Living in the Light

Camp Out at Vomb Lake

"What are some of the feeling toned symptoms of a disrupted relationship with the wildish force in the psyche? To chronically feel, think, or act in any of the following ways is to have a partially severed or lost entirely relationship with the deep instinctual psyche. Using women's language exclusively, these are: feeling extraordinarily dry, fatigued, frail, depressed, confused, gagged, muzzled, unaroused. Feeling frightened, halt or weak, without inspiration, without animation, without soulfulness, without meaning, shame-bearing, chronically fuming, stuck, uncreative, compressed, crazed.

Feeling powerless, chronically doubtful, shaky, blocked, unable to follow through, giving one's creative life over to other life sapping choices in mates, work, or friendships, suffering to live outside one's own cycles, overprotective of self, inert, uncertain, faltering, inability to pace oneself or set limits.

Not insistent on one's own tempo, to be self conscious, to be away from one's own God or Gods, to be separated from one's revivification, drawn far into domesticity, intellectualism, work, or inertia because that is the safest place for one who has lost her instincts.

To fear to venture by one's self to reveal oneself, fear to seek mentor, mother, father, fear to set out one's imperfect work before it is an opus, fear to set out on a journey, fear of caring for another or others, fear one will run on, run out, run down, cringing before authority, loss of energy for creative projects, wincing, humiliation, angst, numbness, anxiety.Afraid to bite back when there is nothing else left to do, afraid to try the new, fear to stand up to, afraid to speak up to, speak against, sick stomach, butterflies, sour stomach, cut in the middle, strangled, becoming conciliatory or nice too easily, revenge. Afraid to stop, afraid to act, repeatedly counting to three and not beginning, superiority complex, ambivalence, AND YET, otherwise, fully capable and functioning. These severances are a disease not of an era or century, but an epidemic anywhere and anytime women are captured, anytime wildish nature has become entrapped.

A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving, Yet separation from the wildish nature causes a woman to become meager, thin, ghostly, spectral. We are not meant to be puny with frail hair and an inabilty to leap up, to birth, to create life. When women's lives are in stasis, or filled with ennui, it is always time for the wildish woman to emerge; it is time for the functioning of the psyche to flood the delta.

How does wild woman affect women? With her as ally, as leader, model, teacher, we see, not through two eyes, but through the eyes of intuition which is many eyed. When we assert intuition, we are therefore like the starry night: we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes.

The wild nature carries bundles for healing; she carries everything a woman needs to be and know. She carries the medicine for all things. She carries stories and dreams and words and songs and signs and symbols. She both a vehicle and a destination.

To adjoin the instinctual nature does not mean to come undone, change everything from left to right, from black to white, to move east to west, to act crazy or out of control. It does not mean to lose one's primary socializations, or to become less human. It means quite the opposite. The wildish nature has a vast integrity to it.

It means to establish territory, to find one's pack, to be in one's body with certain pride regardless of of the body's gifts and limitations, to speak and act on one's behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one's cycles, to find what belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as possible. "

- Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves

"Every creative genius has been a channel. When I speak of a channel, I have an image of a long round pipe, with energy flowing through it like a pipe in a pipe organ, with the music coming through. The channel image has three important features: 1. It is open and unobstructed inside so energy can move freely though it

2. It has definite physical form; a structure surrounds open space so that energy is directed in a particular way. Without this structure, the energy would be free floating without any form.

3. It has a power source- something which moves energy through the channel. We have a common power source (the universe), and the same creative energy flows though each of us. "

- Shakti Gawain, Living in the Light