Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
yearning to go back. Instead, understand these tools, interact with them, and you will feel her presence as though you are a drum skin that has been tapped by a wild hand.
The Inuit characterize these tools as those belonging to “a real woman.” They are what a woman needs to “carve a life for herself.” Her knife cuts, dresses, frees, designs, makes materials fit. Her knowledge of the firesticks enables her to create fire under the most austere conditions. Her stone carvings express her mystical knowledge, her healing repertoire, and her personal union with the spirit world.
In psychological terms, these metaphors typify the strengths common to the wild nature. In classical Jungian psychology, some might call this tandem union the ego-self axis. In fairy-tale argot the knife is, among other things, a visionary tool for cutting through obscurity and seeing into hidden things. The tools of fire- making typify the ability to make nourishment for oneself, to transform one’s old life into new life, to repel useless
negátivity.
They can be seen as a representation of innate drive that heat- strengthens the base materials of the psyche. Traditionally, the making of fetishes and talismans helps the fairy-tale heroine and hero to remember that the strengths of the world of spirit are close by.
For a modem woman, the
ulu
y
her knife, symbolizes insight, her willingness and ability to cut away the superfluous, making clear endings and carving new beginnings. Her fire-making declares her ability to rise from failure, to create passion in her own behalf, to bum something to the ground if necessary. Her stone carvings embody her memory of her own wild consciousness, her union with the natural instinctual life.
Like the seal woman’s child, we learn that to come close to the soul-mother’s creations is to be filled with her. Even though she has gone to her own people, her full force can be felt through the feminine powers of insight, passion, and connection to the wild nature. Her promise is that if we make contact with the tools of psychic strength we will feel her pneuma; her breath will enter our breath, and we will be filled with a sacred wind for singing. The old Inuit say that the breath of a god and the breath of a human,
when commingled, cause a person to create an intense and holy poetry.
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It is that holy poetry and singing we are after. We want powerful words and songs that can be heard underwater and over land. It is the wild singing we are after, our chance to use the wild language we are learning by heart under the sea. When a woman speaks her truth, fires up her intention and feeling, stays tight with the instinctive nature, she is singing, she is living in the wild breath-stream of the soul. To live this way is a cycle in itself, one meant to go on, go on, go on.
This is why Ooruk does not try to dive back under the water or beg to go with his mother as she swims out to sea and disappears from sight This is why he stays on land. He has the promise. As we return to the clacking world, especially if we have been isolated in some way during our trip home, people, machines, and other objects have a slightly unfamiliar cast to them, and even the chatter of those around us sounds a little strange to our ears. This phase of return is called re-entry and it is natural. The feeling of being from an alien world passes after a few hours or a few days. Thereafter, we will spend a good space of time at our mundane life, fueled by the energy we gathered on our journey to home and practicing interim union with soul through the practice of solitude.
In the tale, the seal woman’s child begins to enact the medial nature. He becomes a drummer, a singer, a storyteller. In fairy-tale interpretation, the drummer by drumming becomes the heart at the center of whatever new life and new feeling need to arise and reverberate. The drummer is able to frighten things away, as well as to evoke them. The singer carries messages back and forth between the great soul and the mundane self. By nature and tone of voice the singer can dismantle, destroy, build up, and create. The storyteller is said to have crept close and listened to the Gods talking in their sleep.
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So through all these creative acts, the child lives what seal woman has breathed into him. The child lives what he has learned under water, the relational life with the wild soul. We find ourselves then, filled with drum beats, filled with singing, filled with listening and saying our own words; new poems, new ways of seeing, new ways of acting and thinking. Instead of trying to
“make the magic last,” we just live. Instead of resisting or dreading our chosen work, we move into it fluidly; alive, filled with new notions, and curious to see what happens next. After all, the person who has returned to home has survived being carried out to sea by the great seal spirits.
The Practice of Intentional Solitude
In the gray mists of morning, the now-grown child kneels on a rock in the sea and converses with none other than the seal woman. This intentional and daily practice of solitude and communing allows him to be near home in a critical way, not only by diving down to the soul-place for more sustained periods of time, but just as important, by being able to call the soul back up to the topside world for brief periods.
In order to converse with the wild feminine, a woman must temporarily leave the world and inhabit a state of aloneness in the oldest sense of the word. Long ago the word
alone
was treated as two words,
all one.
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To be
all one
meant to be wholly one, to be in oneness, either essentially or temporarily. That is precisely the goal of solitude, to be all one. It is the cure for the frazzled state so common to modem women, the one that makes her, as the old saying goes, “leap onto her horse and ride off in all directions.”
Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul. In ancient times, as recorded by physician-healers, religious and mystics, purposeful solitude was both palliative and preventative. It was used to heal fatigue and to prevent weariness. It was also used as an oracle, as a way of listening to the inner self to solicit advice and guidance otherwise impossible to hear in the din of daily life.
Women from ancient times as well as modem aboriginal women often set a sacred place aside for this communion and inquiry. Traditionally it is said to have been set aside during women’s menses, for during that time a woman lives much closer to self-knowing than usual; the membrane between the unconscious and the conscious minds thins considerably. Feelings, memories, sensations that are normally blocked from consciousness
ness pass over into cognizance without resistance. When a woman takes solitude during this time, she has more material to sift through.
