Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
rhythm of adding knowledge, making minute adjustments, and deleting the unusable over and over again. It is not only potent but pragmatic, for solitude lives low on the food chain; though it costs something in intention and follow-through, it can be done at any time, in any place. Over time, as you practice, you will find yourself designing your own queries to soul. Sometimes you may have only one question. Other times you may have none whatsoever and just wish to rest on the rock near the soul, breathing together.
Women’s Innate
Ecology
In the tale it is said that many try to hunt the soul to capture and kill her, but no hunter is able. It is one more fairy-tale reference to the indestructibility of the wild soul. Even if we have been working, sexing, resting, or playing out of cycle, it does not kill the Wild Woman, it only tires
us
out. The good news is that we can make the necessary corrections and return to our own natural cycles again. It is through the love for and the caring for our natural seasons that we protect our lives from being dragged into someone else’s rhythm, someone else’s dance, someone else’s hunger. It is through validation of our distinct cycles for sex, creation, rest, play, and work that we relearn to define and discriminate between all our wild senses and seasons.
We know that we cannot live the confiscated life. We know there is
a time when the things of men and the people and things of the world must be left for a while. We have learned that we are like amphibians: We can live on land, but not forever, not without trips to the water and to home. Overly civilized and overly oppressive cultures try to keep women from returning home. Too often, she is warned away from the water until she is thin as a dime and dimmed in light.
But when the call for extended leave to home comes, a part of her always hears, has been waiting to hear. When the call to home comes, she will follow, has been secretly or not so secretly preparing to follow. She and all the allies of her inner psyche will restore her ability to return. This empowering process does not apply to just a woman here and a w
oman there, it applies to all of
us. Everyone becomes snagged by land commitments. Yet, the old one out in the sea calls everyone. Everyone must return.
None of these ways to return home are dependent on economics, social status, education, or physical mobility. Even if we can see only one blade of grass, even if we have only a quarter foot of sky to scry, even if we have only a rangy weed coming up through a crack in the sidewalk, we can see our cycles in and with nature. We can all swim out to sea. We can all commune with the seal from the rock. All women must have this union: mothers with children, women with lovers, single women, women with jobs, women in the doldrums, women riding high on the world, introverted women, extroverted women, women with industrial-strength responsibilities.
Jung said, “It would be far better simply to admit our spiritual
poverty When spirit becomes heavy, it turns to water
Therefore the way of the soul... leads to the water.”
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The return to home and the intervals of conversing with the seal from the rock in the sea are our acts of innate and integral ecology, for they all are a return to the water, a meeting with the wild friend, the one who above all others, loves us unremittingly, unguardedly, and with profound endurance. We need only look into and learn from those soulful eyes that are “wild and wise and loving.”
CHAPTER 10
Clear Water:
Nourishing the Creative Life
Creativity is a shapechanger. One moment it takes this form, the next that. It is like a dazzling spirit who appears to us all, yet is hard to describe for no one agrees on what they saw in that brilliant flash. Are the wielding of pigments and canvas, or paint chips and wallpaper, evidence of its existence? How about pen and paper, flower borders on the garden path, building a university? Yes, yes. Ironing a collar well, cooking up a revolution? Yes. Touching with love the leaves of a plant, pulling down “the big deal,” tying off the loom, finding one’s voice, loving someone well? Yes. Catching the hot body of the newborn, raising a child to adulthood, helping raise a nation from its knees? Yes. Tending to a marriage like the orchard it is, digging for psychic gold, finding the shapely word, sewing a blue curtain? All are of the creative life. All these things are from the Wild Woman, the
Rio
Abajo Río
, the river beneath the river, which flows and flows into our lives.
Some say the creative life is in ideas, some say it is in doing. It seems in most instances to be in a simple being. It is not virtuosity, although that is very fine in itself. It is the love of something, having so much love for something—whether a person, a word, an image, an idea, the land, or humanity—that all that can be done with the overflow is to create. It is not a matter of wanting to, not a singular act of will; one solely must.
The creative force flows over the terrain of our psyches looking for the natural hollows, the
arroyos
, the channels that exist in us.
