Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
Love for the Soul
Hold out. Hold on. Do your work. You will fin
d your own way. At the end of th
e tale, the swans recognize the duckling as one of their own before he does. That is rather typical of the exiled women. After all that hard wandering, they manage to wander over the frontier into home territory and often don’t realize for a time that people’s looks have ceased to be disparaging and are more often neutral, when they are not admiring and approving.
One would think that now that they are on their own psychic ground they would be deliriously happy. But, no. For a time at least, they are terribly distrustful. Do these people really regard me? Am I really safe here? Will I be chased away? Can I really sleep with both eyes closed now? Is it all right to act like ... a swan? After a time, these suspicions fall away and the next stage of coming back to oneself begins: acceptance of one’s own unique beauty; that is, the wild soul from which we are made.
There is probably no better or more reliable measure of whether a woman has spent time in ugly duckling status at some point or all throughout her life than her inability to digest a sincere compliment. Although it could be a matter of modesty, or could be attributed to shyness—although too many serious wounds are carelessly written off as “nothing but shyness”
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—more often a compliment is stuttered around about because it sets up an automatic and unpleasant dialogue in the woman’s mind.
If you say how lovely she is, or how beautiful her art is, or compliment anything else her soul took part in, inspired, or suffused, something in her mind says she i
s undeserving and you, the complimentor
, are an idiot for thinking such a thing to begin with. Rather than understand that the beauty of her soul shines through when she is being herself, the woman changes the subject and effectively snatches nourishment away from the soul-self, which thrives on being acknowledged, on being seen.
So that is the final work of the exile who finds her own: to not only accept one’s own individuality, one’s specific identity as a certain kind of person, but also to accept one's beauty ... the shape of one’s soul and the fact that living close to that wild creature transforms us and all that it touches.
When we accept our own wild beauty, it is put into perspective,
má
we are no longer poignantly aware of it anymore, but neither would we forsake it or disclaim it either. Does a wolf know how beautiful she is when she leaps? Does a feline know what beautiful shapes she makes when she sits? Is a bird awed by the sound it hears when it snaps open its wings? Learning from them, we just act in our own true way and do not draw back from or hide our natural beauty. Like the creatures, we just are, and it is right.
For women this searching and finding is based on the mysterious passion that women have for what is wild, what is innately themselves. We have been calling the object of this yearning Wild Woman ... but even when women do not know her by name, even when they do not know where she resides, they strain toward her. they love her with all their hearts. They long for her, and that longing is both motivation and locomotion. It is this yearning that
catees
us to search for Wild Woman and find her. It is not as hard as one might first imagine, for Wild Woman is searching for us too. We are her young.
=====
The Mistaken Zygote
Over the years
of my practice it became clear that this issue of belonging sometimes needs to be hailed from a lighter side, for levity can shake some of the pain out of a woman. I began to tell my clients this story I created called “The Mistaken Zygote,” mainly as a way to help them look at their outsider material with a more empowering metaphor. This is how the story goes.
Have you ever wondered how you managed to end up in such an odd family as yours? If you have lived your life as an outsider, as a slightly odd or different person, if you are a loner, one who lives at the edge of the mainstream, you have suffered. Yet there also comes a time to row away from all that, to experience a different vantage point, to emigrate back to the land of one’s own kind.
Let there be no more suffering, no more attempting to figure where you went wrong.
The mystery of why you were born
to
whomever you were born
to is over, finis,
terminado,
finished. Rest for a moment at the bow and refresh yourself in the wind coming from your homeland.
For years women who carry the mythic life of the Wild Woman archetype have silently cried, “Why
am I so different? Why was I born
into such a strange [or unresponsive] family?'' Wherever their lives wanted to burst forth, someone was there to salt the ground so nothing could grow. They felt tortured by all the proscriptions against their natural desires. If they were nature children, they were kept under roofs. If they were scientists, they were told to be mothers. If they wanted to be mothers, they were told they'd better fit the mold entirely. If they wanted to invent something, they were told to be practical. If they wanted to create, they were told a woman's domestic work is never done.
Sometimes they tried to be good according to whichever standards were most popular, and didn't realize till later what they really wanted, how they needed to live. Then, in order to have a life, they experienced the painful amputations of leaving their families, the marriages they had promised under oath would be till death, the jobs that were to be the springboards to something more stultifying but better paying. They left dreams scattered all over the road.
Often the women were artists who were trying to be sensible by spending eighty percent of their time doing labor that aborted their creative lives on a daily basis. Although the scenarios are endless, one thing remains constant: they were pointed out very early on as “different’’ with a negative connotation. In actual fact, they were passionate, individual, inquiring, and in their right instinctive minds.
