Highlights:
“To the ancients, bears symbolized resurrection. The creature goes to sleep for a long time, its heartbeat decreases to almost nothing. The male often impregnates the female right before hibernation, but miraculously, the egg and sperm do not unite right away. They float separately in her uterine broth until much later. Near the end of hibernation, the egg and sperm unite and cell division begins, so that the cubs will be born in the spring when the mother is awakening, just in time to care for and teach her new offspring. Not only by reason of awakening from hibernation as though from death, but much more so because she-bear awakens with new young, this creature is a profound metaphor for our lives, for return and increase coming from something that seemed deadened.” - Women Who Run with the Wolves, pg. 387
”The spiritual lands of Wild Woman have, throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed, and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others.” - pg. 1 ^quote2
“I call her Wild Woman, for those very words, wild and woman, create llamar o tocar a la puerta, the fairy-tale knock at the door of the deep female psyche. Llamar o tocar la puerta means literally to play upon the instrument of the name in order to open a passageway. No matter by which culture a woman is influenced, she understands the words wild and woman, intuitively.” - pg. 5
“And when we pick up her trail, it is typical of women to ride hard to catch up, to clear off the desk, clear off the relationship, clear out one’s mind, turn to a new page, insist on a break, break the rules, stop the world, for we are not going on without her any longer.” - pg. 6
“Because in the beginning of retrieving our relationship with her she can turn to smoke in an instant, by naming her we create for her a territory of thought and feeling within us.” - pg. 8
“Stories are medicine… They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything—we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories. Stories engender the excitement, sadness, questions, longings, and understandings that spontaneously bring the archetypes, in this case Wild Woman, back to the surface.” - pg. 15
“Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayermaking, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world between worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts. And even with these well-crafted practices, much of what occurs in this ineffable world remains forever mysterious to us, for it breaks physical laws and rational laws as we know them.” - pg. 30
”This is our meditation practice as women, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of ourselves, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of life itself.” - pg. 32 ^quote8
“Dreams are portales, entrances, preparations, and practices for the next step in consciousness, the ‘next day’ in the individuation process.” - pg. 68
“Wild Woman teaches women when not to act ‘nice’ about protecting their soulful lives. The wildish nature knows that being ‘sweet’ in these instances only makes the predator smile. When the soulful life is being threatened, it is not only acceptable to draw the line and mean it, it is required. When a woman does this, her life cannot be interfered with for long, for she knows immediately what is wrong and can push the predator back where it belongs. She is no longer naive. She is no longer a mark or a target.” - pg. 75
“…to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.” - pg. 88
“A woman’s psychic tasks are these: Learning fine discrimination, separating one thing from the other with finest discernment, learning to make fine distinctions in judgement… Observing the power of the unconscious and how it works even when the ego is not aware…” - pg. 103
“The Life/Death/Life nature is a cycle of animation, development, decline, and death that is always followed by re-animation. This cycle affects all physical life and all facets of psychological life. Everything—the sun, novas, and the moon, as well as the affairs of humans and those of the tiniest creatures, cells and atoms alike—have this fluttering, then faltering, then fluttering again.” - pg. 137
“The desire to force love to live on in its most positive form only is what causes love ultimately to fall over dead, and for good.” - pg. 149
“A culture that requires harm to one’s soul in order to follow the culture’s proscriptions is a very sick culture indeed. This ‘culture’ can be the one a woman lives in, but more damning yet, it can be the one she carries around and complies with within her own mind.” - pg. 189
“When a woman has a collapsing mother construct within her psyche and/or her culture, she is wobbly about her worth. She may feel that choices between fulfilling outer demands and the demands of soul are life-and-death issues. She may feel like a tormented outsider who belongs nowhere—which is relatively normal for the exile—but what is not normal is to sit down and cry about it and do nothing. One is supposed to get to one’s feet and go off in search of what one belongs to.” - pg. 190
”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…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.” ^quote17
“When seeking guidance, don’t ever listen to the tiny-hearted. Be kind to them, heap them with blessing, cajole them, but do not follow their advice.” - pg. 212
“There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives int he ways we deserve to have them. Don’t waste your time hating failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on.” - pg. 237