However, in my exchanges with tribal women from North, Central, and South America, as well as female progeny of some of the Slavic tribes, I find that the “women’s places” were used
anytime,
not just during menses, and more so, that each woman often had her own “woman’s place,” consisting of a certain tree, place at the water’s edge, or some natural forest or desert room or ocean cave.
My experience in analyzing women leads me to believe that much of modem women’s premenstrual crankiness is not just a physical syndrome but is equally attributable to her being thwarted in her need to take enough time away to revivify and renew herself.
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I always laugh when I hear someone quoting early anthropologists who claimed that menstruating women of various tribes were considered “unclean” and forced to leave the village until they were “over it” All women know that even if there were such a forced ritual exile, every single woman, to a woman, would, when her time came, leave the village hanging her head mournfully, at least till she was out of sight and then suddenly break into a jig down the path, cackling all the way.
As in the tale, if we establish a regular practice of intentional solitude, we invite a conversation between ourselves and the wild soul that comes near to our shore. We do this not only just to “be near” the wild and soulful nature, but as in the mystical tradition since time out of mind, the purpose of this union is for us to ask questions, and for the soul to advise.
How does one call up the soul? There are many ways: through meditation, or in the rhythms of running, drumming, singing, writing, painting, music making, visions of great beauty, prayer, contemplation, rite and ritual, standing still, even entrancing moods and ideas. All are psychic summonses that call the soul up from its dwelling place.
However, I advocate using those methods that require no props, no special location, and that can be accomplished as easily in a minute as in a day. This means using one’s mind to summon the soul-self. Everyone has at least one familiar state of mind in which
to effect this kind of solitude. For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need. I sit at the feet of the great old trees of my childhood. From that vantage point, I ask my questions, receive my answers, then coalesce my woodland back down to the size of a love note till next time. The experience is immediate, brief, informative.
Truly the only thing one needs for intentional solitude is the ability to tune out distractions. A woman can learn to detach from other people, noise, and chatter, no matter if she is in the midst of a contentious board meeting, no matter if she is being stalked by a house that needs to be cleaned by bulldozer, no matter if she is surrounded by eighty loquacious relatives, fighting, singing, and dancing their way through a three-day wake. If you have ever been a teenager, you definitely know how to tune out. If you have ever been the mother of an insomniac two-year-old, you know how to take intentional solitude. It is not hard to do, just hard to remember
to
do.
Though we all might prefer to have the kind of sojourn to home that is much more sustained, wherein we depart and no one knows where we are and we return much later, it is also very good to practice taking solitude in a room hill of a thousand persons. It may sound odd at first, but frankly, people converse with the soul all the time. But rather than entering the state consciously, many- fall into it suddenly, through a reverie, or all at once ‘‘snap to” and “find” themselves in it
Because it is considered such an untoward thing, we have learned to camouflage this interval of soulful communication by naming it in very mundane terms. So, it has been named thusly: “talking
to
oneself,” being “lost in thought,” “staring off into space,” or “daydreaming.” This euphemistic language is inculcated by many segments of our culture, for unfortunately, we are taught from childhood onward to feel embarrassment if found communing with soul, and especially in pedestrian environments such as work or school.
Somehow, the educational and business world has felt that such time spent at being “all one,” is unproductive, when in fact it is the most fecund. It is the wild soul who channels ideas into our imagination,
whereupon we sort through these to find which we will implement, which are most applicable and productive. It is commingling with soul that causes us to glow bright with spirit, willing to assert our talents, whatever they might be. It is that brief, even momentary, but intentional unio
n that supports us to live out o
ur inner lives so that instead of burying them in the self-inversion of shame, fear of reprisal or attack, lethargy, complacency, or other limiting reasonings and excuses, we let our inner lives wave, flare, blaze on the outside for all to see.
So, in addition to gaining information about whatever we wish to see into, the taking of solitude can be Used to assess how we ourselves are doing in any sphere we choose. Earlier in the tale, we saw the child stay under the sea for seven days and nights, this being a learning of one of the oldest cycles of nature. Seven is oft considered a woman’s number, a mystical number synonymous with the division of the moon cycle into four parts and equal to menses: waxing, half, full, and waning. It has been usual in the old ethnic women’s traditions that at the full moon cycle an inquiry should be made into the state of one’s being; the state of one’s friendships, one’s home life, one’s mate, one’s children.
In such a state of solitude we can do this, for it is during that time that we bring all aspects of self to bear at one point in time, and we poll them, inquire of them, finding out what they/we/soul wishes right now, and then gaining it if possible. In this way we take vital soundings of our current conditions. There are many aspects of our lives for us to assess on a continuing basis: habitat, work, creative life, family, mate, children, mother/father, sexuality, spiritual life, and so on.
The measurement used in assessment is simple: What needs less? And: What needs more? We are asking from the instinctive self, not in stilted logic, not ego-wise, but Wild Woman-wise, what work, adjustments, loosenings, or emphasizing needs to take place. Are we still on proper course in spirit and soul? Is one’s inner life showing on the outside? What needs battening, protection, ballast, or weights? What needs be disposed of, moved, or changed?
After a period of practice, the cumulative effect of intentional solitude begins to act like a vital respiratory system, a natural