Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said the tailor. “Just pull the
inseam down with your right hand, and everything will be perfect” The customer agreed and purchased the suit.
The next day he wore his new suit with all the accompanying hand and chin “alterations.” As he limped through the park with his chin holding down his lapel, one hand tugging at the vest, the other hand grasping his crotch, two old men stopped playing checkers to watch him stagger by.
“M’Isten,
oh, my God!” said the first man. “Look at that poor crippled man!”
The second man reflected for a moment, then murmured, “
Igen
, yes, the crippling is too bad, but you know I
wonder...
where did he get such a nice suit?”
=====
The reaction of the last old man constitutes a common cultural response toward a woman who has developed an impeccable persona but who is all crippled up with trying to maintain it. Well yes, she is crippled, but look at how nice she looks, look at how good she is, look at how well she’s doing. When we become dried out, we try to walk all crippled up in order to make it appear that we are handling everything, that all is well, and just so. Whether it is the soulskin that is missing, or the culture-made skin that doesn’t fit, we are crippled by pretending it is otherwise. But, when we do this, life is diminished and the cost to ourselves is very high.
When a woman begins to dry out, it becomes harder and harder for her to function in the hearty wildish nature. Ideas, creativity, life itself thrives on moisture. Women in this condition often have dark man dreams: thugs, prowlers, or rapists threaten them, hold them hostage, steal from them, and far worse. Sometimes these dreams are trauma dreams arising from an actual assault. But most often they are dreams of women who are drying out, who are not giving care to the instinctual side of their lives, who steal from themselves, deprive the creative function, and sometimes make no effort to help themselves, or else work very hard to ignore the call back to the water.
Over the years of my practice, I have seen many women in this
dried-out state, some mildly affected, others more so. Concomitantly, I’ve heard from the same women many injured-animal dreams, these increasing dramatically (in women and men) over the last ten years or so. It is hard not to notice that the increase in injured-animal dreams coincides with the devastations to the wilderness both within as well as outside of people.
In these dreams, the creature—doe, lizard, horse, bear, bull, whale, and so on—is crippled up, much like the man in the tailor story, much like the seal woman. Although dreams
of injured animals comment on th
e condition of a woman’s instinctive psyche and her relationship to the wild nature, at the same time these dreams also reflect deep lacerations in the collective unconscious regarding the loss of the instinctual life. If the culture prohibits an integral and sane life for women for whatever reason, she will dream injured-animal dreams. Though the psyche makes every effort to cleanse and strengthen itself regularly, every lash mark “out there” is recorded on the unconscious “in here,” so that a dreamer carries the effects of losing her personal ties with Wild Woman, and also the world’s loss of relationship with this deep nature.
So sometimes it is not only the woman who is drying out. Sometimes, essential aspects of one’s micro-environment—the family or the workplace, for instance—or one’s larger culture are caking and cracking to dust also, and these affect and afflict her. In order for her to contribute to helping aright these conditions, a return to her own skin, her own instinctual common sense, and her own return to home are necessary.
As we have seen, it is hard to recognize our condition until we become like seal woman in her distress: peeling, limping, losing juice, going blind. So it is a gift from the immense vitality of the psyche, then, that there is deep in the unconscious a caller, an old one who rises to the surface of our consciousness and begins to incessantly call us back to our true natures.
Hearing the Old One’s Call
What is that cry over the sea? This voice on the wind that calls the child from his bed and out into the night is
similar
to a kind of nightdream that comes into a dreamer’s awareness as a disembodied voice and nothing more. This is one of the most powerful dreams a dreamer can dream. In my cultural traditions, whatever is said by this voice in the dream is considered a direct transmission from the soul.
It is said that disembodied voice dreams may occur at any time but particularly when a soul is in distress; then the deep self cuts to the chase, so to speak. Bang! A woman’s soul speaks. And it tells her what comes next.
In the story, the old seal rises out of its own element to begin the call. It is a profound feature of the wild psyche that if we do not come on our own, if we aren’t paying attention to our own seasons and the time for return, the Old One will come for us, calling and calling until something in us responds.
Thank goodness for this natural homing signal that becomes louder and louder the more we are in need of return. The signal goes off as everything begins to be “too”—in either a negative or positive sense. It can be as much time to go home when there is too much positive stimulation as when there is ceaseless dissonance. Perhaps we have become too intense about something. We can be too worn down by something. We can be overloved, underloved, overworked, underworked... each costs much. In the face of “too much” we gradually become dry, our hearts become tired, our energies begin to become spare, and a mysterious longing for—we almost never have a name for it other than “a something”—rises up in us more and more; then the Old One calls.
In this story, it is interesting that the one who hears and responds to the call from the sea is the little spirit child. It is he who ventures out over the ice crags and stones, who dumbly follows the cry, and who accidentally trips over his mother’s rolled- up sealskin.