“The central psychic fact remains that our connection to meaning, passion, soulfulness, and the deep nature is something we have to keep watch over. There are many things that try to force, sweep, seduce away those handmade shoes, seeming simple things like saying, ‘Later, I’ll do that dance, planting, hugging finding, planning, learning, peace-making, cleansing… later. Traps, all.” - pg. 242
“Instinct is a difficult thing to define, for its configurations are invisible, and though we sense they have been part of human nature since the beginning of time, no one knows quite where they might be housed neurologically, or precisely how they act upon us. Psychologically, Jung speculated that the instincts derived from the psychoid unconscious, that layer of psyche where biology and spirit might touch. I am of a considered same mind, and would go further to venture that the creative instinct in particular is as much the lyrical language of the Self as is the symbology of dreams. Etymologically, the word instinct derives from the Latin instinguere, meaning ‘impulse,’ also instinctus, meaning ‘instigation,’ to incite or impel via an innate prompting. The idea of instinct can be valued positively as an inner something that when blended with forethought and consciousness guides humans to integral behavior. A woman is born with all instinct intact.” - pg. 249
“At the bottom of the well in the psyches of too many women lies the visionary creator, the astute truth-teller, the far-seer, the one who can speak well of herself without denigration, who can face herself without cringing, who works to perfect her craft. The positive impulses in shadow for women in our culture most often revolve around permission for the creation of a handmade life.” - pg. 254
“When the collective is hostile to a woman’s natural life, rather than accept the derogatory or disrespectful labels that are placed upon her, she can and must, like the ugly duckling, hold on, hold out, and search for that which she belongs to—and preferably out-live, out-thrive, and out-create those who vilified her.” - pg. 261
“If you are striving to do something you value, it is so important to surround yourself with people who unequivocally support your work.” - pg. 273
“The real miracle of individuation and reclamation of Wild Woman is that we all begin the process before we are ready, before we are strong enough, before we know enough… We respond before we know how to speak the language, before we know all the answers, and before we know exactly to whom we are speaking.” - pg. 274-275
“The psyches and souls of women have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place.” - pg. 276
“If the culture prohibits an integral and sane life for women for whatever reason, she will dream injured-animal dreams. Though the psyche makes every effort to cleanse and strengthen itself regularly, every lash mark ‘out there’ is recorded on the unconscious ‘in here,’ so that a dreamer carries the effects of losing her personal ties with Wild Woman, and also the world’s loss of relationship with this deep nature.” - pg. 298
”Nothing makes the light, the treasure, the wonder stand out so well as the darkness.” - pg. 300 ^quote28
“Especially if you are an artist, surround yourself with persons who are understanding about your need for home, for chances are you will need, more often than most, to mine the psychic terrain of home in order to learn the cycles of creation.” - pg. 311
“In order to converse with the wild feminine, a woman must temporarily leave the world and inhabit a state of aloneness in the oldest sense of the word. Long ago, the word alone was treated as two words, all one. To be all one meant to be wholly one, to be in oneness, either essentially or temporarily. That is precisely the goal of solitude, to be all one. It is the cure for the frazzled state so common to modern women… Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul.” - pg. 316
“Some say the creative life is in ideas, some say it is in doing. It seems in most instances to be in a simple being. It is not virtuosity, although that is very fine in itself. It is the love of something, having so much love for something—whether a person, a word, an image, an idea, the land, or humanity—that all that can be done with the overflow is to create. It is not a matter of wanting to, not a singular act of will; one solely must.” - pg. 322
“In archetypal lore there is the idea that if one prepares a special psychic place, then the being, the creative force, the soul source, will hear of it, sense its way to it, and inhabit that place. Whether this force is summoned by the biblical ‘go forward and prepare a place for the soul’ or, as in the film Field of Dreams, in which a farmer hears a voice urging him to build a baseball diamond for the spirits of players past, ‘If you build it, they will come,’ preparing a fitting place induces the great creative force to advance.” - pg. 323
”So we see that the river here symbolizes a form of feminine largess that arouses, excites, makes passionate. Women’s eyes flash as they create, their worlds lilt, their faces flush with life, their very hair seems to shine all the more. They are excited by the idea, aroused by the possibilities, impassioned by the very thought, and at that point, like the great river, they are meant to flow outward and continuously on their own unparalleled creative path. That is the way women feel fulfilled…
But sometimes…a woman’s creative life is taken over by something that wants to manufacture things of and for ego only, things which have no lasting soul-worth. Sometimes there are pressures from her culture that say her creative ideas are useless, that no one will want them, that it is futile for her to continue. That is pollution…That is what poisons the psyche.
