Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (25 page)

Frozen Feeling, Frozen Creativity

Women deal with exile in other ways. Like the duckling who becomes frozen in the ice of the pond,
théy
freeze up. Freezing up is the worst thing a person can do. Coldness is the kiss of death to creativity, relationship, life itself. Some women act as though it is an achievement to be cold. It is not. It is an act of defensive anger.

In archetypal psychology to be cold is to be without feelings. There are stories of the frozen child, the child who could not feel, the
corpses
frozen in the ice, during which time nothing could move, nothing co
uld become, nothing could be born
. For a human to be frozen means to
purposely
be without feeling, especially toward oneself, but also and sometimes even more so toward others. While it is a self-protective mechanism, it is hard on the soul-psyche, for the soul does not respond to iciness, but rather warmth. An icy attitude will put out a woman’s creative fire. It will inhibit the creative function.

This is a serious problem, yet the story gives us an idea. The ice must be broken and the soul taken out of the freeze.

When writers, for example, feel dry, dry, dry, they know that the way to become moist is to write. But if they’re locked in ice, they won’t write. There are painters who are gasping to paint, but they’re telling themselves, “Get out of here. Your work is weirdly strange and ugly.” There are many artists who’ve not yet gotten a good foothold or who are old war-horses at developing their creative lives, and yet and still, every time they reach for the pen, the brush, the ribbons, the script, they hear, “You’re nothing but trouble, your work is marginal or completely unacceptable— because you yourself are marginal and unacceptable.”

So what is the solution? Do as the duckling does. Go ahead, struggle through it. Pick up the pen already and put it to the page and stop whining. Write. Pick up the brush and be mean to yourself for a change, paint. Dancers, put on the loose chemise, tie the ribbons in your hair, at your waist, or on your ankles and tell the body to take it from there. Dance. Actress, playwright, poet, musician, or any other. Generally, just stop talking. Don’t say one more word unless you’re a singer. Shut yourself in a room with a ceiling
or in a clearing under the sky. Do your art. Generally, a thing cannot freeze if it is moving. So move. Keep moving.

The Passing Stranger

Although in the story the farmer taking the duck home seems to be a literary device to further the story rather than an archetypal leitmotif about exile, there is a thought here that I think is valuable. The person who might take us out of the ice, who might even

psychically free us from our lack of feeling, is not necessarily going to be the one to whom we belong. It may be, as in the story, another of those magical but fleeting events that again came along when we least expected it, an act of kindness from a passing stranger.

This is another example of nourishment of the psyche that occurs when one is at the end of one's rope and cannot stand it anymore. Then a something that is sustaining appears out of nowhere to assist you, and then disappears into the night, leaving you wondering. Was that a person or a spirit? It might be a sudden gust of luck that brings something very needed in through your door. It might be as simple a thing as a respite, a let-up in pressure, a small space of rest and repose.

This is not a fairy tale we are talking about now, but real life. Whatever it might be, it is a time when the spirit, in one way or another, feeds us, pulls us out, shows us the secret passage, the hiding place, the escape route. And this coming when we are down and feeling stormy dark or darkly calm is what pushes us through the channel to the next step, the next phase in learning the strength of the exile.

Exile as Boon

If you have attempted lo fit whatever mold and failed to do so, you are probably lucky. You may be an exile of some sort, but you have sheltered your soul. There is an odd
p
henom
en
on that occurs when one keeps trying to fit and fails. Even though the outcast is driven away, she is at the same time driven right into the arms of her psychic and true kin, whether these be a course of study, an art
form, or a group of people. It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires. It is never a mistake to search for what one requires. Never.

There is something useful in all this torque and tension. Something in the duckling is being tempered, being made strong by this exile. While this situation is not one we would wish on anyone for any reason, its effect is similar to pure natural carbon under pressure producing diamonds—it leads eventually to a profound magnitude and clarity of psyche.

There is an aspect of alchemy, wherein the base substance of lead is pounded about and beaten down. While exile is not a thing to desire for the fun of it, there is an unexpected gain from it; the gifts of exile are many. It takes out weakness by the pounding. It removes whininess, enables acute insight, heightens intuition, grants the power of keen observation and perspective that the “insider” can never achieve.

