Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
be ever-able, all giving, eternally energetic. We may try to emulate these, but they are ideals, not achievable by humans, and not meant to be. Yet the trap requires that women exhaust themselves trying to achieve these unrealistic levels. To avoid the trap, one has to learn to say “Halt” and “Stop the music,” and of course mean it.
A woman has to go away and be with herself and look into how she came to be trapped in an archetype to begin with.
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The basic wild instinct that determines “only this far and no farther, only this much and no more” must be retrieved and developed. That is how a woman keeps her bearings. It is preferable to go home for a while, even if it causes others to be irritated, rather than to stay and deteriorate, and then finally crawl away in tatters.
So, women who are tired, temporarily sick of the world, who are afraid to take time off, afraid to stop, wake up already! Lay a blanket over the banging gong that cries for you to infinitely help this, help that, help this other thing. It will be there to uncover again, if you wish it so, when you come back. If we do not go home when it is time, we lose our focus. Finding the skin again, putting it on, patting it tight, going home again, helps us to be more effective when we return. There is a saying, “You can’t go home again.” It is not true. While you cannot crawl back into the uterus again, you can return to the soul-home. It is not only possible, it is requisite.
Cutting Loose, Diving In
What is homing? It is the instinct to return, to go to the place we remember. It is the ability to find, whether in dark or in daylight, one’s home place. We all know how to return home. No matter how long it’s been, we find our way. We go through the night, over strange land, through tribes of strangers, without maps and asking of the odd personages we meet along the road, “What is the way?"
The exact answer to “Where is home?” is more complex... but in some way it is an internal place, a place somewhere in time rather than space, where a woman feels of one piece. Home is where a thought or feeling can be s
ustained instead of being inter
rupted or tom away from us because something else is demanding our time and attention. And through the ages women have found myriad ways to have this, make this for themselves, even when their duties and chores were endless.
I first learned this in the community of my childhood, where many devout women rose before five A.M.
and in their long dark dresses wended their way through the gray dawn to kneel in the cold nave of the church, their peripheral vision cut off by babushkas pulled far forward. They buried their faces in their red hands and prayed, told God stories, pulled into themselves peace, strength, and insight. Oftentimes, my Aunt Katerin took me with her. When
once
I said, “It is so quiet and pretty here,” she winked as she shushed me. “Don’t tell anyone; it’s a very important secret.” And so it was, for on the walking path to church at dawn and in the dim interior of the church itself were the only two places of that time where it was forbidden to disturb a woman.
It is right and proper that women eke out, liberate, take, make, connive to get, assert their right to go home. Home is a sustained mood or sense that allows us to experience feelings not necessarily sustained in the mundane world: wonder, vision, peace, freedom from worry, freedom from demands, freedom from constant clacking. All these treasures from home are meant to be cached in the psyche for later use in the topside world.
Although there are many physical places one can go to “feel” her way back to this special home, the physical place itself is not home; it is only the vehicle that rocks the ego to sleep so that we can go the rest of the way by ourselves. The vehicles through and by which women reach home are many: music, art, forest, ocean spume, sunrise, solitude. These take us home to a nutritive inner world that has ideas, order, and sustenance all of its own.
Home is the pristine instinctual life that works as easily as a joint sliding upon its greased bearing, where all is as it should be, where all the noises sound right, and the light is good, and the smells make us feel calm rather than alarmed. How one spends one’s time in the return is not important. Whatever revivifies balance is what is essential. That is home.
There is not only time to contemplate, but also to learn, and uncover the forgotten, the disused, and the buried. There we can
imagine
the
future
and also pore over the scar maps of the psyche, learning what led to what, and where we will go next. As Adrienne Rich writes about taking back the Self in her evocative poem, '‘Diving Into the Wreck,”
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There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner...
I go
down...
I came to explore the
wreck...
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that
prevail...
The most important thing I can tell you about the timing of this home cycle is this: When it’s time, it’s time. Even if you’re not ready, even if things are undone, even if today your ship is coming in. When it’s time, it’s time. The seal woman returns to the sea, not because she just feels like it, not because today is a good day to go, not because her life is all nice and tidy—there is no nice and tidy time for anyone. She goes because it is time, and therefore she must
We all have favorite methods of talking ourselves out of taking the time to go home; yet when we retrieve our instinctive and wildish cycles, we are under a psychic obligation to arrange our lives so that we can live them more and more in accordance. Arguments about the rightness Versus the wrongness of leave-taking in order to return home are useless. The simple truth is that when it’s time, it’s time.