Ego satisfaction is allowable and important in its own regard. The problem is that the spewing out of negative complexes attacks freshness, newness, potential, newborness, things in the pupae state, the lacuna, as well as the half-grown and the old and revered. When there is too much soulless or mock manufacturing, toxic waste pours into the pure river, killing off both creative impulse and energy.” - pg. 329
“But the creative life dies because we are not tending to the health of the river…
How might a woman’s creative life become polluted? This sludging of creative life invades all five phases of creation: inspiration, concentration, organization, implementation, and sustenance. Women who have lost one or more of these report that they ‘can’t think’ of anything new, useful, or empathetic for themselves. They are easily ‘distracted’ by love affairs, too much work, too much play, by tiredness, or by fear of failure.
Sometimes they cannot coalesce the mechanics of organization and their project lays scattered about in a hundred places and pieces. Sometimes problems issue from a woman’s naïveté about her own extroversion: She thinks that by making a few motions in the outer world, she has really done something. This is like making the arms but not the legs or the head of a thing and calling it done. She feels necessarily incomplete.
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.
Other times she is under attack by those around her, or by the voices yammering in her head: ‘Your work is not right enough, not good enough, not this enough, not that enough. It is too grandiose, too infinitesimal, too insignificant, takes too long, is too easy, too hard.’ This is pouring cadmium into the river.” - pg. 331
“Negative psychological complexes rear up and question your worth, your intention, your sincerity, and your talent. They also send exhortations that assert unequivocally that you must labor to ‘earn a living’ doing things that exhaust you, leave you no time to create, destroying your will to imagine…
One of the greatest problems of the creative complex is the accusation that whatever you’re doing won’t work because you’re not thinking logically, you’re not being logical, what you have done so far isn’t logical and is therefore doomed to failure. First of all, the primary stages of creating are not logical—nor should they be. If the complex succeeds in stopping you with this, it has you.” - pg. 332-333
“A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectability) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she ‘should’ be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.
The scattering of plans and projects, as if by a wind, occurs when a woman attempts to organize a creative idea and it just somehow keeps being blown away, becoming more and more confused and distorted. She is not tracking it in any concrete way because, again, she doesn’t have time to write it all down and organize it, or she is called by so many other things, that she loses her place and cannot pick it up again.
It may also be that a woman’s creative process is misunderstood or disrespected by those around her. It is up to her to inform them that when she has ‘that look’ in her eyes, it does not mean she is a vacant lot waiting to be filled. It means she is balancing a big cardhouse of ideas on a single fingertip, and she is carefully connecting all the cards using tiny crystalline bones and a little spit, and if she can just get it all to the table without it falling down or flying apart, she can bring an image from the unseen world into being. To speak to her in that moment is to create a Harpy wind that blows the entire structure to tatters. To speak to her in that moment is to break her heart.
And yet, a woman may do this to herself by talking away her ideas until all the arousal is gone from them, or by not putting her foot down about people creeping off with her creative tools and materials, or by the simple oversight of not buying the right equipment to execute the creative work properly, or by stopping and starting so many times, by allowing everyone and their cat to interrupt her at will, that the project falls into a shambles.” - pg. 333[^2]
“The challenge of loving unappealing aspects of ourselves is as much of an endeavor as any heroine has ever undertaken.” - pg. 467
“A woman at this stage of the psychic process (waiting to birth something) may enter another enantiodromia, the psychic state in which all that was once held valuable is now not so valuable anymore, and further, may be replaced by new and extreme cravings for odd and unusual sights, experiences, endeavors…(A woman) may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground, or put them into the ground…A new self is on the way. Our inner lives, as we have known them, are about to change. While this does not mean we should throw away the decent and especially the supportive aspects of our lives in some kind of demented housecleaning, it does mean that in the descent the topside world and ideals pale, and for a time we shall be restless and unsatisfied, for the satisfaction, the fulfillment, is in the process of being born in the inner reality. What it is we are hungering for can never be fulfilled by a mate, a job, money, a new this or that. What we hunger for is of the other world, the world that sustains our lives as women. And this child-Self we are awaiting is brought forth by just this means—by waiting. As time passes in our lives and our work in the underworld, the child develops and will be born. In most cases, a woman’s nightdreams will presage the birth; women literally dream of a new baby, a new home, a new life.” - pg. 467-468