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May 6, 2024 - February 8, 2025
If you want to re-summon Wild Woman, refuse to be captured.24 With instincts sharpened for balance—jump anywhere you like, howl at will, take what there is, find out all about it, let your eyes show your feelings, look into everything, see what you can see. Dance in red shoes, but make sure they’re the ones you’ve made by hand. I can promise that you will become one vital woman.
Calmness is not the same as solitude.
It is not exactly the rightness of a person or thing or its wrongness that causes the theft of our soulskins, it is the cost of these things to us. It is what it costs us in time, energy, observation, attention, hovering, prompting, instructing, teaching, training.
Psychologically, to be without the pelt causes a woman to pursue what she thinks she should do, rather than what she truly wishes. It causes her to follow whoever or whatever impresses her as strongest—whether it is good for her or not. Then there is much leaping and little looking. She is jocular instead of incisive, laughs things off, puts things off. She pulls back from taking the next step, from making the necessary descent and holding herself there long enough for something to happen.
We learn the world, but lose our skins.
Proofs that are of a feeling or mystical nature do not very often sit well with the ego.
The ego is crude in comparison to the soul. Its way of doing things is usually not evocative or sensitive.
“suckling a dead litter,”
Long ago the word alone was treated as two words, all one.
For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need.
It is not the quality of our creative products that we are concerned with through this story, but the individual’s recognition of the value of one’s unique gifts and the methods for caring for the creative life that surrounds those gifts. Always behind the actions of writing, painting, thinking, healing, doing, cooking, talking, smiling, making, is the river, the Río Abajo Río; the river under the river nourishes everything we make.
So we see that the river here symbolizes a form of feminine largess that arouses, excites, makes passionate. Women’s eyes flash as they create, their words lilt, their faces flush with life, their very hair seems to shine all the more. They are excited by the idea, aroused by the possibilities, impassioned by the very thought, and at that point, like the great river, they are meant to flow outward and continuously on their own unparalleled creative path. That is the way women feel fulfilled.
A farmer is a real farmer when she looks out over the land and plans the spring crops. A runner is real when she takes the first step, a flower is real when it is yet in its mother stem, a tree is real when it is still a seed in the pine cone. An old tree is a real living being. Real is what has life.
To create one must be able to respond. Creativity is the ability to respond to all that goes on around us, to choose from the hundreds of possibilities of thought, feeling, action, and reaction that arise within us, and to put these together in a unique response, expression, or message that carries moment, passion, and meaning.
To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth.
Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down. We can put out our skirts and shirts to catch as much as we can carry.
“I love my creative life more than I love cooperating with my own oppression.”
If we were to abuse our children, Social Services would show up at our doors. If we were to abuse our pets, the Humane Society would come to take us away. But there is no Creativity Patrol or Soul Police to intervene if we insist on starving our own souls. There is just us. We are the only ones to watch over the soul-Self and the heroic animus.
When women are out in the cold, they tend to live on fantasies instead of action.
Friends who love you and have warmth for your creative life are the very best suns in the world.
They comfort her—but that is far different from nurture. Nurture moves you from one place to another.
frozen woman without nurture is inclined to turn to incessant “what if” daydreams. But even if she is in this frozen condition, especially if she is in such a frozen condition, she must refuse the comforting fantasy. The comforting fantasy will kill us dead for certain.
But in this case, because fantasy overwhelms action, nothing new occurs.
Rushing is not the thing to do. As we see in the tale, sitting and rocking is the thing to do. Patience, peace, and rocking renew ideas. Just holding the idea and the patience to rock it are what some women might call a luxury. Wild Woman says it is a necessity.
There is a powerful saying: Ella habla por en medio en las piernas, “She speaks from between her legs.”
Gross losses of power, meaning loss of certainty that we are worthy of care, respect, and concern, cause extreme sorrow and angry childhood vows to, once grown, never allow oneself to be harmed like that ever again.
In Buddhism there is a questing action called nyübu, which means to go into the mountains in order to understand oneself and to remake one’s connections to the Great.
Figuratively translated, the phrase means “Thank you, Illusion.” In Japanese, zaishö means a clear way of looking at matters that interfere with deeper understandings of ourselves and the world.
To lift the veils makes one strong enough to tolerate what life is about; and to see into the patterns of events, people, and things; and eventually to
learn not to take the first impression so deadly seriously, but to look behind and beyond.
When we are able to see through these illusions, which in Buddhism would be called “barriers to enlightenment,” we are able to discover the hidden side of rage.
Before Zen, mountains were mountains and trees were trees. During Zen, mountains were thrones of the spirits and trees were the voices of wisdom. After Zen, mountains were mountains and trees were trees.
Life is supposed to become mundane again. Yet she has the bounty of her experience on the mountain. She has knowing.
Yet one day in the future, a something—a look, a word, a tone of voice, a feeling of being patronized, unappreciated, or manipulated against one’s will, one of these—will crop up again. Then her residue of pain will catch fire.6
Women who are tortured often develop a dazzling kind of perception that has uncanny depth and breadth.
having lived through a gross repression causes gifts to arise that compensate and protect.
In that respect a woman who has lived a torturous life and delved deeply into it definitely has inestimable depth.
Women have died a thousand deaths before they are twenty years old.
To make descansos means taking a look at your life and marking where the small deaths, las muertes chiquitas, and the big deaths, las muertes grandotas, have taken place. I like to make a time-line of a woman’s life
Descansos is a conscious practice that takes pity on and gives honor to the orphaned dead of your psyche, laying them to rest at last.
Descansos mark the death sites, the dark times, but they are also love notes to your suffering.
When a woman has trouble letting go of anger or rage, it’s often because she’s using rage to empower herself.
It means to be tired all the time, to carry a thick layer of cynicism, to dash the hopeful, the tender, the promising.
It means to be afraid you will lose before you open your mouth.
You decide what debt you will now say needs not be paid further.
Forgiveness is the culmination of all foregoing, forebearing, and forgetting. It does not mean giving up one’s protection, but one’s coldness.
It is better for the soul-psyche to closely limit time and repartee with people who are difficult for you than to act like an unfeeling mannequin.
How does one you know if she has forgiven? You tend to feel sorrow over the circumstance instead of rage, you tend to feel sorry for the person rather than angry with him.
You are free to go. It may not have turned out to be a happily ever after, but most certainly there is now a fresh Once upon a time waiting for you from this day forward.
said nothing that a human may have done, is doing, or might do, is outside the bounds of forgiveness. Nothing.
