Running with the wolves

Every spring, the S. Pines Library has a book sale.  I'm usually fifth in line (i like to sleep late), and have found many treasures while plundering through boxes of books.  Some, I purchase because I've wanted to read, and some for the titles alone.  For instance, one title that grabbed me was "I Killed June Cleaver."  I mean, really. Who could pass that up?

Last year, there was a black and gold paperback, good quality.  The title of that one grabbed me, too.  It was called, Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Jungian psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Fascinating reading. She uses stories as a healing tool to help women rediscover the primal woman, the collective unconscious specific to our gender.

I’ve skipped ahead to a chapter on rage. How to deal with it. When it’s appropriate to bare fangs. How to lay it to rest.

Estes speaks of descansos, white crosses that mark the spot where someone has died, where lives have changed. An exercise in this chapter involves making a descansos, a chart, or time-line, of our lives and ask where the crosses are. Estes writes:

“To make a descansos means taking a look at your life and marking where the small deaths and the big deaths have taken place.”

“We mark where there were roads not taken, paths that were cut off, ambushes, betrayals, and deaths. I put a little cross along the time-line at the places that should have been mourned, or still need to be mourned. And then I write the background “forgotten” for those things that the woman senses but which have not yet surfaced. I also write “forgiven” over those things the woman has for the most part released.”

“Descansos is a conscious practice that takes pity on the orphaned dead of your psyche , laying them to rest at last.”

"There is a lot to be said for pinning things to the earth so they don't follow us around.  There is a lot to be said for laying them to rest."

Pinkola-Estes is a wise and insightful woman. Women Who Run With the Wolves is teaching and healing well worth the time for reading.