Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (45 page)

There is a saying in our family that story has wings. Via trans- ocean migrations by my Magyar foster family, a number of the stories I carry flew over the Carpathian Mountains with them when they fled their villages during the wars. There they lodged for a time in the Urals, thence sailing over an ocean to North America. The little ragged band, and their stories shaped by their

experiences, then traveled overland down through the great forests to the Great Lakes basin.

The little core of “The Three Gold Hairs” was given to me by my “Tante” Kata, a gifted
healer and powerful prayer-maker who grew up in Eastern Europe, and I have amplified that kernel here. In my research, I have spotted quite different Teutonic and Celtic stories that revolve around the leitmotif of “golden hair.” The leitmotif or kernel of a story represents an archetypal juncture in the psyche. That is the nature of archetypes ... they deposit some nuance of themselves at the point of contact with psyche. As symbolic representations, they sometimes leave behind an evidence— wending their ways into the life stories, dreams, and ideas of every mortal. Dwelling who knows where, the archetypes constitute, one might say, a set of psyche instructions that traverse time and space and enwisen each new generation.

The theme of this story is about how one regains focus once one has lost it. Focus is composed of sensing, hearing, and following the directions of the soul-voice. Many women are quite good at focusing, but when they lose touch with it, they become scattered like a feather bed burst all over the countryside.

It is important to have a container for all that we sense and hear from the wild nature. For some women it is their journals, where they keep track of every feather that flies by, for others it is the creative art, they dance it, paint it, make it into a script. Remember Baba Yaga? She has a big pot; she moves through the sky in a cauldron that is actually a pestle and a mortar. In other words, she has a container in which to put things. She has a way of thinking, a way of moving from one place to another that is contained. Yes, containment is the solution to the problem of all loss of energy, that and one more thing. Let us
see...

The Three Gold Hairs

Once, when it was deepest, darkest night, the sort of night when the land is black and the trees seem like gnarled hands against the dark blue sky, it was on exactly this kind of night that

a lone old man staggered through the forest. Though boughs scratched his face, half-blinding his eyes, he held out a tiny lantern before him. Therein the candle burned lower and lower.

The old man was a sight to behold with his long yellow hair, cracked yellow teeth, and curved amber fingernails. His back was rounded like a bag of flour, and so ancient was he that his skin hung in furbelows from chin, arms, and hips.

The old one progressed through the forest by grasping a sapling and pulling his body forward, grasping another sapling, and pulling himself forward, and with this rowing motion and by the small breath left in him, he made his way through the forest.

Every bone in his feet pained like fire. The owls in the trees screeched right along with his joints as he propelled himself forward in the dark. Way off in the distance, there was a tiny flickering light, a cottage, a fire, a home, a place of rest, and he labored toward that little light. Just as he reached the door, he was so tired, so exhausted, the tiny light in his little lantern died, and the old man fell through the door and collapsed.

Inside was an old woman sitting before a beautiful roaring fire, and now she hurried to his side, gathered him into her arms, and carried him to the fire. She held him in her arms as a mother holds her child. She sat and rocked him in her rocking chair. There they were, the poor frail old man, just a sack of bones, and the strong old woman rocking him back and forth saying, “There, there. There, there. There, there.”

And she rocked him all through the night, and by the time it was not yet morning but almost, he had grown much younger, he was now a beautiful young man with golden hair and long strong limbs. And still she rocked him. “There, there. There, there. There, there.”

And as morning approached even more closely, the young man had turned into a very small and very beautiful child with golden hair plaited like wheat.

Just at the moment of dawn, the old woman plucked three hairs very quickly from the child's beautiful head and threw them to the tiles. They sounded like this:
Tiiniiiing! Tiiiiiiiiiing! THiiiiiiiing!

And the little child in her arms crawled down from her lap and ran to the door. Looking back at the old woman for a moment, he

gave her a dazzling smile, then turned and flew up into the sky to become the brilliant morning sun
.
¹⁹

Things are different at night, so to understand this story we must descend to a night-consciousness, a state in which we are more quickly aware of every creak and snap. Night is when we are closer to ourselves, closer to essential ideas and feelings that do not register so much during the daylight hours.

