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 encourages humans to remain multi-lingual; fluent in the languages of dreams, passion, and poetry. She whispers from night dreams, she leaves behind on the terrain of a woman’s soul a coarse hair and muddy footprints. These fill women with longing to find her, free her, and love her.
She is ideas, feelings, urges, and memory. She has been lost and half forgotten for a long, long time. She is the source, the light, the night, the dark, and the daybreak. She is the smell of good mud and the back leg of the fox. The birds tell us secrets belonging to her. She is the voice that says, ‘This way, this way.’”
Pg. 12 Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.
When you are on the right path, you feel it in your bones. For me, fear and anxiety usually accompany as well. They are companions that I acknowledge their presence, stop, sit down and pat their head, give them a reassuring hug, tell them that ‘everything is going to be okay’, and then I continue. Sometimes, I continue with them lugging on my legs like reluctant two year olds. Other times, they are content to just peek over my shoulder from time to time.
Either way, the important thing is to continue.
I told Samantha Wilson – Founder of Wild Women Community that I was not comfortable calling myself a ‘wild woman’. My mother would not approve.
She told me in return that wild did not mean women with ‘wanton hair, desperate eyes, mismatched clothes dancing menacingly’ as I had mentioned in my introduction article but that she intended it in the sense that Clarissa Pinkola Estes intends it.
I had previously heard of Estes’s book Women Who Run with the Wolves (haven’t we all?) but had not read. So I ordered it.
And lo’ and behold within the first few pages, I read the above passages speaking of the smell of good mud and the back leg of the fox. Whoa! I had just been speaking of muddy foxes and the importance of diving into life and ‘getting muddy‘ in my article “What Does the Fox Say”?
I started to read her book, and chills went up and down my spine: the cells calling to me this way, this way. It was as if an old friend, who I did not even know I had, appeared at my doorstep. I opened the door, and something that I felt was lost, was found.
I read about misplaced Zygotes and how wild women without supportive environments often end up proudly wearing their ‘survival badges’ (me!), but how important it is to move from surviving to thriving and how rituals can help with that.
My good friend calls and offers to do a Healing Ceremony for me. My Moon Lodges that I do on new moons and full moons begin to attract new Mamas.
My husband tells me everyone thinks I am becoming weird.
I worry and think perhaps he is right. I should tone it down, shut up and go back to doing my best to ‘fit in’.
I think of the difference between surviving, trudging through each day, weighed down by the consequences of all of my choices, struggling, but showing off my worn muscles with a weary smile.
And then I think of thriving.
That feeling you get when you know you are on the right path: when things feel alive, when the tree waves to you, the mama duck paddles along with her babies following, the full moon shines on the river, a smile from someone who ’gets’ you.
Or even if they don’t quite get you,
They Allow You.
And I decide to keep going.
I am not as self-assured as a lot of the women here. Some days, I feel the weight of journeying my whole life, but lately, I feel myself on a new path. As if I’m taking everything I’ve been taught up until now and returning it, ‘sorry, not for me’.
Perhaps you would like to come along.
This article is also published at the below location; please check out the Wild-Woman site.
http://wild-woman.com/2014/06/the-voice-that-says-this-way-this-way-karen-moon/
* Picture credit to: http://society6.com/product/vulpes-vulpes-zl2_print#1=45
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