So the answer to Why me. Why this family, Why am I so different, is, of course, that there are no answers to these questions. Still, the ego needs something to chew on before it will let go, so I propose three answers regardless. (The analysand may pick whichever one she likes, but she must pick at least one. Most pick the last one, but any are sufficient) Prepare yourself. Here they are.
We are born the way we are, and into th
e odd families we came through I
) just because (almost no one will believe this), 2) the
Self has a plan, and our pea-brains are too tiny to parse it (many find this a hopeful idea), or 3) because of the Mistaken Zygote Syndrome
(well...
yes,
maybe...
but what is that?).
Your family thinks you’re an alien. You have feathers, they have scales. Your idea of a good time is the forest, the wilds, the inner life, the outer majesty. Their idea of a good time is folding towels. If this is so for you in your family, then you are a victim of the Mistaken Zygote Syndrome.
Your family moves slowly through time, you move like the wind; they are loud, you are soft, or they are silent and you sing. You know because you just know. They want proof and a three- hundred-page dissertation. Sure enough, it’s the Mistaken Zygote Syndrome.
You’ve never heard of that? Well see, the Zygote Fairy was flying over your hometown one night, and all the little zygotes in her basket were hopping and jumping with excitement.
You were indeed destined for parents who would have understood you, but the Zygote Fairy hit turbulence and, oops, you fell out of the basket over the wrong house. You fell head over heels, head over heels, right into a family that was not meant for you. Your “real” family was three miles farther on.
That is why you fell in love with a family that wasn’t yours, and that lived three miles over. You always wished Mrs. and Mr. So- and-So were your real parents. Chances are they were meant to be.
This is why you tap-dance down the hallways even though you come from a family of television spores. This is why your parents are alarmed every time you come home or call. They worry, “What will she do next? She embarrassed us last time, God only knows what she will do now. Ai!” They cover their eyes when they see you coming and it is not because your light dazzles them.
All you want is love. All they want is peace.
The members of your family, for their own reasons (because of their preferences, innocence, injury, constitution, mental illness, or cultivated ignorance), are not so good at being spontaneous with the unconscious, and of course your visit home conjures the trickster archetype, the one who stirs things up. So before you’ve even broken bread together, the trickster madly dances by just dying to drop one of her hairs into the family stew.
Even though you don’t mean to upset the family, they will be upset no matter what. When you show up, everyone and everything seems to go quite mad.
It is a sure sign of wild zygotes in the family if the parents are offended all the time and the children feel as though they can never do anything right.
The unwild family wants only one thing, but the Mistaken Zygote is never able to figure out what that is, and if she could, it would make her hair stand up in exclamation points.
Prepare yourself, I will tell you this big secret. This is what they really want from you, that mysterious, momentous thing.
The unwild want consistency.
They want you to be exactly the same today as you were yesterday. They wish you not to change with the days, but to remain as at the beginning of Steaming Time.
Ask the family if they want consistency and they will answer affirmatively. In all things? No, they will say, only in the things that matter. Whatever these things are that count in their value systems, they are too often anathema to the wild nature of women. Unfortunately, “the things that matter” to them are not cohesive with “the things that matter” to the wild child.
Consistency in manner is an impossible sentence for Wild Woman, for her strength is her adaptation to change, her innovation, her dancing, her howling, her growling, her deep instinctual life, her creative fire. She does not show consistency through uniformity, but rather through her creative life, through her consistent perceptions, quick-sightedness, flexibility, and deftness.
If we were to name only one thing that makes the Wild Woman what she is, it would be her responsiveness. The word
response
comes from the Latin “to pledge, to promise”—and that is her strong suit. Her perceptive and deft responses are a consistent promise and pledge to the creative forces, be it
Duende
, the goblin-spirit behind passion, or Beauty, Art, or the Dance, or Life. Her promise to us, if we will not thwart it, is that she will cause us
to live. She will cause us to live fully alive, responsively and consistently so.
In this way, the Mistaken Zygote gives her fealty, not to her family but to her interior Self. This is why she feels tom. You might say her wolf mother has hold of her tail, her worldly family has hold of her arms. It is not long before she is crying in pain, snarling and biting herself and others, and finally, the deathly quiet. You look in her eyes and you see
ojos
del
cielo
, sky eyes, the eyes of a person who is no longer here.
While socialization for children is an important thing, to kill the interior
criatura
is to kill the child. The West Africans recognize that to be harsh with a child is to cause its soul to retreat from its body, sometimes just a few feet away, other times many days’ walk away.
While the needs of the child’s soul must be balanced with her need for safety and physical care and with carefully examined notions about “civilized behavior,” I always worry for those who are too well behaved; they often have that “faint soul” look in their eyes. Something is not right. A healthy soul shines through the persona on most days and blazes through on others. Where there is gross injury, the soul flees.