We become its tributaries, its basins; we are its pools, ponds, streams, and sanctuaries. The wild creative force flows into whatever beds
we have for it, those we are born
with as well as those we dig with our own hands. We don’t have to fill them, we only have to build them.
In archetypal lore there is the idea that if one prepares a special psychic place, then the being, the creative force, the soul source, will hear of it, sense its way to it, and inhabit that place. Whether this force is summoned by the biblical “go forward and prepare a place for the soul” or, as in the film
Field of Dreams,
1
in which a fanner hears a voice urging him to build a baseball diamond for the spirits of players past, “If you build it, they will come,” preparing a fitting place induces the great creative force to advance.
Once that great underground river finds its estuaries and branches in our psyches, our creative lives fill and empty, rise and fall in seasons just like a wild river. These cycles cause things to be made, fed, fall back, and die away, all in their own right time, and over and over again.
Creating one thing at a certain point in the river feeds those who come to the river, feeds creatures far downstream, yet others in the deep. Creativity is not a solitary movement. That is its power. Whatever is touched by it, whoever hears it, sees it, senses it, knows it, is fed. That is why beholding someone else’s creative word, image, idea, fills us up, inspires us to our own creative work. A single creative act has the potential to feed a continent One creative act can cause a torrent to break through stone.
For this reason, a woman’s creative ability is her most valuable asset, for it gives outwardly and it feeds her inwardly at every level: psychic, spiritual, mental, emotive, and economic. The wild nature pours out endless possibilities, acts as birth channel, invigorates, slakes thirst satiates our hunger for the deep and wild life. Ideally, this creative river has no dams on it no diversions, and especially no misuse.
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Wild Woman’s river nurtures and grows us into beings that arc like hen life givers. As we create, this wild
and mysterious
being is creating us in return, filling us with love. We are evoked in the way creatures are evoked by sun and water. We are made so alive
that we in turn give life out; we burst, we bloom, we divide and multiply, we impregnate, incubate, impart, give forth.
Clearly creativity emanates from something that rises, rolls, surges, and spills into us rather than from something that just stands there hoping that we might, however circuitously, find our way to it In that sense we can never “lose” our creativity. It is always there, filling us or else colliding with whatever obstacles are placed in its path. If it finds no inlet to us, it backs up, gathers energy, and rams forward again till it breaks through. The only ways we can avoid its insistent energy are to continuously mount barriers against it, or to allow it to be poisoned by destructive negativity and negligence.
If we are gasping for creative energy; if we have trouble pulling down the fertile, the imaginative, file ideational; if we have difficulty focusing on our personal vision, acting on it, or following through with it, then something has gone wrong at the
waterspill
juncture between the headwaters and the tributary. Perhaps one’s creative waters are flowing through a polluting environment wherein the life forms of imagination are killed off before they can grow to maturity. More often than not, when a woman is bereft of her creative life, all these circumstances are at the root of the issue.
There are other more insidious possibilities as well. Perhaps one so admires the gifts of another, and/or the seeming benefits earned or received by another, that one becomes expert in mimicry, sadly content to be a mediocre “them,” rather than developing one’s own unique gifts to their absolute and startling depths. Perhaps one has become caught in a hyper-fascination or a hero- worship and has no idea how to mine their own inimitable gifts. Perhaps one is afraid, for the waters are deep, the night is dark, and the way is very long; just the right conditions needed for development of one’s original and precious gifts.
Since Wild Woman is
Río Abajo Río
, the river beneath the river, when she flows into us, we flow. If the aperture from her to us is blocked, we are blocked. If her currents are toxified by our own negative inner complexes or by the environ of persons around us, the delicate processes that craft our ideas are polluted also. Then we are like a dying river. This is not a slight thing to
be ignored. The loss of clear creative flow constitutes a psychological and spiritual crisis.
When a river is tainted, everything begins to die off because, as we know from environmental biology, every life form is dependent on every other life form. If, in an actual river, the sedge at water’s edge turns brown starving for oxygen, then the pollens can find nothing vibrant enough to fertilize, water plantain falls over leaving no cribs among its roots for water lilies, willows will not grow catkins, newts find no mates, and mayflies will not hatch. Therefore the fish will not jump, birds will not dive down, and the wolves and other creatures that come to refre
sh themselves move on or else th
e from drinking bad water or from eating prey that has eaten the dying plants near the water.
