Clarissa Pincola Estes – Women Who Run With The Wolves – Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype

Now their end-of-the-day fatigue comes from satisfying work and endeavors, not from being shut up in too small a mindset, job, or relationship. They know instinctively when things must die and when things must live; they know how to walk away, they know how to stay.

Sometimes a woman trips over her own introversion and wants to simply wish things into being; she may think that just thinking the idea is good enough, and there need be no outer manifestation. Except she feels bereft and unfinished anyway. These are all manifestations of pollution in the river. What is being manufactured is not life but something that inhibits life.

Everyone becomes snagged by land commitments. Yet, the old one out in the sea calls everyone. Everyone must return.

Women’s “heal everything, fix everything” compulsion is a major entrapment constructed by the requirements placed upon us by our own cultures, mainly pressures to prove that we are not just standing around taking up space and enjoying ourselves, but that we have redeemable value—in some parts of the world, it is fair to say, to prove that we have value and therefore should be allowed to live.

She does not realize that by sacrificing her need for return, she teaches her children to make the very same sacrifices of their own needs once they are grown.

The reaction of the last old man constitutes a common cultural response toward a woman who has developed an impeccable persona but who is all crippled up with trying to maintain it. Well yes, she is crippled, but look at how nice she looks, look at how good she is, look at how well she’s doing.

The reaction of the last old man constitutes a common cultural response toward a woman who has developed an impeccable persona but who is all crippled up with trying to maintain it. Well yes, she is crippled, but look at how nice she looks, look at how good she is, look at how well she’s doing.

We lose the soulskin by becoming too involved with ego, by being too exacting, perfectionistic,5 or unnecessarily martyred, or driven by a blind ambition, or by being dissatisfied—about self, family, community, culture, world—and not saying or doing anything about it, or by pretending we are an unending source for others, or by not doing all we can to help ourselves.

lose the soulskin by becoming too involved with ego, by being too exacting, perfectionistic,5 or unnecessarily martyred, or driven by a blind ambition, or by being dissatisfied—about self, family, community, culture, world—and not saying or doing anything about it, or by pretending we are an unending source for others, or by not doing all we can to help ourselves.

There is much truth to the saying that freedoms have to be fought for anew every twenty years. Sometimes it seems that they have to be fought for every five minutes.