Sometimes it drifts or bolts so far away that it takes masterful propitiation to coax it back. A long time must pass before such a soul will trust enough to return, but it can be accomplished. The retrieval requires several ingredients: naked honesty, stamina, tenderness, sweetness, ventilation of rage, and humor. Combined, these make a song that calls the soul back home.
What are soul needs? They lie in two realms: nature and creativity. In these realms lives
Na’ashjé’ii Asdzúá
, Spider Woman, the great creation spirit of the Dineh. She gifts her people with protection. Her purview, among others, is teaching the love of beauty.
The soul’s needs are found in the hovel of those three old (or young, depending on what day it is) sisters—Clotho, Lachesis, and
Atropos
—who make the red thread, meaning the passion, of a woman’s life. They weave the ages of a woman’s life, tying them off as each is completed and the next is begun. They are found in the woods of the huntress spirits, Diana and Artemis, both of
whom are wolf women who represent the ability to hunt, track, and recover various aspects of the psyche.
The soul’s needs are governed by
Coatlicue
, the Aztec Goddess of female self-sufficiency, who gives birth squatting and square on her feet. She teaches about the lone woman’s life. She is a maker of babies, meaning new potential for life, but she is also a death mother who wears skulls on her skirt, and when she walks they sound like the rattles on a snake, for they are skull rattles, and because skull rattles sound also like rain, through sympathetic resonance, they draw down rain for the earth. She is the protec- toress of all lone women and those so
mágia,
so filled with powerful thoughts and ideas, they must live out at the edge of who-knows-where in order not to daze the village too much.
Coatlicue
is the especial protectoress of the female outsider.
What is the basic nutrition for the soul? Well, it differs from creature to creature, but here are some combinations. Consider them psychic macrobiotics. For some women air, night, sunlight, and trees are necessities. For others, words, paper, and books are the only things that satiate. For others, color, form, shadow, and clay are the absolutes. Some women must leap, bow, and run, for their souls crave dance. Yet others crave only a tree-leaning peace.
There is yet another issue to be dealt with. Mistaken Zygotes learn to be survivors. It is tough to spend years among those who cannot help you to flourish. Being able to say that one is a survivor is an accomplishment. For many, the power is in the name itself. And yet comes a time in the individuation process when the threat
on
trauma is significantly past. Then is the time to go to the next stage ate survivorship, to healing and
thriving
.
If we stay as survivors only without moving to thriving, we limit ourselves and cut our energy to ourselves and our power in the world to less than half. One can take so much pride in being a survivor that it becomes a hazard to further creative development. Sometimes people are afraid to continue beyond survivor status, for it is just that—a status, a distinguishing mark, a “damn- straight, bet your buttons, better believe it” accomplishment.
Instead of making survivorship the centerpiece of one’s life, it is better to use it as one of many badges, but not the only one. Humans deserve to be dripping in beautiful remembrances,
medals, and decorations for having lived, truly lived and triumphed. Once the threat is past, there is a potential trap in calling ourselves by names taken on during the most terrible time of our lives. It creates a mind-set that is potentially lim
iting. It is not good to base th
e soul identity solely on the feats and losses and victories of the bad times. While survivorship can make a woman tough as beef jerky, at some point, allying with it exclusively begins to inhibit new development.
When a woman insists “I am a survivor” over and over again once the time for its usefulness is past, the work ahead is clear. We must loosen the person’s clutch on the survivor archetype. Otherwise nothing else can grow. I liken it to a tough little plant that managed—without water, sunlight, nutrients—to send out a brave and
ornery
little leaf anyway. In spite of it all.
But thriving means, now that the bad times are behind, to put ourselves into occasions of the lush, the nutritive, the light, and there to flourish, to thrive with bushy, shaggy, heavy blossoms and leaves. It is better to name ourselves names that challenge us to grow as free creatures. That is thriving. That is what was meant for us.
Ritual is one of the ways in which humans put their lives in perspective, whether it be Purim, Advent, or drawing down the moon. Ritual calls together the shades and specters in people’s lives, sorts them out, puts them to rest. There is a particular image from
El Día de los Muertos
,
Day of the Dead, celebrations that can be applied to help women in the transition from surviving to thriving. It is based on the rite of
ofrendas
, which are altars to those who have passed from this life.
Ofrendas
are tributes, memorials, and expressions of deepest regard for the loved ones no longer on this earth. I find it helps many women to make an
ofrenda
to the child they once were, rather like a testament to the heroic child.
Some women choose objects, writings, clothing, toys, mementos from events, and other symbols from childhood that will be portrayed. They arrange the
ofrenda
in their own way, tell the story that goes with it or not, and then leave it up for as long as they wish. It is the evidence of their past hardship, valor, and triumph over adversity.
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