Women and Wolves

Women and Wolves

A healthy woman is much like a wolf, strong life force, life-giving, territorily aware, intuitive and loyal. Yet seperation from her wildish nature causes a woman to become meager, anxious, and fearful.

The wild nature carries the medicine for all things. She carries stories, dreams, words and songs. She carries everything a woman needs to be and know. She is the essence of the female soul...

With the wild nature as ally and teacher, we see not through two eyes only, but through the many eyes of intuition. With intuition we are like the starry night, we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes.

It does not mean to lose one's primary socializations. It means quite the opposite. The wild nature has a vast integrity to it. It means to establish territory, to find one's pack, to be in one's body with certainty and pride, to speak and act in one's behalf, to be aware, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to proceed as a powerful being who is friendly but never tame.

The Wild Woman is the one who thunders in the face of injustice. She is the one we leave home to look for and the one we come home to. She is the one who keeps a woman going when she thinks she's done for. She is intuition, far-seer, deep listener, and she is loyal heart. She thrives on fresh site and self-integrity.

She must strut the old pathways, assert her instinctual knowledge, proudly bear the battle scars of her time, write her secrets on walls, refused to be ashamed, lead the way through and out, be cunning and use her feminine wits.

Where can you find her? She walks in the deserts, cities, woods, oceans, and in the mountain of solitude. She lives in women everywhere; in castles with queens, in the boardrooms, in the penthouse, and on the night bus to Brownsville.

She lives in a faraway place that breaks through to our world. She lives in the past and is summoned by us. She is in the present. She is in the future and walks backward in time to find us now.

Wild woman whispers the words and the ways to us, and we follow. She has been running and stopping and waiting to see if we are catching up. She has many things to show us.

Whether you are possessed of a simple heart or the ambitious, whether you are trying to make it to the top or just make it through tomorrow, the wild nature belongs to you.

Don't be a fool. Go back and stand under that one red flower and walk straight ahead for that last hard mile. Go up and knock on the old weathered door. Climb up to the cave. Crawl through the window of a dream. Sift the desert and see what you find. It is the only work we have to do.

Without us, Wild Woman dies. Without Wild Woman, we die. Para Vida, for true life, both must live.

Text summarized from
Women Who Run With Wolves
© Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.