A book I’ve been reading,
re-reading and dipping into for years, is “Women Who Run With The Wolves”, by
Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I’ve blogged about it before.
I received my first copy as
a gift from a high school friend, round about the late 1990s, or early in the
year 2000. I know I was married at the time. I read it and was fascinated. A
few years later, I read it again, and a few years later, again. I realised that
it was a work of literature that not only spoke to me, but that spoke to me in
a different way everytime I turned to it, depending on what was happening in my
life. I think I’ve read the complete book about four or five times, and have
been dipping into it, reading particular chapters, or sections, for at least 10
years.
The book started out as the doctoral
thesis of the writer. It’s a book about the natural woman, and how modern
society has stripped her of her natural (wild) essence, intuition, and power. Estes
blends Jungian psychology with her knowledge gained from living in and studying
many cultures, all of which prize living naturally, as well as the role of
storytelling. In this seminal book, she analyses various fairy tales, using
this blended approach.
More than all of that, she
writes in a way that, once I start reading, I can’t stop. And I read her work
with a pencil, underlining passages that speak to me. Besides her very
down-to-earth approach, she also has a poetic style of writing, rich in
metaphor. Can you imagine her analyisis of a story like The Red Shoes, about
not giving up your natural vibrancy, and of recognizing people who come into
your life, seemingly to help you, but whose first task is to remove your red
shoes? Yes – and she does this in a whole chapter! It’s one of my favourites,
along with Bluebeard. One of the things that fascinate me about her book is
that most of the fairy tales are stories I encountered in my childhood, and
understood as a child would. Reading her analyses as an adult, as a woman, as a
woman who’s had many life experiences, as a mother, as a divorced woman, as an
artist, as an artist who has to practise her art in her free time, as a person
who has opened her life to many new beginnings, is more profound than I can
express.
When I re-read the book - or
parts of it – now, I can see how I’ve allowed it to shape my way of looking at
life, and of living. Having just made a huge change in my life – leaving
teaching, re-entering the private sector, and doing a job I’ve never done
before – I’ve felt the urge to go back to the book, to immerse myself in her
magnetic writing, and to experience the wonderful sense of calm, of coming
home, that I get whenever I read it.
And what did I find,
precisely where my bookmark was? An analysis of the story “Sealskin, Soulskin”,
about returning home after having spent some time trying really hard to be who
you’re not.
I’d like to quote a
section that resonates with me, as I continue to process the emotional tidal
wave of my recent changes. It’s about being deeply restless for change, not
necessarily knowing what you want,
but trusting your instincts, and going where life leads you. I wasn’t raised to
live like this – I found, over many years, that this was who I was, and how I
liked to live my life. Over time, I have steadily begun to be more instinctual
(natural, ‘wild’), and less invested in what others think is right for me.
“These
images of going about in and through the dark carry an age-old message that
says. ‘Do not fear ‘not knowing’. In various phases and periods of our lives,
this is as it should be. This feature of tales and myths encourages us to
follow the call, even when we’ve no idea of where to go, in what direction, or
for how long. All we know is that, like the child in the tale, we must sit up,
get up, and go see. So maybe we stumble around in the dark for a while trying
to find what calls us, but because we have managed to not talk ourselves out of
being summoned by the wild one, we invariably stumble over the sealskin. When
we breathe up that soul-state, we automatically enter the feeling state of ‘This
is right. I know what I need.’
For
many modern women, it is not the driving about in the dark looking for the
soulskin that is most fearsome. Rather it is the diving into the water, the
actual return to home, and especially the actual leave taking, that are far
more formidable. Though women come back into themselves, draw on the sealskin,
pat it closed, and are all ready to go, it is hard to go; really, really hard
to cede, to hand over whatever we’ve been so busy with, and just leave.” Clarissa Pinkola Estes
