Chatty Crone

This is an important Blog topic for me personally. It is Martin Luther King day and he was kind of a kind of a rebell in a good way. He rebelled against injustice. A dreamer. So this is my rebellion and dream.

I believe what happens to you in the past, helps determines your future. I don't mean that we live in the past, but I believe who we are today, stems from past experiences.

You have choices of how you will live the rest of your life. You can stay the same person you've always been - stagnant. You can become worse from the past by being a person who is bitter and angry with what life has dealt them. Or you can become a better person, who in spite of your past, changes and moves forward. You would also have to be a person who will be open and honest with themselves and someone who is willing to change. No pain, no gain.

You learn from your past and what you do with that knowledge determines your today. Personally I don't think one can totally get rid of their past. While it isn't in the conscious all the time, it's always with us in our sub-conscious (I believe we remember everything and it is stored in us). So in a way, subconsciously we are always reacting to the past in tiny ways, but we continuously have the choice to learn from it and grow. We are a work in progress until the day we die.

The following are some excerpts I found interesting from a book by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. called, “Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild Women Archetype.” My book of the month. Okay this book is supposed to about woman. I think some of it can apply to some special and unique men as well. I mean if you get it, you get it and if you don't, you don't.

In her foreword Dr. Estes states, “We are all filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used to hide our feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during out days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed.”

Next she explains what ‘women who run with the wolves’ means…”Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with there young, their mates, and their pack. They area experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances, they are fiercely stalwart and very brave. Yet both have been hounded, harassed, and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors. They have been the targets of those who would clean up the wilds as well as the wildish environs of the psyche, extincting the instinctual, and leaving no trace of it behind. The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar.”

In this book she tells stories she has heard and then explains them. She is a Jungian therapist. The story in the book I'm going to be referring to is Chapter 8 - The Feral Women. It interests me.

The following is a little story on the Feral Woman called, "The Red Shoes" and her interpretation of the stories meaning. Here is some insight on the feral woman…..feral meaning wild beast.

The feral woman is a “Woman who was once in their right wild mind – then later captured by some turn of events, thereby becoming overly domesticated and deadened in proper instincts. When she has opportunity to return to her original wildish nature, she too easily steps into all manner of traps and poisons. Because her cycles and protective systems have been tampered with, she is at risk in what used to be her natural wild state. No longer wary and alert, she easily becomes prey.”

“If you have ever been captured, if you have ever endured 'hambre del alma', a starvation of the soul, if you have even been trapped, and especially if you have a drive to create, it is likely that you have been or are a feral woman.”

“In order to avoid these snares and enticements that are tripped by a woman’s time spent in capture and famine, we must be able to see them in advance and sidestep them. We have to redevelop insight and caution. We have to learn to veer. To be able to see the right turns, we have to be able to see the wrong ones.”

“These discarded, devalued, and unacceptable aspects of soul and self do not just lie there in the dark, but rather conspire about how and when they shall make a break for freedom. They burble down there in the unconscious, they seethe, they boil, till one day, no matter how well the lid over them is sealed, they explode outward and upward in an unchanneled torrent and with a will of their own.”

“There is something in the wild soul that will not let us subsist forever on piecemeal intake.”

“The important thing about rebellion is that the form it takes be effective.”

How do you get back to the person you were born to be, without totally being destructive to yourself?

“Psychically, it is good to make a halfway place, a way station, a considered place in which to rest and mend after one escapes famine. It is not too much to take one year, two years, to access one’s wounds, seek guidance, apply the medicines, and consider the future. The feral woman is making her way back. She is learning to wake up, pay attention, stop being naive, uninformed. She takes life into her own hands. To relearn the deep feminine instincts, it is vital to see how they were decommissioned to begin with.”

I stay two years is an impossible amount of time to replenish and change yourself– I think it takes a life time - of trying – of walking forward – of replenishing - one little step at a time.

If you can understand this, then you can understand me.

Chatty Crone