Even though there are negative aspects to it, the wild psyche can endure exile. It makes us yearn that much more to free our own true nature and causes us to long for a culture to match. Even this yearning, this longing makes a person go on. It makes a woman go on looking, and if she cannot find the culture that encourages her, then she usually decides to construct it herself. And that is good, for if she builds it, others who have been looking for a long time will mysteriously arrive one day enthusiastically proclaiming that they have been looking for this all along.

The Uncombed Cats and Cross-Eyed Hens of the World

The uncombed cat and the cross-eyed hen find the duckling’s aspirations stupid and nonsensical. It gives just the right perspective on the touchiness and the values of others who denigrate
the
se
who are not like themselves. Who would expect a cat to like the water? Who would expect a hen to go swimming? No one, of course. But too often, from the exile’s point of view, when people are not alike, it is the exile who is inferior, and the limitations and/or motives of the other are not properly weighed or evaluated.

Well, in the spirit of not wanting to make one person less and

another person more, or any more than we have to for the purposes of discussion, let us just say that here the duckling has the same experience that thousands of exiled women have—that of a basic incompatibility with dissimilar persons, which is no one’s fault, even though most women are too obliging and take it on as though it is their fault personally.

When this happens, we see women who are ready to apologize for taking up space. We see women who are afraid to just say “No, thank you,” and leave. We see women who listen to someone telling them they are wrongheaded over and over again without understanding that cats don't swim and hens don’t dive under water.

I must admit, I sometimes find it useful in my practice to delineate the various typologies of personality as cats and hens and ducks and swans and so forth. If warranted, I might ask my client to assume for a moment that she is a swan who does not realize it. Assume also for a moment that she has been brought up by or is currently surrounded by ducks.

There is nothing wrong with ducks, I assure them, or with swans. But ducks are ducks and swans are swans. Sometimes to make the point I have to move to other animal metaphors. What If you were raised by the mice people? But what if you’re, say, a swan. Swans and mice hate each other’s food for the most part. They each think the other smells funny. They are not interested in spending time together, and if they did, one would be constantly harassing the other.

But what if you, being a swan, had to pretend you were a mouse? What if you had to pretend to be gray and furry and tiny? What if you had no long snaky tail to carry in the air on tailcarrying day? What if wherever you went you tried to walk like a mouse, but you waddled instead? What if you tried to talk like a mouse, but instead out came a honk every time? Wouldn’t you be the most miserable creature in the world?

The answer is an unequivocal yes. So why, if this is all so and too true, do women keep trying to bend and fold themselves into shapes that are not theirs? I must say, from years of clinical observation of this problem, that most of the time it is not because of deep-seated masochism or a malignant dedication to self-destruction or anything of that nature. More often it is because the woman simply doesn’t know any better. She is unmothered.

There is a saying,
tu puedes
saber
muchas cosas
, you can know about things, but it is not the same as
sentido
, possessing sense. The duckling seems to know “things,” but he has no sense. He is unmothered, meaning untaught at the most basic level. Remember, it is the mother who teaches by expanding the innate talents of the offspring. Animal mothers who teach their offspring to hunt are not exactly teaching them “how to hunt,” for that is in their bones already. But they are teaching them what to watch out for, what to pay attention to; those things are not known to them until the mother shows them, thereby activating new learning and innate wisdom.

It is the same for the woman in exile. If she is an ugly duckling, if she is unmothered, her instincts have not been sharpened. She learns instead by trial and error. Usually many trials; many, many errors. But there is hope, for you see, the exile never gives up. She keeps going till she finds the guide, the scent, till she finds the trail, till she finds home.

