PRIMAL GODDESS
From Women Who Run With Wolves by Clarissa Pikola Estes
Once upon a time there was a woman whose psyche had been looted, not all at once through a kind of grand larceny, but through attrition, in small acts, like pilfering in a candy store..small acts that wore her vital sense of self away like a dress faded and worn thin through constant wear. It wasn’t outright robbery either, because the loss of her instinctual inner sense of passion and power had been so eroded over generations that robbery was never even considered or suspected. An unidentified anxiousness, a sort of hollowness, a dull ache and longing, subtly crept into her heart, like lime into sandstone, unnoticed. She began to accept these feelings as her natural state and as such to expect no relief. She had become ensnared in an invisible trap that fostered the constant erosion of her instinctual wisdom, in one deadening act after the other. Because her instinctual nature had been muzzled, she no longer even saw or questioned the bars on her cage, so insidiously were they constructed by all that she experienced in the somnambulistic culture of the asleep around her.
But because the wild woman archetype could never be completely snuffed out in the female psyche, she had dreams, from which she would wake up startled, disturbed, breathless. In these dreams she would be dancing in a state of abandon, around a bonfire with other wild eyed women with clay streaked faces or she would see herself consorting with snakes, undulating mysteriously in dark underground caverns. For a few moments after these dreams, she would wake up feeling afraid, but curiously enlivened, tingling with unfathomable possibilities. It was in these infrequent moments, waking from dreams, that the reclamation of her ravaged and starving soul began. These moments were discounted at first as wild dreams, but something began to enter her awareness like blood dripping from a wound. She was unable to ignore or suppress it. She became more present to her actual predicament. She began to occasionally notice the bars on her invisible cage and began to feel their painful constraint.
One night she was strangely drawn to go outside on a moonlit night. Not knowing what else to do outside at night, she sat somewhat fearfully under a tree on the perfectly trimmed lawn in her back yard. The longer she sat under the influence of the moon, the more she began to observe how the wildness of nature had, like herself, been forced into squares called yards. When she felt the pain of that awareness, something snapped in her belly and without another thought, she began running, she didn’t know where or why but something buried deep within drove her out in the dark night. She ran until she fell into a swoon on the earth. Perhaps in her exhaustion she fell asleep and dreamed what follows, or perhaps she overcame, for a moment, the prison of her limited perception which ever was the case, she found herself in a place far beyond the neat squares of yards.. a place she had never noticed existed before. She found herself amidst an untrammeled snarl of trees on a starry hilltop overlooking a valley. As she began to squint her eyes and look more closely, she began to make out the faint tracings of mysteriously painted faces, etched on the edge of the darkness that enveloped her. At first she was terrified.. then as she scrutinized the faces that peered out at her, it occurred to her.. could they also have been moved by the same primal force that burst her prison walls.. could they also have broken free and been drawn to this wild place to reclaim the creative spark, the passion, the lightening in the blood, the aliveness which had been lost? As she thought this thought, the women formed a circle around her, the deep tones of a drum began to awaken some primal remembrance and set fire to her senses. Her whole body began to blush and pulsate. Slowly the women appeared to turn into a snake, undulating around her, making throaty utterances that slowly transformed into a low droning sound. The thoughts that usually incessantly jabbed and poked at her, had suddenly succumbed to the silence. In that moment, by some miracle, she became the direct intuitive knowing beyond the strait jacket of words. She found that she instead BECAME the sound itself. She became the undulating and primal movement of the snake. She became the power of the dancing flames. She became the ecstasy of direct knowing. In this knowing, she felt the earth’s heartbeat. She became the passionate love pulsing endlessly from that divine female power source. She merged so completely with that love that she merged, unified, and finally became the earth. She felt the earth’s embrace in the night sky. She was all women in union with the Beloved. In that moment, she cried, she screamed, she raged, wildly uncontrollably merging with her divine birthright of passion and power. It was in that moment that she became the Mystery. It was in that moment that she knew. It was in that moment that she saw that she would never return to the mental prison that had held her captive. It was in that moment that she began her joyful descent of the mountain, into the reclamation of her soul, her intuitive wisdom, her playful spirit, her very being!
