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An excerpt from the book “Women Who Run With The Wolves.”
Chapter 1
The Howl: Resurrection of the Wild Woman
“Ancient dissectionists spoke of the auditory nerve being divided into three of more pathways deep in the brain. They surmised that the ear was meant, therefore, to hear at three different levels. One pathway was said to hear mundane conversations of the world. A second pathway apprehended learning and art. And the third pathway existed so the soul itself might hear guidance and gain knowledge while here on earth.
…We all begin as a bundle of bones lost somewhere in a desert, a dismantled skeleton that lies under the sand. It is our work to recover the parts. It is a painstaking process best done when the shadows are just right, for it takes much looking. La Loba indicates what we are to look for – the indestructible life force, the bones.
The work of La Loba can be thought of as representing uncuento milagro, a miracle story. It shows us what can go right for the soul. It is a resurrection story about eh underworld connection to Wild Woman. It promises that if we will sing the song, we can call up the psychic remains of the wild soul and singer her into vital shape again.
La Loba sings over the bones she has gathered. To sing means to use the soul-voice. It means to say on the breath the truth of one’s power and one’s need, to breathe soul over the thing that is ailing or in need of restoration. This is done by descending into the deepest mood of great love and feeling, till one’s desire for relationship with the wildish Self overflows, then to speak one’s soul from that frame of mind. That is singing over the bones. We cannot make the mistake of attempting to elicit this great feeling of love from a lover, for this womans’ labour of finding and singing creation hymn is a solitary work, a work carried out in the desert of the psyche.
…By whatever name (she is known by,) the force personified by La Loba records the personal past and the ancient past for she has survived generation after generation, and is old beyond time. She is an archivist of feminine intention. She preserves the female tradition. Her whiskers sense the future; she has the far-seeing eye of the old crone; she lives backward and forward in time simultaneously, correcting for one side by dancing witht eh other.
The old one, The One Who Knows, is within us. She thrives in the deepest soul-psyche of women, the ancient and vital wild Self. He home is that place in time where mind and instincts mingle, where a woman’s deep life finds her mundane life. It is the point where the I and the Thou kiss, the place where, in all spirit, women run with the wolves.
This old woman stands between the worlds of rationality and mythos. She is the knucklebone on which these two worlds turn. This land between the worlds is that inexplicable place we all recognize once we experience it, but its nuances slip away and shape-change if one tries to pin them down, except when we use poetry, music, dance, or story.
There is speculation that the immune system of the body is tooted in this mysterious psychic land, and also the mystical, as well as all archetypal images and urges including our God-hunger, our yearning for the mysteries, and all the sacred instincts as well as those which are mundane. Some would say the records of humankind, the root of light, the coil of dark are also here. It is not a void, but rather the place of the Mist Beings where things are and also are not yet, where shadows have substance and substance is sheer.”
La Loba
"There is an old woman who lives in a hidden place that everyone knows in their souls but few have ever seen. As in the fairy tales of Eastern Europe, she seems to wait for lost or wandering people and seekers to come to her place.
She is circumspect, often hairy, always fat, and especially wishes to evade most company. She is both a crower and a acackler, generally having more animal sounds than human ones.
I might say she lives among the rotten granite slopes in Tarahumara Indian territroy. Or that she is buried outside Pheonix near a well. Perhaps she will be seen travelling south to Monte Alban in a burnt-out car with the back window shout out. Or maybe she will be spotted standing by the highway near El Paso, or riding shotgun with truckers to Morelia, Mexico, or walking to market above Oaxaca with strangely formed boughs of firewood on her back. She calls herself manynames: La Huesera, Bone Woman; La Trapera, The Gatherer; and La Loba, Wolf Woman.
The sole work of La Loba is the collecting of bones. She collects and preserves especially that which is in danger of being lost to the world. Her cave is filled with the bones of all manner of desert creatures; the deer, the rattlesnake, the crow. But her specialty is wolves.
She creeps and crawls and sifts through the ontanas, mountains, and arroyos, dry riverbeds, looking for the wolf bones, and when she has assembled an entire skeleton, when the last bone is in place and the beautiful white sculpture of the creature is land out before her, she sits by the fire and thinks about what song she will sing.
And when she is sure, she stands over the criatura, raises her arms over it, and sings out. That is when the rib bones and leg bones of the wolf to flesh out and the creature becomes furred. La Loba sings some more, and more of the creature comes into being; its tail curls upward, shaggy, and strong.
And La Loba sings more and the wolf opens its eyes, leaps up, and runs away down the canyon.
Somewhere in its running, whether by the speed of its running or by splashing its way into a river, or by the way of a ray of sunlight or moonlight hitting it right in the side, the wolf is suddenly transformed into a laughing woman who runs free toward the horizon.
So remember, if you wander the desert, and it is near sundown, and you are perhaps a little bit lost, and certainly tired, that you are lucky, for La Loba may take a liking to you and show you something- something of the soul."
By Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.
First copyright 1992.
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