In mythos, night is the world of Mother Nyx, the woman who made the world. She is the Old Mother of Days, one of the Life and Death crones. When it is night in a fairy tale, for interpretation’s sake, we know we are in the unconscious.
San Juan de la Cruz
, Saint John of the Cross, called such “the dark night of the soul.” In this tale, night typifies a time when energy in the form of an old, old man becomes weaker and weaker. It is a time when we are on our last foot in some important way.

To lose focus means to lose energy. The absolutely wrong thing to attempt when we’ve lost focus is to rush about struggling to pack it all back together again. Rushing is not the thing to do. As we see in the tale, sitting and rocking is the thing to do. Patience, peace, and rocking renew ideas. Just holding the idea and the patience to rock it are what some women might call a luxury. Wild Woman says it is a necessity.

This is something the wolves know all about. When an intruder appears, wolves may growl, bark, or even bite the interloper, but also they may, from a good distance, draw back into their group and sit together as a family would. They just sort of sit there and breathe together, Rib cages go in and out, up and down. They’re focusing themselves, regrounding themselves, returning to the center of themselves and deciding what is critical, what to do next. They’re deciding they’re “not going to do anything right now, just going to sit here and breathe, just gonna rock together.”

Now many times when ideas aren’t unfolding or operating smoothly, or we aren’t working them well, we lose focus. It is part of a natural cycle and it occurs because the idea has gotten stale or we have lost our ability to see it in a fresh way. We have ourselves

grown old and creaky like the old man in “Three Gold Hairs." Although there are many theories on creative “blocks,” the truth is that mild ones come and go like weather patterns and like seasons—with the exceptions of the psychological blocks we talked about earlier, such as not getting down to one’s truth, fear of being rejected, being afraid to say what one knows, worrying about one’s
a
dequacy, pollution of the basic flow, settling for mediocrity or pale imitations, and so on.

This story is so excellent because it delineates the entire cycle of an idea, the little tiny light accorded it, which of course is the idea itself, and that it becomes fatigued and is near extinguished, all as part of its natural cycle. In fairy tales, when something bad happens it means that something new has to be tried, a new energy has to be introduced, a helper, healer, magic force has to be consulted.

Here again we see old
La Que Sabe
, the two-million-year-old woman. She is “the one who knows.’’ To be held in her arms before her fire is restorative, reparative.
²⁰
It is to this fire and to her arms that the old man drags himself, for without these he will die.

The old man is tired out from a long time at the work we give to him. Have you ever seen a woman work like the devil had hold of her big toe, only to suddenly collapse and go no further? Have you ever seen a woman hell's-a-popping about some social issue only to one day turn her back and say “Hell with it” Her animus has worn out and is in need of being rocked by
La Que Sabe.
The woman whose idea or energy has waned, withered, or ceased altogether needs to know the way to this old woman
curandera,
healer, and must carry the tired animus th
ere
for renewal.

I work with many women who are deeply involved in social activism. There is no doubt about it, at the far turn of this cycle they become tired out, dragging themselves through the forest on creaking legs, the lantern flickering, ready to go out This is the time when they say, “I’ve had it I quit, I’m turning in my press pass, my badge, my union suit, my
...”
whatever it is. They’re going to immigrate to Auckland. They’re going to watch TV and eat bean curd cookies and never look out the window onto the world again. They’re going to buy bad shoes, move to a neighborhood where nothing ever happens, they’re going to watch the

shopping channel for the rest of their lives. From now on they’re going to mind their own business, look the other way ... on
and
o
n.

Whatever their idea of respite, even though they’re speaking from abject tiredness and frustration, I say that respite is a good idea, it is time to rest. To which they usually screech, “Rest! How can I rest when the whole world is going to hell right before my very eyes?”

