, not through two eyes, but through the eyes of intuition which is many-eyed. When we assert intuition, we are therefore like the starry night: we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes...
So it struck me when I heard that Sarah Palin "is an enthusiastic hunter who has proposed legislation and cash incentives to encourage aerial wolf gunning" (http://www.slate.com/id/2199140/). When I heard this, what I felt was this deep pain in my heart. And, without knowing her, I knew her just the same. I knew that Sarah Palin, like the man who chose her to be his running mate, was a deeply wounded human being. I knew that this woman was not a healthy woman. And an unhealthy woman is not able to be an advocate for other women, for children, for the planet. Again, I know this not just in my mind or in the logical ways of knowing, but rather in my deepest being because this has been my personal experience. I understand when a heart is open, strong, and healthy and when it is not.
I am deeply respectful of the many paths which can lead to greater consciousness and a greater opening of one's heart and connection to one's soul. As Matthew Fox states, there is one River but many wells. For me, and several years into my healing journey, wolves began to appear. They were emerging in my clothing and jewelry, in the photographs and paintings on my walls, in figures and sculptures around my home. I went to Wolf Haven outside Olympia, Washington and howled with real wolves. I did not initially know why it was that I was drawn to wolves. And I did not need to know. I surrendered into the deep mystery of what I was drawn to.
Then I finally purchased the book a friend had been recommending to me for a year -- Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. And I couldn't put it down. I actually read it back to back. Twice. I drank it in. Deeply. I was given a deeper understanding of what in many ways cannot be described in words. That is the magic, the mystery, the power, and the soulfulness behind the great storytellers and what it is that they bring forward from the depths of timelessness and beyond. Through this process, I was forever and profoundly changed.
While there is much that is circulating that is of importance regarding the issues, character, and judgment of all those who are running for the highest offices in this country, for me it is important to not leave off my own small contributions to the on-going conversations. And in doing so, it comes to me strongly at this time to share the powerful voice, courage, wisdom, beauty, heart and soul of one of my mentors, Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Not many have spoken more clearly about wounds and wolves, beauty and blessing, and the Wild Woman who has embraced her injuries and awakened to her true power and her true knowing.
I will always be eternally grateful to Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Women Who Run With the Wolves. I leave you with this glimpse of what has personally held such meaning for me and what has been so helpful in a deeply soulful way on my journey in this lifetime...
Wildlife and Wild Woman are both endangered.
Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt. For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and the wildlands. For several thousand years, as soon and as often as we turn our backs, it is relegated to the poorest land in the psyche. The spiritual lands of Wild Woman have, throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed, and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others.
It is not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades. It is not so difficult to comprehend why old forests and old women are viewed as not very important resources. It is not such a mystery. It is not so coincidental that wolves and coyotes, bears and wildish women have similar reputations. They all share related instinctual archetypes, and as such, both are erroneously reputed to be ingracious, wholly and innately dangerous, and ravenous...
The studies of wolves Canis lupus and Canis rufus are like the history of women, regarding both their spiritedness and their travails.
Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mate and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.
Yet both have been hounded, harassed, and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors. They have been targets of those who would clean up the wilds as well as the wildish environs of the psyche, extincting the instinctual, and leaving no trace of it behind. The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar...
When we lose touch with the instinctive psyche, we live in a semi-destroyed state and images and powers that are natural to the feminine are not allowed full development... A woman's issues of soul cannot be treated by carving her into a more acceptable form as defined by an unconscious culture...
The wild nature has a vast integrity to it. It means to establish territory, to find one's pack, to be in one's body with certainty and pride regardless of the body's gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one's behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one's cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as we can...
From the viewpoint of archetypal psychology as well as the storytelling tradition, Wild Woman is the female soul. Yet, she is more; she is the source of the feminine. She is all that is of instinct, of the worlds both seen and hidden -- she is the basis. We receive from her a glowing cell which contains all the instincts and knowing needed for our lives...
She is the Life/Death/Life force, she is the incubator. She is intuition, she is far-seer, she is deep listener, she is loyal heart.
She is the one who thunders after injustice.
She leaves footprints wherever there is one woman who is fertile soil.
With Wild Woman as ally, as leader, model, teacher, we see, not through two eyes, but through the eyes of intuition which is many-eyed. When we assert intuition, we are therefore like the starry night: we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes...
Howl often...
Molly
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