Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The longing comes when one realizes one has given scant time to the mystic cookfire or to the dreamtime, too little time to one’s own creative life, one’s life work, or one’s true loves.

This speaks to me...It feels like it's where I am

The comprehension of this Wild Woman nature is not a religion but a practice. It is a psychology in its truest sense: psukh¯e/psych, soul; ology or logos, a knowing of the soul.

Did not know this definition of psychology

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.

How do I find my pack in this vagabond life? Did I already have it and lost it or left It?

She is the one we leave home to look for. She is the one we come home to. She is

Wow

walk straight ahead for that last hard mile. Go up and knock on the old weathered door. Climb up to the cave. Crawl through the window of a dream. Sift the desert and see what you find. It is the only work we have to do.

Profound

And with that, the mother’s breath fell into the depths of her body where it gathered up her soul and rushed out from between her lips, and the mother was dead.

What a beautiful way to describe the last breath

Her breasts were bounding while theirs dwindled from meanness. She

Oh so meanness makes you flat chested….haaaah

We may have been taught to set aside acute insight in order to get along. However, the reward for simply being nice6 in oppressive circumstances is to be mistreated all the more.

Yes...teachers

women who are raised in families that are not accepting of their gifts often set off on tremendously big quests—over and over, and they do not know why. They feel they must have three Ph.D.s or that they have to hang upside down from Mount Everest, or that they must execute all manner of dangerous, time-consuming, and money-eating endeavors to try to prove to their families that they have worth. “Now will you accept me? No? Okay (sigh), watch this.”

I can name a few of these people. I have to say I wish I had a little more of that drive without having to also accept the past trauma that came with it