Wolf Woman Sings
Longing is a strange beast. Like pain in the body, it often manifests in ways that are mysterious and masked, referring us to something wholly different than what our soul actually wants. It can make us think we are hungry for chocolate when what really crave is something much more nutritious, something mineral and holistic, something genesis and creative.
LONGING CAN MAKE YOU THINK OF A KISS WHEN WHAT YOU WANT IS TO CREATE.
It can awaken a desire in you that you can not name. It is a hot coal burning in your gut that no cold water can reach. And it is annoying in its insistence that you pay it its rightful attention, or something in you dies a million deaths with every unfulfilled breath you breathe.
Longing gone untended leaves you with no peace.
I have recognized of late that I crave deeply. I am not sure if this is something new that has just arrived in me, like some strange visitor from heaven, or if this has been an unresolved wanting that I have successfully pushed down and away until now. I do not know its origin or its birth date. But I know it’s here, now, and it is demanding attention.
The frustration is that it is difficult to name. The dreams are foggy and unclear and speak in mind-boggling metaphor, parables with hidden, layered meanings. They feel certain for only a moment at a time, then they disappear back into some nether-land of my psyche, only to re-emerge at some other, surprising time.
WHEN THE WOLF-PACK COMES FOR YOU
A little over a year ago, I had the most amazing dream. I was standing on the deck of a house and all of a sudden, night fell. The woods around the house suddenly became illuminated by a fog that seemed to carry light within it. It was a stark, beautiful image: the black of trees in silhouette against this white, smoky mist. As the light became more intense, however, something even more beautiful began to take shape in the back-light: a beautiful pack of wolves, staring right at me.
I can still remember the outline of them, in shadow, against the lit-up fog; the calm strength in their presence, the insistence of it. They were waiting.
Two were lying down. One was standing. I remember the other so well — she was sitting, and her ear twitched with eager awareness. These beautiful creatures sat in quiet expectation, knowing that there was nothing that would keep them from what they came for. They were on a mission.
Back on the deck, chaos ensued. All the random people who were there went into a panic. But something about the wolves comforted me. Intrigued me. At some point in the dream, I walked over to the edge of the deck and peered over the railing. There, standing on her hind legs, leaning against the wall on her front paws, as if willing herself to get closer, to climb it, was one of them. Her yellow eyes locked mine, and in that moment of connection I knew: she was there for me, and it was time for me to go.
But she kept an important piece of information to herself: where?
In her book Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés brilliantly deconstructs the psyche of the wildish woman, and helps us identify our inner wolf. She is to be expected, the author tells us. She is here to rattle our bones and awaken our intuition; she comes to enliven what has been dead, to awaken that which has overslept. Throughout the book, Pinkola Estés examines myths from around the world and helps us to identify psychological archetypes — a process that feels more like she is reaching a hand into my brain, pulling up fistfuls of grey matter and tossing it aside to get to the juicier stuff — that place where my soul sings its songs somewhere in the chambers of my heart, in the hollows of my belly, in the beautiful creative spaces deeper below.
In the book is a chapter on the LIFE / DEATH / LIFE cycle of relationships — which is something we in the west have a hard time dealing with, what with our high tech medicine that loves to keep things alive for far too long, our serial monogamy, our love of fairy tales. Our binary society has lost connection with the truth of death as an integral part of the creative process, insisting that decay is not a thing, that we must always be shiny and happy and smiley.
But persistent shiny happy smiles are actually death dealing, because if we stay only in this place of plastered smiles, no real development is happening. No growth, no actual living. We here in the west are afraid to acknowledge that if we are truly living our lives, we are also dying new deaths every day — old belief systems, old aspects of our self that no longer serve us, old constructs we used to think we needed to survive suddenly become meaningless and fall away. Unless, that is, we insist on maintaining our grip on them — these decaying, rotting, smelly things that do us no good any longer.
WHEN THE WOLVES LEAD YOU TO YOUR LONGING
Here is where the wolf shows what is in her teeth; here is where she bares it all for us. She has come to bring us to longing, which will at least look like the thing that is insistent enough, enticing enough to loosen our grip on the rotting things we have been holding onto out of fear.
The problem is not that they are rotting. Decay is a part of the life-cycle of things. It is required for metamorphosis. It is our clinging to something that is only going to become like dirt in a river bed that is the problem — it will get swept away no matter how hard we try to hold on to it. The question becomes will we be swept up in the current and drown, or will we instead release what is not ours to hold in the first place, raise our faces to the sun, and find the new path through the forest?
And can we do this without getting distracted by what we think we want, or worse, think we need?
Can we let go of what we think a relationship should be and allow it to become what it needs to be? Can we release the career we thought we were made for and open up to a new possibility? Can we stop worrying about what other people think long enough to admit to ourselves and the world who we actually are? Are we brave enough to announce that we dance with angels, kiss the sea, forge whole universes in the synapses of our minds? Can we let God out of the box we have carefully constructed, and trust that God actually knows how to be divine?
Like referred nerve pain in the body, longings need to be examined carefully for their edges and the paths they take. Like parables, they need to be considered and understood. Before you gorge yourself on chocolate, it’s important to take dose of magnesium and see if satisfaction sets in. Sweetness is only sweet, after all, until it makes you sick.
Women especially — though some men, too, I suspect — have long had our wildish natures squashed; our inner wolf-women have dried up to ashy bone, rattling about in our inner spaces, by power structures that keep us polite and well-behaved people-pleasers. When the wolf arrives at the door of our psyches — in whatever manifestation she may take — we do well to welcome her in, allow her to take up residence, to curl up in our bed with us and lick our fingers awake again. She’s not going away, after all, and I’d rather be friends with a wolf than have her snarling and growling and raging.
I do not pretend to control my wolf-woman nor my longing, but only to follow them both into some misty, self-illuminated fog. In order to do this, I have tried to look past the chocolate-smeared appearance of my longing and see what is true underneath. There, I find the milky edges of untended creativity — I sense a desire to make something of my own. I feel my empty hands and I want something in them, something sensual that will get them dirty with the process — clay to mold or color to paint the sky of my interior vibrant again. I feel the urge to excavate my inner places for words of beauty and worth — the kinds of words that will invite you — yes, you — to fall into them. Into me, laid almost bare and vulnerable. I know my mind craves thoughts and ideas that live on borderlands, with edges that push and pull and terrify. I even — briefly but viscerally — felt the urge to act again. To feel a script in my hand, to dissect a character and put her back together again, a psychic sort of Frankenstein of beautiful voice and embodiment. I felt in that quickest of moments the craving for the smell of back stages again, of lights and stage make up and rehearsal spaces and the tired ache of that god-forsaken thing call tech dress.
You know it’s bad if an actor is craving tech dress.
The urge to act again left as quick as it came, and it may have just been my body remembering its own creative process, so I will let it be for now. But I saw that piece of gore dangling off the wolf-woman’s fang, and I said to myself, “Duly noted.”
I’ll let her lead. I’ll follow the soft pad of her paw across the pine needles and decaying leaves. I trust her to show me the things I need to let go of, the things I must allow to litter the forest floor so it can be regenerated and so I can be free to dance in moonlit fog, to burrow my fingers into clay and mold something new, to pour myself into words on pages and screens and into all of you, beautiful humans, in all our dysfunctional forms. And I mean this literally: I have just now signed up for an art class; I am applying to PhD programs; I commit to writing words — their beauty and worth is to be determined. I will feed my wolf-woman with my empty hands and my longing, and sing her rattling bones back to life.
This is the only offering I have.
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