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May 6, 2024 - February 8, 2025
Where there is a shaming secret, there is always a dead zone in the woman’s psyche, a place that does not feel or respond properly to her own continuing emotional life events or to the emotional life events of others. The dead zone is greatly protected. It is a place of endless doors and walls, each locked with twenty locks, and the homunculi, the little creatures in women’s dreams, are always busy building more doors, more dams, more security, lest the secret escape.
A woman who carries a secret is an exhausted woman.
There are general wounds, and there are wounds that are specific to males, and there are wounds that are specific to females. Abortion leaves a scar. Miscarriage makes a scar. Losing a child of any age makes a scar. Sometimes being close to another person lays down scar tissue.
The dead zone spread from the center of the secret outward, not only overtly covering commemorative events, but then stretching to celebratory events, and even beyond. All of these familial and friendship events were disparaged by the woman, who overtly considered them a waste of time.
Most often we wound others where, or very close to where, we have been wounded ourselves.
With changes of weather the scar can and will ache again. That is the nature of a true grief.
But we know now what humans have known instinctively for centuries: that certain hurts and harms and shames can never be done being grieved; the loss of a child through death or relinquishment being one of the most, if not the most, enduring.
Although there will be scars and plenty of them, it is good to remember that in tensile strength and ability to absorb pressure, a scar is stronger than skin.
It is also a good idea for women to count their ages, not by years, but by battle scars.
As the Lakota painted glyphs on animal hides to record the events of winter, and the Nahuatl, the Maya, and the Egyptians had their codices recording the great events of the tribe, the wars, the triumphs, women have their scapecoats, their battle coats.
Let there be no mistake about it, for you have earned it by the hard choices of your life. If you are asked your nationality, ethnic origin, or blood line, smile enigmatically. Say, “Scar Clan.”
If a story is seed, then we are its soil.
“participation mystique”—a term borrowed from anthropologist Levy-Bruhl—and it is used to mean a relationship wherein “a person cannot distinguish themselves as separate from the object or thing they behold.” Among Freudians, it is called “projective identification.”
In mythos, the teaching of endurance is one of the rites of the Great Wild Mother, the Wild Woman archetype.
We know that we will have to burn to the ground in one way or another, and then sit right in the ashes of who we once thought we were and go on from there.
But, another side of our natures, a part more desirous of languor, hopes it won’t be so, hopes the hard work can cease so slumber can resume.
But this desire for a bargain over hard work is so human and so common that it is amazing to find a person alive who has not made the compact.
“Touch sun.” After the dream, every day, wherever I went, I put my back, or the sole of my foot, or my palm on the suncats—the rectangles of sunlight—on walls, floors, and doors. I leaned and rested on those golden shapes. They acted as a turbine to my spirit. I cannot say how, only that it was so.
Goddesses combed the hair of mortal women and loved them so.
As women, we touch many people. We know our palm is a kind of sensor. Whether in a hug or a pat or just a touch on the shoulder, we take a reading of the persons we touch. If we are connected in any way to La Que Sabe, we know what another human feels by sensing them with our palms. For some, information in the form of images and sometimes even words comes to them, informing them of the feeling state of others. One might say there is a form of radar in the hands.
I am amazed how little women cry nowadays, and then apologetically. I worry when shame or disuse begins to steal away such a natural function. To be a flowering tree and to be moist is essential, otherwise you will break. Crying is good, it is right.
enantiodromia—meaning to flow backward.
Her new parents are the wind and the road.
She is outside the seeming happy families of the villages, outside the warm room and out in the cold; that is her life now.20 This becomes the living metaphor for women on the journey. We begin somehow not to feel a part of the life that carnivals about us.
The calliope seems far away, the barkers, the hucksters, the whole magnificent circus of outer life wobbles and then falls to dust as we descend farther into the underworld.
The psyche of a woman must constantly sow, train, and harvest new energy in order to replace what is old and worn out.
“I was once of the world, and yet I am not of this world.”
She may live in the topside world days, but the work of transformation occurs in the underworld, and she is able to live in both, like La Que Sabe, “she who knows.” All this is in order to learn her way, in order to clear her way, to the true and wild self.
Our work is to interpret this Life/Death/Life cycle, to live it as gracefully as we know how, to howl like a mad dog when we cannot—and to go on, for ahead lies the loving underworld family of the psyche that will embrace and assist us.
The challenge of loving unappealing aspects of ourselves is as much of an endeavor as any heroine has ever undertaken.
Nevertheless, the old knowing is universal knowing, eternal and immortal learning, which will be as relevant five thousand years from now as it is today, and as it was five thousand years ago. It is archetypal knowing, and that kind of knowledge is timeless. It is a good idea to remember that the predator is timeless also.
There was a phrase my grandmother used, “veiling the bowl.” It meant to put a white cloth over a bowl of kneaded dough to cause the bread to rise. The veil for the bread and the veil for the psyche serve the same purpose. There is a potent leavening in the souls of women in descent. There is a powerful fermenting going on. To be behind the veil increases one’s mystical insight.
to bear being misunderstood, to be severed again and again from love
to wait
to re-trace and grasp her childhood, girlhood, and womanhood
Don’t be distracted by burning matches and fantasies like the Little Match Girl.
If you don’t go out in the woods, nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.
Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods, nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin. Go out in the woods, go out. Go out in the woods, go out, Go out in the woods,
To my mind, story, in every way possible, thrives only on hard work—intellectual, spiritual, familial, physical, and integral. It never comes easy. It is never “just picked up,” or studied in one’s “off times.”
Sacrifice is not a great striving or even a substantial discomfort. It is in somewise “entering a hell not of one’s own making,” and returning from it, fully chastened, fully focused, fully devoted. No more, no less.