Wolves never look more funny than when they have lost the scent and scrabble to find it again: they hop in the air; they run in circles; they plow up the ground with their noses; they scratch the ground, then run ahead, then back, then stand stock-still. They look as if they have lost their wits. But what they are really doing is picking up all the clues they can find. They’re biting them down out of the air, they’re filling up their lungs with the smells at ground level and at shoulder level, they are tasting the air to see who has passed through it recently, their ears are rotating like satellite dishes, picking up transmissions from afar. Once they have all these clues in one place, they know what to do next

Though a woman may look scattered when she has lost touch with the life site values most and is running about trying to recapture it she is most often gathering information, taking a taste of this, grabbing up a paw of that. At the very most one might briefly explain to her what it is that she is doing. Then, let her be. As soon as she processes all the information from the clues she’s gathered, she’ll be moving in an intentional manner again. Then the desire

for membership in the uncombed cat and cross-eyed hen dub will diminish to nothing.

Remembrance and Continuance No Matter What

We all have a longing that we feel for our own kind, our wild kind. The duckling, you will recall, ran away after being tortured without mercy. Next he had a run-in with a gaggle of geese and was almost killed by hunters. He was chased from the barnyard and from a farmer’s home, and finally exhausted, he shivered at the edge of the lake. There is no woman among us who does not know his feeling. And yet, it is just this longing that leads us to hang on, to go on, to proceed with hope.

Here is the promise from the wild psyche to all of us. Even though we have only heard about, glimpsed, or dreamt a wondrous wild world that we belonged to once, even though we have not yet or only momentarily touched it, even though we do not identify ourselves as part of it, the memory of it is a beacon that guides us toward what we belong to, and for the rest of our lives. In the ugly duckling, a knowing yearning stirs when he sees the swans lift up into the sky, and from that single event his remembrance of that vision sustains him.

I worked with a woman who was near the last straw and thinking suicide. A spider making its web on her porch caught her eye. Precisely what it was in that wee beastie’s act that chopped the ice around her soul so she could go free and grow again, we will never know. But I am convinced, both as psychoanalyst and as
cantadora
, that many times it is the things of nature that are the most healing, especially the very accessible and the very simple ones. The medicines of nature are powerful and straightforward: a ladybug on the green rind of a watermelon, a robin with a string of yam, a weed in perfect flower, a shooting star, even a rainbow in a glass shard in the street can be the right medicine. Continuance is a strange thing: it puts out tremendous energy, it can be fed for a month on five minutes of contemplating quiet water.

It is interesting to note that among wolves, no matter how sick, no matter how cornered, no matter how alone, afraid, or weakened, the wolf will continue. She will lope even with a broken leg.

She will go near others seeking the protection of the pack. She will strenuously outwait, outwit, outrun, and outlast whatever is bedeviling her. She will put her all into taking breath after breath. She will drag herself, if necessary, just like the duckling, from place to place, till she finds a good place, a healing place, a place for thriving.

The hallmark of the wild nature is that it goes on. It perseveres. This is not something we do. It is something we are, naturally and innately. When we cannot thrive, we go on till we can thrive again. Whether it be our creative life that we are cut away from, whether it be a culture or a religion we are cast out of, whether it be a familial exiling, a banishment by a group,, or sanctions on our movements, thoughts, and feelings, the inner wild life continues and we go on. The wild nature is not native to any particular ethnic group. It is the core nature of women from Benin, Cameroon, and New Guinea. It is in women from Latvia, The Netherlands, and Sierra Leone. It is the center of Guatemalan women, Haitian women, Polynesian women. Name a country. Name a race. Name a religion. Name a tribe. Name a city, a village, a lone outpost. The. women all have this in common—the Wild Woman, the wild soul. They all go on feeling for and following the wild.

So, if women must, they will paint blue sky on jail walls. If the skeins are burnt, they will spin more. If the harvest is destroyed they will sow more immediately. Women will draw doors where there are none, and open them and pass through into new ways and new lives. Because the wild nature persists and prevails, women persist and prevail.

The duckling is led to within an inch of his life. He has felt lonely, cold, frozen, harassed, chased, shot at, given up on, unnourished, out there way out of bounds, at the edge of life and death and not knowing what will come next. And now comes the most important part of the story: spring approaches, new life quickens, a new turn, a new try is possible. The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life; hold on, for the promise from the wild nature is this: after winter,
spring always comes.