Clarissa Pinkola Estés is a Jungian analyst and cantadora,
a collector and teller of stories.
In her bestselling book, Women Who Run With The Wolves, Estés uses nineteen folk tales to empower and enlighten women. She attempts to reconnect us with the Wild Woman hidden somewhere deep within each of us.
The Wild Woman is not wild in the sense of being crazy, angry or out-of-control, she is wild because she has not lost her connection to life, death and rebirth--or, to put it more simply, nature.
Estes' book will show you where you have lost touch with your heart, your guts, your creativity, your wildness--your life! The stories she presents, and her insightful analysis of those stories, will gently lead you back to yourself.
Here, now, is an excerpt from Women Who Run With The Wolves:
I would like to introduce you to the concept of Descansos. If you ever traveled in Old Mexico, New Mexico, southern Colorado, Arizona, or parts of the South, you've seen little white crosses by the roadway. These are descansos, resting places. You'll also find them on the edges of cliffs along particularly scenic but dangerous roads in Greece, Italy, and other Mediterranean countries. Sometimes crosses are clustered in twos or threes or fives. People's names are inscribed upon them -- Jesus Mendez, Arturo Beunofuentes, Jeannie Abeyta. Sometimes the names are spelled out in nails, sometimes they are painted on or carved into the wood.
Descansos are symbols that mark a death. Right there, right on that spot, someone's journey in life halted unexpectedly. There has been a car accident, or someone was walking along the road and died of heat exhaustion, or a fight took place there. Something happened there that altered that person's life and the lives of other persons forever.
Women have died a thousand deaths before they are twenty years old. They've gone in this direction or that, and have been cut off. They have hopes and dreams that have been cut off also. Anyone who says otherwise is still asleep. All that is grist for the mill of descansos.
While all these things deepen individuation, differentiation, growing up and growing out, blossoming, becoming awake and aware and conscious, they are also profound tragedies and have to be grieved as such.
To make descansos means taking a look at your life and marking where the small deaths, las muertes chicitas, and the big deaths, las muertes grandotas, have taken place. I like to make a time-line of a woman's life on a big long sheet of white butcher paper, and to mark with a cross the places along the graph, starting with her infancy all the way to the present where parts and pieces of her self and her life have died.
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 in the backgroung "forgotten" for those things that the woman senses but have not yet surfaced. I also write "forgiven" over those things the woman has for the most part released.
I encourage you to make descansos, to sit down with a time-line of your life and say "Where are the crosses? Where are the places that must be remembered, must be blessed?" In all are meanings that you've brought forward into your life today. They must be remembered, but they must be forgotten at the same time. It takes time. And patience.
Descansos is a conscious practice that takes pity on and gives honour to the orphaned dead of your psyche, laying them to rest at last.
Be gentle with yourself and make the descansos, the resting places for the aspects of yourself that were on their way to somewhere, but never arrived. Descansos mark the death sites, the dark times, but they are also love notes to your suffering. They are transformative. 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.
You can buy Women Who Run With The Wolves at Amazon.com.
