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.” - 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