Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes is my personal hero. Her work, words, kindness, wisdom, compassion and beauty sink into my soul and comfort me like no other. I invite you to read her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves and promise that you will be the better for having done so. She is a mother to us all.

"It is into this world that women come in order to claim their own voices, their own values, their imaginations, their clairvoyance, clear-seeing, their stories, and the ancient memories of women. And these are the work of focus and creation. If you've lost focus, just sit down and be still. Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away, and it will renew itself- You need do no more."

"Many women are sensitive in the way sand is sensitive to the wave, the way trees are sensitive to the quality of the air, the way a wolf can hear another creature step into her territory from over a mile away. This splendid gift of women so attuned is to see, hear, sense, receive, and transmit images and ideas and feelings with lightning speed. Most women can feel the slightest change in someone else's temperment can read faces and bodies- this being called intuition- and often from a plethora of tiny clues that coalesce to give her information, she knows what is on their minds. But it is this very openness that leaves their boundaries vulnerable, thereby exposing them to injuries of the spirit. "

"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..Going home is sanity...It takes out weakness by the pounding. It removes whininess, enables acute insight, heightens intuition, grants the power of keen observation, and perspective"

"…throughout time there is the mystical sense that any individuation work done by humans also changes the darkness in the collective unconscious of all humans...Jung once said that God became more conscious as humans became more conscious...Since time out of mind a considered act of heroism has been the cure for stultifying ambivalence..."

"Angst about the body robs a woman in some large share of her creative life and her attention to other things...where there is a wound on the psyches and bodies of women there is a corresponding wound at the same site in the culture itself and finally on Nature herself...It is not amazing that in our culture there is an issue about carving up a woman's natural body, that there is a corresponding issue about carving up the landscape... "

The most holy, beautiful way of seeing aging depicted is in Dr. Estes' description of the Native American Butterfly Woman whom she went to see as a child and was left awed by the dancer's presence:

"She is wide of thigh and broad of rump because she carries much. Her gray hair certifies that she need no longer observe taboos about touching others. She is allowed to touch everyone: boys, babies, men, girl children, the old, the ill, the dead. The Butterfly Woman can touch everyone. It is her privilege to touch all, at last. This is her power. Hers is the body of La Mariposa, the butterfly. "

"The mood of a warrior who enters into the unknown is not one of sadness: on the contrary, she's joyful because she feels humbled by the great fortune, confident that her spirit is impeccable and above all, fully aware of her efficiency."
- The author of this quote is unknown to me. A wonderful woman, an angel-mother, sentthis to me. I look to it for inspiration and comfort when I feel sad or lonely.

I am
a Native Texas Sunflower,
I bloom best when the heat is on;
Unlike the transplanted Magnolia
One blast and she is gone.
I am
a wild Weeping Willow,
Who bends in the fiercest gale
And afterwards stands unbroken
With yet another story to tell.
I am
Not a summer's rosebud
With dainty perfumed feet
But like the heart of a Prickly Pear
My essense is nurturing and sweet.
I am
A believer in the saying
"Bloom where you're planted, friend,"
Life is what YOU make it
The plot falls from your own pen.
I am
as happy each day as I make up my mind to be...
- © Badger Willow Horse, Kathleen Hanna

Moreover, our civilization needs more of the gut wisdom women achieve simply by living as women: the birth givers; comforters; observers of human nature; and frequently the sole fountainhead of warmth, color, pleasure and stimulation that gives meaning to the lives of men...
- Barbara Walker, The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom and Power

There was something about the relationship she had with animals and with her children that deeply satisfied woman. It was of this that man was jealous. The animals can remember; for, like sight, memory is renewed at every birth. But our language they will never speak; not from lack of intelligence, but from the different construction of their speaking apparatus. In the world of man, someone must speak for them. And that is why, in a nutshell, Suwelo, goddesses and witches exist...
- Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

Women, You Must Learn to Be Warriors

Women, you must learn to be warriors
Now when times are dark and our men
Are afraid to tell us what is in their hearts.
There is so much trouble in our land
That it is up to you to decide
Which direction the wind must blow.

Women, you are our tree of life
Just as you were a long time ago
When a man said: carry my seed.
If you go forth from this darkness,
Telling our story of courage and survival,
Then our tree will grow strong with your words.

Women, do not worry about tomorrow.
Even when daylight is long in coming,
The sun remembers its place in the sky.
Take this blue shawl of knowledge and
Wrap it around your daughters, telling them
That women must not be afraid to be warriors.
- © Nancy Wood, from Spirit Walker

Female responses to stress: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight.

Taylor, S.E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B.P., Gruenewald, T.L., Gurung, R.A.R., & Updegraff, J.A. (2000). Psychological Review,107(3), 411-429

Friendships between women are special. They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are. But they may do even more.

Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis.