When creativity stagnates in one way or another, there is the same outcome: a starving for freshness, a fragility of fertility, no place for smaller life forms to live in the interstices of larger life forms, no breeding of this idea to that one, no hatch, no new life. Then we feel ill and want to move on. We wander aimlessly, pretending we can get along without the lush creative life or else by faking one; but we cannot, we must not. To bring back creative life, the waters have to be made clean and clear again. We have to wade into the sludge, purify the contaminants, reopen the apertures, protect the flow from future harm.
Among Spanish-speaking people, there is an old old tale called
“La Llorona,
”
3
“The Weeping Woman.” Some say it originated in the early 1500s when the conquistadors invaded the Aztec peoples of Mexico, but it is far older than that It is a tale about the river of life that became a river of death. The
protagonista
is a haunting river woman who is fertile and generous, creating out of her own body. She is poor, breathtakingly beautiful, but rich in soul and spirit.-
“La Llorona”
is an odd tale, for it continues to evolve throughout time as though it has a big inner life of its own. Like a great marching sand dune that pushes across the land, taking up what is before it, building with and upon it till the land becomes part of its own body, this story builds on the psychic issues of each generation. Sometimes the
La Llorona
tale is told as a story about
Ce. Malinalli
or
Malinche
, the native woman said to have been translator and lover to the Spanish conqueror
Hernán Cortés.
But the first version of
“La Llorona
” I ever heard described her as the female protagonist in a union-busting war up in the north woods, where I was raised. The next time I heard the tale,
La
Llorona
was dealing with an antagonist involved in the forced repatriation of Mexicans from the United States in the 1950s. I heard the story in numerous versions in the Southwest, one being from the old Spanish Land Grant farmers, who said she was involved in the land grant wars in New Mexico; a rich developer took advantage of a poor but beautiful Spanish daughter.
Then there is the spook story ;
La Llorona
wanders and wails through a trailer park at night. There is “a prostitute with AIDS”
tale;
La Llorona
plies her trade down at the Town River in Austin. The most startling one, I was given by a young child. First I will tell you the general story line of the great
La Llorona
tales, and then a most astonishing twist on the story.
=====
La Llorona
A
rich
hidalgo
, nobleman, courts a beautiful but poor woman and wins her affections. She bears him two sons, but he deigns not to marry her. One day he announces that he is returning to Spain, where he will marry a rich woman chosen by his family, and that he will take his sons with him.
The young woman is crazed and acts in the manner of the great shrieking madwomen throughout time. She claws his face, she claws her own face, she tears at him, she tears at herself. She picks up the two small sons and runs to the river with them and there throws them into the torrent. The children drown, and
La Llorona
falls to the riverbank in grief and dies.
The
hidalgo
returns to Spain and marries the rich woman. The soul of
La Llorona
ascends to heaven. There the master of the gate tells her she may come to heaven, for she has suffered, but that she may not enter
until
she recovers the souls of her children from the river.
And that is why it is said today that
La Llorona,
the weeping woman, sweeps the riverbanks with her long hair, puts her long stick-fingers into the water to drag the bottom for her children. It is also why living children must not go near the river after dark, for
La Llorona
may mistake them for her own children and take them away forever.
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=====
Now, to a modem
La Llorona.
As the culture is affected by various influences, our thinking, our attitudes, and our issues shift. The
La Llorona
story shifts too. While in Colorado last year collecting ghost stories, Danny Salazar, a ten-year-old child with no front teeth and surrealistic ally big feet on his skinny (but someday to be tall) body, gave me this tale. He told me that
La Llorona
did not kill her children for the reasons described in the old tale.
“No, no,” asserted Danny.
La Uorona
went with a rich
hidalgo
who had factories on the river. But something went wrong. During her pregnancy
La llorona
drank from the river.
Hear babies, twin boys, were born
blind and with webbed fingers, few the
hidalgo
had poisoned the river with the waste from his factories.
The
hidalgo
told
La Uorona
he didn’t want her or her babies. He married a rich woman who wanted the things the factory manufactured.