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Some women never go home, and instead live their lives
a la zona zombi
, in the zombie zone. The most cruel part of this lifeless state is that the woman functions, walks, speaks, acts, even accomplishes many things, but she no longer feels the effects of what has gone wrong—if she did, her pain would make her immediately turn to the fixing of it.
But, no, a woman in such a state hobbles on, arms out, defended against the painful loss of home, blind and, as they say in the Bahamas, “She gone
sparat
,” meaning her soul has gone off
without her and left her feeling, no matter what she does, not quite substantial. In this state women have an odd sense that they are accomplishing much but feel little satisfaction. They are doing what they thought they wanted to do, but the treasure in their hands has somehow turned to dust. This is a very good awareness for a woman to have in such a state. Discontent is the secret door to significant and life-giving change.
Women I've worked with who have not been home in twenty or more years always weep upon first setting foot on that psychic ground again. For various reasons, which seemed like good ones at the time, they spent years accepting permanent exile from the homeland; they forgot how immensely good it is for rain to fall on dry earth.
For some, home is the taking up of an endeavor of some sort. Women begin to sing again after years of finding reason not to. They commit themselves to learn something they’ve been heartfelt about for a long time. They seek out the lost people and things in their lives. They take back their voices and write. They rest They make some comer of the world their own. They execute immense or intense decisions. They do something that leaves footprints.
For some, home is a forest a desert, a sea. In truth, home is holographic. It is carried at full power in even a single tree, a solitary cactus in a plant shop window, a pool of still water. It is also at full potency in a yellow leaf lying on the asphalt a red clay pot
waiting for a root bundle, a drop of water on the skin. When you focus with soul-eyes, you will see home in many, many places.
For
how long does o
ne go home? As long as one can or until you have yourself back again. How often is it needed? Far more often if you are a “sensitive” and are very active in the outer world. Less so if you have thick skin and are not so “out there.” Each woman knows in her heart how often and how long is needed. It is a matter of assessing the condition of the shine in one’s eyes, the vibrancy of one’s mood, the vitality-of one’s senses.
How do we balance the need to go home with our daily lives? We pre-plan home into our lives. It is always amazing how easily women can “take time away” if there is illness, if a child needs
them, if the car breaks down, if they have a toothache. Going home has to be given the same value, even stated in crisis proportions if necessary. For it is unequivocally true, if a woman doesn’t go when it’s her time to go, the hairline crack in ha
-
soul/psyche becomes a ravine, and the ravine becomes a roaring abyss.
If a woman absolutely values her going-home cycles, those around her will also learn to value them. It is true that significant “home” can be reached by taking time away from the click- clack of daily routine, time that is inviolate and solely for ourselves. “Solely for ourselves” means different things to different women. For some being in a room with the door closed, but still being accessible to others, is a fine return to home. For others though,the place from which to dive to home needs to be without even a tiny interruption. No “Mommy, Mommy, where are my shoes?” No “Honey, do we need anything from the grocery store?”
For this woman, the inlet to her deep home is evoked by silence.
No me
molestes.
Utter Silence, with a capital
U
and a capital
S.
For her, the sound of wind through a great loom of trees is silence. For her, the crash of a mountain stream is silence. For her, thunder is silence. For her, the natural order of nature, which asks nothing in return, is her life-giving silence. Each woman chooses both as she can and as she must.
Regardless of your home time, an hour or days, remember, other people can pet your cats even though your cats say only you can do it right. Your dog will try to make you think you are abandoning a child on the highway, but will forgive you. The grass will grow a little brown but it will revive. You and your child will miss each other, but be glad when you return. Your mate may grump. They’ll get over it. Your boss may threaten. She or he will get over it too. Staying overlong is madness. Going home is sanity.
When the culture, the society, or the psyche does not support this cycle to return home, many women learn to leap over the gate or dig under the fence anyway. They become chronically ill and purloin reading time in bed. They smile that fangy smile as if all is well and go on a subtle work slowdown for the duration.
Homing: Returning to OneSelf
When the cycle to return home is disturbed in women, many feel that in order to free t
hemselves to go they must pick a
fight with their boss, their children, their parents, or their mate in order to assert their psychic needs. So it occurs that in the midst of some blowup or other, the woman insists, “Well, I'm leaving. Since you’re such a [fill in the blank] and you obviously don’t care about [fill in the blank], then Ffl just be
leaving, thank you very much.” And rumble, roar, spray of gravel, she’s off.
If a woman has to fight for what is rightfully hers, she feels justified, feels absolutely vindicated in her desire to go home. It is interesting to note that if necessary, wolves fight to gain what they want, whether it be food, sleep, sex, or peace. It would appear that to fight for what one wants is a proper instinctual response to being hindered. However, for many women the fight must also-or only be fought inside, battled out against the entire internal complex that negates her need to begin with. You can also push an aggressive culture back much better once you’ve gone home and come back.