The child’s restless sleep is an acute and accurate portrayal of the restlessness a woman feels when she is yearning to return to her psychic place of origin. Since the psyche is a complete system, all its elements resonate to the call. A woman’s restlessness during this time is often accompanied by irritability and a sense that everything is much too near for comfort, or far too far for peace. She feels anywhere from a little bit to a lot “lost,” for she has
stayed too long from home. These feelings are just the right feelings to feel. They are a message that says “Come here now.” That feeling of being tom comes from hearing, consciously or unconsciously, something calling us, calling us back, something that we cannot say no to without hurting ourselves.
If we don't go when it is time, the soul will come for us, as we see in these lines from a poem called “Woman Who Lives Under the Lake.”
... one night
there’s a heartbeat at the door.
Outside, a woman in the fog, with hair of twigs and dress of weed, dripping green lake water.
She says “I
am you,
and I have traveled a long distance.
Come with me, there is something I must show you ..
She turns to go, her cloak falls open,
Suddenly, golden light... everywhere, golden light.. .
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The old seal rises up at night and the child stumbles about at night In this and many other tales we see the main character discovering an astonishing truth or recovering an invaluable treasure while groping in the dark. This motif is ubiquitous in fairy tales and occurs no matter what by hook or by crook. Nothing makes the light the wonder, the treasure stand out so well as darkness. The “dark night of the soul” has almost become a catchphrase in certain parts of the culture. The recovery of the divine is done in the dark of Hel or Hades or “there.” The return of the
Cristo
comes as a glow from the gloaming of hell. The Asian sun Goddess Amaterasu bursts from the darkness beneath the mountain. The Sumerian Goddess Inanna, in her water form, “ignites into a white gold as she lies in a newly plowed trough of black earth.”
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In the mountains in Chiapas, it is said that every day “the yellow sun must bum a hole through the blackest
huípil,
blouse, in order to rise up in the sky.”
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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 soulskin. When we breathe up that soul- state, we automatically enter the fee
ling state of “This is right I
know what I need.”
For many modem 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.
Staying Overlong
In the story, the seal woman dries out as she stays too long. Her afflictions are the same ones we experience by staying overlong. Her skin dries out. Our skin is our greatest sensing organ; it tells us when we are cold, too warm, excited, frightened. When a woman is gone too long from home, her ability to perceive how she’s truly feeling and thinking about herself and all other matters begins to dry and crack. She is on “lemming status.” Because she is not perceiving what is too much, what is not enough, she runs right over her own edges.
We see in the tale that her hair thins, her weight drops, she becomes an anemic version of what she once was. When we stay too long, we too lose our ideas, our soul-relationship becomes scrawny, our blood runs thin and slowly. Seal woman begins to limp, her eyes lose their moisture, she begins to go blind. When we are overdue for home, our eyes have nothing to sparkle for, our bones are weary, it is as though our nerve sheaths are unwrapped, and we can no longer focus on who or what we are about.
In the wooded hills of Indiana and Michigan, there is a striking group of farm people whose ancestors came up from the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee a long time ago. Though their speech is clotted with grammatical inventions—“I ain’t got no
...”
and “We done this the other day
..—they
are Bible readers and so they also use beautiful and rolling long words such as
iniquities
,
aromatical
, and
canticle.
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Also, they have many descriptions that apply to women being worn out and unaware. Backwoods people don’t sand their words down fine. They block cut them, string them in chunks they call sentences, and throw them down rough. “Gone too long in harness,” “worked her hind legs off,” “so tired she can’t find her way back to a bright red bam,” and the especially brutal descriptor “suckling a dead litter,” mean she is draining her life away in a futile or unrewarding marriage, job, or endeavor.
When a woman is too long gone from home, she is less and less able to propel herself forward in life. Instead of pulling in the harness of her choice, she’s dangling from one. She’s so cross-eyed with tiredness she trudges right on past the place of help and comfort. The dead litter is comprised of ideas, chores, and demands that don’t work, have no life, and bring no life to her. Such a woman becomes pale yet contentious, more and more uncompromising, yet scattered. Her fuse bums shorter and shorter. Popular culture calls this “burnout”—but it’s more than that, it’s
hambre
del alma,
the starving soul. Then, there is only one recourse, finally the woman knows she has to—not might, maybe, sort of, but
must
—return to home.
In the story, a promise made becomes a promise broken. The man, who is rather dried out himself with all those long cracks in his face from having been so lonely so long, has gotten the seal woman to enter his house and heart by promising that after a certain period of time he will return her pelt and she can stay with him or return to her own land, as she wishes.
What woman does not know this broken promise by heart? “As soon as I finish this I can go. As soon as I can get
away...
When the springtime comes, I’ll go. When the summer’s over, I’ll go. When the kids are back in
school...
Late in autumn when the trees are so beautiful, I will go. Well, no one can go anywhere in winter. So I’ll just wait for spring ... I really mean it this time.”
The return to home is particularly important if one has been bound up in worldly matters and overstayed her time. What is that length of time? It is different for each woman, but suffice to say that women know, absolutely know, when they have stayed overlong in the world. They know when they are overdue for home. Their bodies are in the here and now, but their minds are far, far away.