A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women. It's a stunning finding that has turned five decades of stress research-most of it on men-upside down. "Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible," explains Laura Cousino Klein, Ph.D., now an assistant professor of biobehavioral health at Pennsylvania State University in State College and one of the study's authors. It's an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers. Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just "fight or flight" In fact, says Dr. Klein, it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the stress response in a woman, it buffers the "fight or flight" response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect. This calming response does not occur in men, says Dr. Klein, because testosterone-which men produce in high levels when they're under stress-seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen, she adds, seems to enhance it.

The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic "aha!" moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. "There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded," says Dr. Klein. "When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. "I commented one day to fellow researcher ShelleyTaylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something."

The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake: The fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health. It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the "tend and befriend" notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men. Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. "There's no doubt," says Dr. Klein, "that friends are helping us live longer."

In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no friends increased their risk of death over a 6-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%. Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses' Health Study from Harvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friend or confidante was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight! And that's not all: When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all, those women who had a close friend and confidante were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairment or permanent loss of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate.

Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? That's a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen Josselson, PhD, coauthor of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls' and Women's Friendships (Three Rivers Press,1998). "Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women," explains Dr. Josselson. "We push them right to the back burner. That's really a mistake, because women are such a source of strength to each other. We nurture one another. And we need to have unpressured space in which we can do the special kind of talk that women do when they are in need.

"Willing to experience aloneness
I discover connection everywhere;
Turning to face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within;
Opening to my loss
I gain the embrace of the universe;
Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness without end..
Each condition I flee from pursues me,
Each condition I welcome transforms me..."
- Jennifer Welwood

Ceremony

I chased the red-winged blackbirds
across Illinois fields, laughed as I climbed sycamore trees,
and sometimes in the twilight, I believed
I would not change.
Until one night my breasts swelled

and hair came in moist and secret places,
and my legs and arms
unfolded. I ran with awkward steps, drumming emotion,
and when the bleeding came, I was afraid. I wanted
to be painted in red earth like the Cheyenne,

bathe in chamomile, hide in the sweet-grass smell
of the moon lodge with my kind grandmother
until the defiling passed. On a night

of a waxing moon I coughed, and when my father
rubbed medicine across my chest, he saw
the changing. A Cheyenne father marks the time
with the gift of a horse. I looked up
as my father stepped away from me,

saw the softening of his eyes.
- Suellen Wedmore

"...We had power, Anita thought. It's a power of transformation you have, when you're stuffed full of fear and eagerness- not a thing in your life can escape being momentous. A power you never think of losing because you never know you have it..."
- Alice Munro, Friends of My Youth

Finding Her Here

I am becoming the woman I've wanted,
grey at the temples,
soft body, delighted
cracked up by life
with a laugh that's known bitter
but, past it, got better,
knows she's a survivor-
that whatever comes,
she can outlast it.
I am becoming a deep
weathered basket.

I am becoming the woman I've longed for,
the motherly lover
with arms strong and tender,
the growing up daughter
who blushes surprises
. I am becoming full moons
and sunrises.

I find her becoming,
this woman I've wanted,
who knows she'll encompass,
who knows she's sufficient,
knows where she's going
and travels with passion.
Who remembers she's precious,
but knows she's not scarce-
who knows she is plenty,
plenty to share.
- Jayne Relaford Brown

excerpt from Synchronicity and the Tao

...Rupert Sheldrake described morphic fields as a source of cumulative memory based upon experiences of that species in the past. The human morphic field is what we tap into and are resonating with and influenced by when we respond as members of the human race, doing what humans have done. From prehistoric to contemporary times, humans have apparently held spiritual beliefs, observed rituals, had places of worship, and related to divinity. Whatever the particular practice or place, whatever spiritual or mystical experience humans have had are in some way contained within the morphic fields of our species, the contents of which span time and distance. Sheldrake's morphic resonance theory (as applied to humans) and Jung's concept of the collective unconscious are very similar ideas. Both theories account for collective memories, knowledge, behavior, or images that we did not acquire in our personal lives; both account for transpersonal, collective, archetypal experience...

excerpt from Morphic Fields, Women's Spirituality, Pilgrimage

Since morphic fields span time, they contain everything that has been important to human experience. History may forget, and there may be only faint traces of a matriarchal time when a Goddess was worshipped. But if morphic fields exist, images and rituals that have not been recalled for thousands of years will be accessible to people who turn again toward a goddess spirituality. If such is the case, then spontaneous rituals to the goddess done by contemporary women are not invented but "remembered." Tapping into a morphic field at a sacred site, a pilgrim may receive intuitively a "truer" sense of what went on there than would a scholar with limited sources from later though still relatively ancient times. Researchers dismiss the use of intuition, especially by women, as critics of archeologist Marija Gimbutas have done, because she made intuitive speculations about the meaning of the shards and artifacts that were found at goddess sites. If morphic fields exist, and if she tapped into one, her conclusions would be correct.