If you have to battle each time you go, your relationships with those close to you may need to be weighed carefully. If you can, it is better to teach your people that you will be more arid also different when you return, that you are not abandoning them but learning yourself anew and bringing yourself back to your real life. Especially if you are an artist, surround yourself with persons who are understanding about your need for home, for chances are you will need, more often than most, to mine the psychic terrain of home in order to learn the cycles of creation. So be brief, but potent. My friend Normandi, a gifted writer, says she’s practiced and gotten it down to this: “I am going.” These are the best words ever. Say them. Then go.
Different women have different criteria for what constitutes a useful and/or necessary length of time spent home. Most of us cannot always go for as long as we want, so we go for as long as we can. Now and then we go for as long as we must. Other times, we go until we miss what we left. Sometimes we dip in, dip out, dip in again in bursts. Most women who are coming back into their natural cycles again alternate between these, balancing out circumstances and need. One thing is sure, it’s a good idea to keep a little valise by the door. Just in case.
The Medial Woman: Breathing Under Water
In the story, a curious compromise is made. Instead of leaving the child, or taking the child with her forever, seal woman takes the child for a visit to the ones who live “beneath.” The child is given recognition as a member of the seal clan through the blood of his mother. There in the underwater home he is educated in the ways of the wild soul.
The child represents a new order in the psyche. His seal mother has breathed some of her own breath, some of her special kind of animation, into this child’s lungs, thereby, in psychological terms, transforming him into a medial being,
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one who is able to bridge both worlds. Yet, even though this child is initiated in the underworld, he cannot stay there, but must come back to earth. Thence forward, he occupies a special role. The child who has dived down and resurfaced is not wholly ego, not wholly soul, but somewhere in between.
There is at the core of ail women, what Toni Wolffe, a Jungian analyst who lived in the first half of the twentieth century, called “the medial woman.” The medial woman stands between the worlds of consensual reality and the mystical unconscious and mediates between them. The medial woman is the transmitter and receiver between two or more values or ideas. She is the one who brings new ideas to life, exchanges old ideas for innovative ones, translates between the world of the rational and the world of the
imaginai.
She “hears” things, “knows” things, and “senses” what should come next.
This midway point between the worlds of reason and image, between feeling and thinking, between matter and spirit— between all the opposites and all shades of meaning one can imagine—is the home of the medial woman. The seal woman in the story is an emanation of soul. She is able to live in all worlds, the topside world of matter, and the far world, or underworld, which is her spiritual home, but she cannot stay too long on earth. She and the fisherman, the ego-psyche, create a child who can also live in both worlds, but cannot stay too long in the soul-home.
The seal woman and the child together form a system in a
woman’s psyche that is rather like a bucket brigade. The seal woman, soul-self, passes thoughts, ideas, feelings, and impulses up from the water to the medial self, which in turn lifts those things onto land and consciousness in the outer world. The structure also works conversely. The events of our daily lives, our past traumas and joys, our fears and hopes for the future, are all passed hand over hand down to the soul, who makes comments on them in our nightdreams, emanates its feelings upward through our bodies, or pierces us with a moment of inspiration with an idea on the end of it.
The Wild Woman is a combination of common sense and soul- sense. The medial woman is her double and is also capable of both. Like the child in the tale, the medial woman is of this world, but can travel to the deeper reaches of psyc
he with ease. Some women are born
with this as their gift. Other women acquire it as a skill. It matters not which way one arrives at it. But one of the effects of going to home on a regular basis is that the medial woman of the psyche is strengthened each time a woman goes and returns.
Surfacing
The wonder and pain of returning to the wild home place lies in the fact that we can visit, but we cannot stay. No matter how wonderful it is in the deepest home imaginable, we cannot stay under water forever, but must rise back to the surface. Like Ooruk, who is gently placed on the stony shore, we come back to our mundane lives infused with new animation. Even so, it is a sad moment to be placed back on the shore and on our own once again. In ancient mystical rites, initiates returning to the outer world also felt a bittersweet mood pass through them. They were glad and refreshed, but also a little wistful at first.
The remedy for this small mourning is given when seal woman instructs her child, “I am always with you. Only touch what I have touched, my firesticks, my
ulu,
knife, my stone carvings of otters and seal, and I will breathe into your lungs a wind for the singing of your songs.”
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Her words are a special kind of wild promise. They imply that we should not spend much time in immediate