COME OUT, COME OUT WHEREVER YOU ARE

“Women across the world - your mother, my mother, you and I, your sister, your friend, our daughters, all the tribes of women not yet met - we all dream what is lost, what next must rise from the unconscious. We all dream the same dreams worldwide. We are never without the map. We are never without each other. We unite through our dreams.

Dreams are compensatory, they provide a mirror into the deep unconscious most often reflecting what is lost, and, what is yet needed for correction and balance. Through dreams, the unconscious constantly produces teaching images. So, like a fabled lost continent, the wild dreamland rises out of our sleeping bodies, rises steaming and streaming to create a sheltering motherland over all of us. This is the continent of our knoiwng. It is the land of our Self.

And this is what we dream: We dream the archetype of Wild Woman, we dream of reunion. And we are born and reborn from this dream every day and create from its energy all during the daytime. We are born and reborn night after night from this same wild dream, and we return to daylight grasping a coarse hair, the soles of our feet black with damp earth, our hair smelling like ocean, or forest or cook fire.

It is from that land that we step into our day clothes, our day lives. We travel from that wildish place in order to site before the computer, in front of the cook pot, before the window, in front of the teacher, the book, the customer. We breathe the wild into our corporate work, our business creations, our decisions, our art, the work of our hands and our hearts, our politics, spirituality, plans, home life, education, industry, foreign affairs, freedoms, rights, and duties. The wild feminine is not only sustainable in all worlds; it sustains all worlds.

Let us admit it. We women are building a motherland; each with her own plot of soil eked from a night of dreams, a day of work. We are spreading this soil in larger and larger circles, slowly, slowly. One day it will be a continuous land, a resurrected land come back from the dead. Munda de la Madre, psychic motherworld, coexisting and coequal with all other worlds. This world is being made from our lives, our cries, our laughter, our bones. It is a world worth making, a world worth living in, a world in which there is a prevailing and decent wild sanity.

When we think of reclamation it may bring to mind bulldozers or carpenters, the restoration of an old structure, and that is the modern usage of the word. However, the older meaning is this: The word reclamation is derived from the old French reclaimer, meaning to ‘call back the hawk which has been let fly.’ Yes, to cause something of the wild to return when it is called. It is therefore by its meaning an excellent word for us. We are using the voices of our minds, our lives and our souls to call back intuition, imagination; to call back the Wild Woman. And she comes.

Women cannot get away from this. If there is to be change, we are it. We carry La Que Sabe, the One Who Knows. If there is to be inner change, individual women must do it. If there is to be world change, we women have our own way of helping to achieve it. Wild Woman whispers the words and the ways to us, and we follow. She has been running and stopping and waiting to see if we are catching up. She has something, many things, to show us.

So if you are on the verge of breaking away, taking a risk - daring to act in proscribed ways, then dig up the deepest bones possible, fructifying the wild and natural aspects of women, of life, of men, of children, of earth. Use your love and good instincts to know when to growl, to pounce, to take a swipe, when to kill, when to retreat, when to bay till dawn. To live as closely as possible to the numinous wild a woman must do more head tossing, more brimming, have more sniffing intuition, more creative life, more ‘get-down-dirty’, more solitude, more women’s company, more natural life, more fire, more spirit, more cooking of words and ideas. She must do more recognition of sorority, more seeding, more root stock-keeping, more kindness to men, more neighborhood revolution, more poetry, more painting of fables and facts, longer reaches into the wild feminine. More terrorist sewing circles, and more howling. And, especially, much more canto hondo, much more deep song.

She must shake her pelt, strut the old pathways, assert her instinctual knowledge. We can all assert membership in the ancient scar clan, proudly bear the battle scars of our time, write our secrets on walls, refuse to be ashamed, lead the way through and out. Let us not overspend on anger. Instead let us be empowered by it. Most of all let us be cunning and use our feminine wits.

Let us keep in mind that the best cannot and must not hide. Meditation, education, all the dream analysis, all the knowledge of God’s green acre is of not value if one keeps it all to oneself or one’s chosen few. So come out, come out wherever you are. Leave deep footprints because you can…

…Forgive as much as you can, forget a little, and create a lot. What you do today influences your matri-lineal lines in the future. The daughters of your daughters of your daughters are likely to remember you, and most importantly, follow in your tracks.”

- Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., Women Who Run With the Wolves