La Llorona
threw the babies into the river because they would have such a hard life. Then she fell down dead from grief. She went to heaven but Saint Peter told her she could not come into heaven until she found the souls of her sons. Now
La Uorona
looks and looks through the polluted river for her children, but she can hardly see, for the water is so dirty and dark. Now her ghost drags the river bottom with her long fingers. Now she wanders the riverbanks calling few her children all the time.
The Pollution of the Wild Soul
La Uorona
belongs to the category of tales that the
cantadoras
y
cuentistas
in our family call
temblón,
shiver stories. These overtly entertain, but are meant to cause listeners to experience a shiver of awareness that leads to thoughtfulness, contemplation, and action.
Regardless of the shifting motifs within this story over time, the theme remains the same: the destruction of the fertile feminine. Whether the contamination of wild
beauty
takes place in the inner world or in the outer world, it is painful to witness, in modem culture we sometimes count one as far mote devastating than the other, but both are equally critical.
Although I sometimes tell this two-version tale in other contexts,
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when understood as a metaphor for the deterioration of the creative flow, it causes everyone women and men alike—to shiver with knowing aplenty. If we view this tale as the condition of a single woman’s psyche, we can understand a good deal about the weakening and wasting of a woman’s creative process. As in other stories that have harsh endings, the tale is instrumental in teaching a woman what not to do, and how to back out of poor choices in order to lessen negative impact Generally, by taking the opposite psychological tack to that chosen by the protagonist in t
he tale, we can learn to ride th
e swell instead of drown in it
This tale uses the metaphors of the beautiful woman and the pure river of life to describe a woman’s creative process in its normative state. But here, when interactive with a destructive animus, both the woman and the river decline. Then a woman whose creative life is dwindling experiences, like Im
Llorona,
a sensation of poisoning, deformation, a desire to kill off everything. Subsequently she is driven to seemingly endless searching through the wreckage for her former creative potential.
In order for her psychic ecology to be arighted, the river has to be made clear once again. It is not the quality of our creative products that we are concerned with through this story, but the individual’s recognition of the value of one’s unique gifts and the methods for caring for the creative life that surrounds those gifts. Always behind the actions of writing, painting, thinking, healing, doing, cooking, talking, smiling, making, is the river, the
Rio Abajo Río,
the river under the river nourishes everything we make.
In symbology, the great bodies of water express the place where life itself is thought to have originated, in the Hispanic Southwest, the river symbolizes the ability to live, truly live. It is greeted as the mother.
La Madre
Grande,
La Mujer
Grande, the Great Woman, whose waters not only run in the ditches and riverbeds
but spill out of the very bodies of women th
emselves as their babies are born
. The river is seen as the
Gran Dama
who walks the land with a full swirling skirt of blue or silver and sometimes gold, who lays with the soil to make it good for growing.
Some of my old women friends in South Texas say
El Rio Grande
could never be a man river, but is a woman river. They laugh and say, How can a river be anything but the
La Dulce Acequia
, the sweet slot, between the thighs of the earth? In northern New Mexico, the river in storm, in wind, in flash flood, is spoken of as the one who is aroused, the one who in her heat rushes to touch everything she can to make it grow.
So we see that the river here symbolizes a form of feminine largess that arouses, excites, makes passionate. Women’s eyes flash as they create, their words lilt, their faces flush with life, their very hair seems to shine all the mote. They are excited by the idea, aroused by the possibilities, impassioned by the very thought, and at that point, like the great river, they are meant to flow outward and continuously on their own unparalleled creative path. That is the way women feel fulfilled. And this is the condition of the river that
La Uorona
once lived by before destruction occurred.
But sometimes, as in the tale, a woman’s creative life is taken over by something that wants to manufacture things of and for ego only, things which have no lasting soul-worth. Sometimes there are pressures from her culture that say her creative ideas are useless, that no one will want them, that it is futile for her to continue. That is pollution. That is pouring lead into the river. That is what poisons the psyche.
Ego satisfaction is allowable and important in its own regard. The problem is that the spewing out of negative complexes attacks all freshness, newness, potential, newborness, things in the pupae stage, the lacuna, as well as the half-grown and the old and revered. When there is too much soulless or mock manufacturing, toxic waste pours into the pure river, killing off both creative impulse and energy.