There is a grassroots women's spirituality movement that is worldwide yet unorganized: women are gathering together in small groups or are acting individually, observing seasons and important transitions, doing rituals, making altars, finding symbols that express important spiritual and psychological themes and feelings. There is very little tradition to follow, and so women follow intuition and do what feels spontaneously right. After four to six thousand years of patriarchy and patriarchal gods in the passing of spiritual traditions in a mother- line from mother to daughter awareness of priestesses, healers, wisewomen, female divinity, or a mother goddess are lost from memory. In the spontaneous arising of a women's spirituality movement, however, " re-membering" may be occurring. In sacred places, where the goddess once was worshipped or venerated, women enact rituals. In circles, women celebrate the seasons. Might it be that women are resonating with a morphic field as they bring the Goddess back into human consciousness? Might contemporary ritual reflect what has gone on before and be adding to it? Tapping into a morphic field that holds the energy or pattern of the collective human experience of divinity would be awesome; it may contribute to the numinosity of all religious experience...
- Jean Shinoda Bolen

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light;
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves;
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
- Anne Sexton, from To Bedlam and Part Way Back

Response to a Reading
For Li-Young Lee

In two of your poems you called that central
Passage of womanhood a wound,
Instead of a curtain guarding a silken
Trail of sighs. How many men,
Upon regarding such beauty, helplessly
Touching it, recklessly needing
To enter its warmth again and again,
Have assumed it embodies their own ache
Of absence, the personal
Gash that has punished their lives.
So endowed of anatomy, any woman,
Who has been loved
Knows that her tenderest blush
Of tissue is a luxe burden of have.
Although it bleeds, this is only to cleanse,
To prepare yet another nesting for love.
It is not a wound, friend.
It is a home for you.
It is a way into the world.
- Michele Wolf

As A Woman

One of the most mystical experiences of my life was discovering what I have found to be the true nature of being a woman. For me, being a woman is an awe-some experience that I can only explain in mystical, mytho-poetic language. When I look at a full moon or watch the birds in the trees, I feel Mother Nature and my feminine connection to her. As a woman I have found myself drawn to the ancient, nature-centered religions of the past who honored the Divine equally in masculine and feminine forms.

Nature has been my link to the Divine and spending time within the forest has helped my own personal individuation process. By living within and around Nature, I have begun to understand the power of the Goddess in both her nurturing and wrathful forms. Nature provides unceasingly and we come to rely upon her children for food, clothing and shelter. She is the Great Spiderwoman of Native American Mythology. She is the Virgin Mary who gave birth to Christ. However, a tornado which struck our home recently, instantly reminded me of the wrathful Egyptian goddess Sekhment, the alter-ego of Hathor, who had to be drugged in order to keep her from destroying an entire city. There is also a side of Nature and Woman which is baleful yet tenacious and loyal represented by the goddesses Isis and Demeter who wander the earth, wailing and searching for their lost loves. Healer, lover, nurturer, witch, saint and mother- all are Woman.

There is something strong and resilient in Nature that I see in Women which I believe comes from our receptivity. Many would think that being receptive denotes weakness; however, as discussed in the Tao, feminine receptivity and yielding is the creatrix of all life. There is something both holy and frightening about Women and this mystery fuels the fire of both our persecutions and elevations. Women represent the Life/Death/Life cycle of the universe where all things are born from and return to.
- Paula Trimble

La Maja Desnuda

Do not mistake my plainness
for lack of passion
I look at Southern women
sway and display
their sexuality
And want to make myself over
Put on false eyelashes
and long fingernails
Bleach my hair
Pluck a thin line of eyebrow
Leave my cleavage exposed
But I feel silly doing this
Like dressing up
in costume
Come feel my thighs
so dimpled and lush
Notice my breasts
pointed classically outward
My cheeks rosy with health
My eyes brown with intelligence
Am I not more
like Goya's women
than those practiced sirens?
Grab my unpainted hand
Kiss my modestly
roughed mouth
Press me to you
You will find fire there
Stoked by pages of poetry
literary lunges, much praying
- Anne M. Candelaria

A Woman's Lesson

A woman's lesson is a simple lesson:
Whatever life asks, answer with love.

A woman's lesson is a wise lesson:
Whenever conflict threatens, go forth in harmony.

A woman's lesson is an enduring lesson:
Whatever is taken from you, give back in generosity.

A woman's lesson is a gradual lesson:
Whenever there is a storm, remain a calm center.

A woman's lesson is courageous lesson:
Whenever there is despair, sow the seed of hope.

A woman's lesson is a practical lesson:
Wherever there is dryness, go and get the rain.
- Nancy Wood, from Spirit Walker

Additional Quote Resources

I Am Becoming the Woman I've Wanted, edited by Sandra Haldeman Martz, © 1994 Papier-Mache Press

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