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February 18 - November 8, 2023
When we assert intuition, we are therefore like the starry night: we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes.
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 possible.
she lives backward and forward in time simultaneously, correcting for one side by dancing with the other.
If a woman holds on to this gift of being old while she is young and young while she is old, she will always know what comes next. If she has lost it, she can yet reclaim it with some purposeful psychic work.
Life in the desert is small but brilliant and most of what occurs goes on underground. This is like the lives of many women.
To restrain the natural predator3 of the psyche it is necessary for women to remain in possession of all their instinctual powers.
All creatures must learn that there exist predators. Without this knowing, a woman will be unable to negotiate safely within her own forest without being devoured. To understand the predator is to become a mature animal who is not vulnerable out of naïveté, inexperience, or foolishness.
Women who are gullible or those with injured instincts still, like flowers, turn in the direction of whatever sun is offered.
The door in the tale is portrayed as a psychic barrier, as a kind of sentry that is placed in front of the secret.
What stands behind? What is not as it appears? What do I know deep in my ovarios that I wish I did not know? What of me has been killed, or lies dying?
Hel is the Goddess of life and death. She shows the dead how to live backward. They become younger and younger until they are ready to be reborn and re-released back into
God became more conscious6 as humans became more conscious.
It is a tale about finally cutting down and rendering the natural predator of the psyche.
Dreams are portales, entrances, preparations, and practices for the next step in consciousness, the “next day” in the individuation process.
Letting the pressure build between who one is taught to be and who one really is. Ultimately working toward letting the old self die and the new intuitive self be born.
the reward for simply being nice6 in oppressive circumstances is to be mistreated all the more.
dolls emanate both a holiness and mana7—an
Being bound to one’s intuition promotes a confident reliance on it, no matter what. It changes a woman’s guiding attitude from “what will be, will be” to “let me see all there is to see.”
Talismans are reminders of what is felt but not seen, what is so, but is not immediately obvious.
Not so long ago, women were deeply involved in the rhythms of life and death. They inhaled the pungent odor of iron from the fresh blood of childbirth. They washed the cooling bodies of the dead as well. The psyches of modern women, especially those from industrial and technological cultures, are often deprived of these close-up and hands-on blessed and basic experiences.
To wash something is a timeless purification ritual.
The renewal, the revivifying, takes place in the water, in the re-discovering of what we really hold to be true, what we really hold sacred.
A wise woman keeps her psychic environ uncluttered.
Gradually the structures of the psyche are overgrown until they finally are but a hidden archeologic ruin in the psyche’s unconscious.
Whatever can happen to a garden can happen to soul and psyche—too
Although sweetness can fit into the wild, the wild cannot long fit into sweetness.
Women often crave a mate who has this kind of endurance and the wit to continue trying to understand her deep nature. When she finds a mate of that substance, she will give lifelong loyalty and love.
The momentum of deep work is similar to sexual arousal in that it begins from ground zero, accelerates in plateaus, becomes sustained and intense. If the plateaus are interrupted harshly (imagine a loud and unexpected noise), one must begin all over again.
The first question is this: “What do you want?” Almost everyone asks some version of this, just as a matter of course. But there is yet one more essential question, and that is: “What does your deeper self desire?”
The instinctual nature has the miraculous ability to live through all positive boon, all negative consequence, and still maintain relationship to self, to others.
something can, should, and must be born and when it must die.
Poets understand that there is nothing of value without death. Without death there are no lessons, without death there is no dark for the diamond to shine from.
What must I give more death to today, in order to generate more life? What do I know should die, but am hesitant to allow to do so? What must die in me in order for me to love? What not-beauty do I fear? Of what use is the power of the not-beautiful to me today? What should die today? What should live? What life am I afraid to give birth to? If not now, when?
“Ignorance is not knowing anything and being attracted to the good. Innocence is knowing everything, and still being attracted to the good.”
“Shatter my heart so a new room can be created for a Limitless Love.”
the fisherman is letting his heart break—not break down, but break open.
song will bring to them the things they need as well as transform or banish those things they do not want.
when there is song in a tale or mythos, we know that the gods are being called upon to breathe their wisdom and power into the matter at hand.
Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths.
Death is the cause of all tears and all laughter.
protectionism creates nothing, selfishness creates nothing, holding on and screaming effects nothing.
Girl children who display a strong instinctive nature often experience significant suffering in early life. From the time they are babies, they are taken captive, domesticated, told they are wrongheaded and improper.
In some parents’ fantasy whatever child they have will be perfect, and will reflect only the parents’ ways and means. If the child is wildish, she may, unfortunately, be subjected to her parents’ attempts at psychic surgery over and over again, for they are trying to re-make the child, and more so trying to change what her soul requires of her. Though her soul requires seeing, the culture around her requires sightlessness. Though her soul wishes to speak its truth, she is pressured to be silent.
So the issues of the exiled wildish woman are usually twofold: inner and personal, and outer and cultural.
The mother bends to the desires of her village, rather than aligning herself with her child.
It is not uncommon in punitive cultures for women to be torn between being accepted by the ruling class (her village) and loving her child, be it a symbolic child, creative child, or biological child. This is an old, old story. Women have died psychically and spiritually for trying to protect the unsanctioned child, whether it be their art, their lover, their politics, their offspring, or their soul life. At the extreme, women have been hanged, burned, and murdered for defying the village proscriptions and sheltering the unsanctioned child.
The most destructive cultural conditions for a woman to be born into and to live under are those that insist on obedience without consultation with one’s soul, those with no loving forgiveness rituals, those that force a woman to choose between soul and society, those where compassion for others is walled off by economic tiers or caste systems,
When a mother is forced to choose between the child and the culture, there is something abhorrently cruel and unconsidered about that culture.
mothers should surrender their sons to the nation for the sake of war, and be glad of it. There are the forced “repatriations” that continue yet today.
For a long time in our culture, the father—unfortunately, and for whatever reasons9—was unable or unwilling to “be there” for anyone, most sorely, even himself.