They are dying for new life. They are panting for the sea. They are living just for next month, just till this semester is past, can’t wait till winter is finally over so they can feel alive again, just waiting for a mystically assigned date somewhere in the
future
when they will be free to do some wondrous thing. They think they will die if they
don’t...
you fill in the blank. And there is a quality of mourning to it all. There is angst. There is bereftness. There is wistfulness. There is longing. There is plucking at threads in one’s skirt and staring long from windows. And it is not a temporary discomfort. It stays, and grows more and more intense over time.
Yet women continue in their day-to-day routines, looking sheepish, acting guilty and smirky.
“Yes, yes, yes,
I know,” they say. “I should, but, but,
but.."It
is the “buts” in their sentences that are the dead giveaways that they have stayed too long.
An incompletely initiated woman in this depleted state erroneously thinks she is deriving more spiritual credit by staying than she thinks she will gain by going. Others are caught up in, as they say in Mexico,
dar a algo un tirón fuerte
, always tugging at the sleeve of the Virgin, meaning they are working hard and ever harder to prove that they are acceptable, that they are good people.
But there are other reasons for the divided woman. She is not used to letting others take the oars. She may be a practitioner of “kid lit” which is a litany that goes like this: “But my kids need this, my kids need that, et cetera.”
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She does not realize that by sacrificing her need for return, she teaches her children to make the very same sacrifices of their own needs once they are grown.
Some women are afraid that those around them will not understand their need for return. And not all may. But the woman must understand
this
herself: When a woman goes home according to her own cycles, others around her are given their own
individuation
work, their own vital issues to deal with. Her return to home allows others growth and development too.
Among wolves there are no such divided feelings about going and staying, for they work, whelp, rest, and rove in cycles. They are part of a group that shares in working and caregiving while others take time away. It is a good way to live. It is a way to live that has all the integrity of the wild feminine.
Let us clarify that the going home is many different things to many different women. My Romanian painter friend knew his grandmother was in her going-home state when she took a wooden chair out into the back garden and sat staring at the sun with her eyes wide open. “It is medicine for my eyes, good for you,” she said. People knew not to disturb her, or if they didn’t know, they soon found out. It is important to understand that going home does not necessarily cost money. It costs time. It costs a strong act of will to say “I am going” and mean it. You can call over your shoulder, as my dear friend Jean rec
ommends, “I’m off for now but I’ll
back,” but you must keep trekking homeward even so.
There are many ways to go home; many are mundane, some are divine. My clients tell me these mundane endeavors constitute a return to home for them ... although I caution you, the exact placement of the aperture to home changes from time to time, so its location may be different this month than last. Rereading passages of books and single poems that have touched them. Spending even a few minutes near a river, a stream, a creek. Lying on the ground in dappled light. Being with a loved one without kids around. Sitting on the porch shelling something, knitting something, peeling something. Walking or driving for an hour, any direction, then returning. Boarding any bus, destination unknown. Making drums while listening to music. Greeting sunrise. Driving out to where the city lights do not interfere with the night sky. Praying. A special friend. Sitting on a bridge with legs dangling over. Holding an infant. Sitting by a window in
a café
and writing. Sitting in a circle of trees. Drying hair in the sun. Putting hands in a rain barrel. Potting plants, being sure to get hands very muddy. Beholding beauty, grace, the touching frailty of human beings.
So, it is not necessarily an overland and a
rduous journey to go home, yet I
do not want to make it seem that it is simplistic, for there is much resistance to going home no matter if it be easy or hard.
There is one more way to understand women’s delaying the return, one that is far more mysterious, and that is a woman’s overidentification with the healer archetype. Now an archetype is an enormous force that is both mysterious and instructive to us. We gain great stores by being near it, by emulating it to some extent, by being in balanced relationship to it. Each archetype carries its own characteristics that support the name we give the archetype: the great mother, the divine child, the sun hero, and so forth.
The great healer archetype carries wisdom, goodness, knowing, caregiving, and all the other things associated with a healer. So, it is good to be generous and kind and helpful like the great healer archetype. But only to a point. Beyond that, it exerts a hindering influence on our lives. Women’s “heal everything, fix everything” compulsion is a major entrapment constructed by the requirements placed upon us by our own cultures, mainly pressures to prove that we are not just standing around taking up space and enjoying ourselves, but that we have redeemable value—in some parts of the world, it is fair to say, to prove that we have value and therefore should be allowed to live. These pressures are introduced into our psyches when we are very young and unable to judge or resist them. They become law to
us...
Unless or until we challenge them.
But the cries of the suffering world cannot all be answered by a single person all the time. We can truly only choose to respond to those that allow us to go home on a regular basis, otherwise our heart-lights dim to almost nothing. What the heart wishes to help is sometimes different from what the soul’s resources be. If a woman values her soulskin, she will decide these matters according to how close she is to and how often she has been “home.”
While archetypes may emanate through us for short periods of time, in what we call numinous experience, no woman can emanate an archetype continuously. Only the archetype itself can