But in the end, a woman must rest now, rock now, regain her focus. She must become younger, recover her energy. She thinks she cannot, but she can, for the circle of women, be they mothers, students, artists, or activists, always closes to fill in for those who go on rest leave. A creative woman has to rest now and return to her intense work later. She has to go see the old woman in the forest, the revivifier, the Wild Woman in one of her many leitmotifs. Wild Woman
expects
that the animus will wear out on a regular basis. She is not shocked that he falls through her door. She is not shocked when we fall through the door. She is ready. She will not rush to us in a panic. She will just pick us up and hold us till we regain our power again.

And neither should we panic when we lose our momentum or focus. But like her, we must calmly hold the idea and be with it a while. Whether our focus is on self-development, world issues, or relationship doesn’t matter, the animus will wear down. It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when. Completing long endeavors, such as finishing school, concluding a manuscript, fulfilling one’s opus, caregiving an ill person, all these have their times when the once-young energy turns old, falls down, and can go on no longer.

For women, it is best if they understand this at the onset of an endeavor, for women tend to be surprised by fatigue. Then they wail, they mutter, they whisper about failure, inadequacy, and such. No, no. This losing of energy is as it is. It is Nature.

The assumption of eternal strength in the masculine is in error. It is a cultural introject that must be routed from the psyche. This misconception causes both the masculine energies in the inner landscape and males in the culture to feel an unwarranted sense of failure if they tire or need rest. All n
aturally need a break to restore

strength. The modus operandi of the Life/Death/Life nature is cyclical and applies to everyone and all things.

In the story, three hairs are thrown to the floor. In my family there is a saying: “Throw some gold on the floor.” This is derived from
desprender
las palabras
, which in the tradition of
cuentistas
, storytellers, and healers in my family, means to throw away some of the words of the story in order to make it stronger.

The hair is symbolic of thought, that which issues from the head To throw some away or down makes the boychild somehow lighter, causing him to shine even more brightly. Likewise your worn-out idea or endeavor can shine more brightly if you will take some of it and throw it away. It is the same idea as the sculptor removing more marble in order to reveal more of the hidden form beneath. A powerful way to renew or strengthen one’s intention or action that has become fatigued is to throw some ideas away, and focus.

Take three hairs out of your endeavor and throw them to the ground. There they become like a wake-up call. Throwing them down makes a psychic noise, a chime, a resonance in the woman’s spirit that causes activity to occur again. The sound of some of one’s many ideas falling away becomes like an announcement of a new era or a new opportunity.

In reality, old
La Que Sabe
is
giving the masculine a light pruning. We know that cutting away the deadwood helps a tree to grow stronger. We also know that pinching off the heads of blossoms of certain plants helps them grow far more bushy, far more lush. For the wildish woman, the animus’s cycle of increase and decrease is natural. It is an archaic process, an ancient process. Time out of mind, it is how women approached the world of ideas and the outer manifestation of them. This is how women do it. The old woman in the fairy tale “Three Gold Hairs” teaches us, reteaches us really, how it is done.

So what is the point of this reclamation and focus, this calling back of what has been lost, this running with the wolves? It is to go for the jugular, to get right down to the seed and to the bones of everything and anything in your life, because that’s where your pleasure is, that’s where your joy is, that’s where a woman’s Eden lies, that place where there is time and freedom to be, wander,

wonder, write, sing, create, and not be afraid. When wolves perceive pleasure or danger, they at first become utterly still. They become like statues, utterly focused so they can see, so they can hear, so they can sense what is
there,
sense what is there in its most elemental form.

This is what the wildish nature offers us: the ability to see what is before us through focusing, through stopping and looking and smelling and listening and feeling and tasting. Focusing is the use of all of our senses, including intuition. It is into this world that women come in order to claim their own voices, their own values, their imaginations, their clairvoyance, their clear-seeing, their stories, and the ancient memories of women. And these are the work of focus and creation. If you’ve lost focus, just sit down and be still. Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away, and it will renew itself. You need do no more.