Today I finished re-reading Women Who Run With The Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés. This book of nearly five-hundred pages is truly filled with wisdom, knowledge and power. Every time I opened the book, I felt the presence of the Wild Woman whom I consider to be our “Universal Mother” — the eternal feminine numen that is as old as the beginning of the world. Especially during the last three weeks of travail, as Charles and I were in deep inquiry to reassess our daughters’ current educational environment, I often resorted to this book for the daily wisdom, nourishment and comfort I needed.

Whenever I began reading the book, it magically came alive; it was as if a wise and compassionate grandmother was delighted to see me and help me with her keen insight and loving guidance. Mysteriously the book “spoke” to me and revealed the next best step for me to consider. Some passages in the book looked as if they were written specifically for me because they gave me unequivocal assurance that I was on the right path, and encouraged me to keep moving forward with the conviction of my heart and soul.

The following passage resonated with me poignantly when I felt my soul’s stamina flagging, and needed to hear from a trustworthy source that I was on track:

“One of the most important things we can do is to understand life, all life, as a living body in itself, one that has respiration, new cell turnover, sloughing off, and waste material. It would be silly if we expected our bodies not to have waste material more than once every five years. It would be inane to think that just because we ate a day ago we shouldn’t be hungry today.

“It is just as fatuous to think that once we solve an issue it stays solved, that once we learn, we always remain conscious ever after. No, life is a great body that grows and diminishes in different areas, at different rates. When we are like the body, doing the work of new growth, wading through la mierda, the shit, just breathing or resting, we are very alive, we are within the cycles of the Wild Woman. If we could realize that the work is to keep doing the work, we would be much more fierce and much more peaceful.

“To hold to joy, we may sometimes have to fight for it, we may have to strengthen ourselves and go full-bore, doing battle in whichever ways we deem most shrewd. To prepare for siege, we may have to go without many comforts for the duration. We can go without most things for long periods of time, anything almost, but not our joy, not those handmade red shoes.”

“Those handmade red shoes” are a metaphor as used in the fairy tale, “The Red Shoes,” to refer to joyful and vibrant life that is “handmade;” in other words, life designed and created by one’s self, and not purchased from, or manufactured by, someone else.

I think the reason why this book is such a treasure for me is because it shows me what the healthy feminine looks like, sounds like, feels like and acts like. Although my mother had three sisters, I don’t recall seeing them celebrating, respecting, or cherishing women’s wisdom and their innate power to create “those handmade red shoes.” Also, through my adolescence and young adulthood, I didn’t find a role model or mentor who taught me about feminine wisdom, strength, and power.

During law school, legal practice and corporate life, I learned to develop and use my masculine energy; I experienced and witnessed examples of the healthy as well as the unhealthy masculine in both male and female professionals with whom I worked. However, like a frog in a pot of water, gradually heating up until it is boiling, I was losing my healthy feminine energy slowly but surely through atrophy while my masculine energy, albeit healthy in nature, dominated my psyche in work and life.

It has been only two or three years since I have seriously begun reclaiming my feminine energy. Since then I have met women who have nurtured their feminine qualities as a deep source of inner strength and wisdom, while cultivating their healthy masculine energy, to birth their vision, creativity, and imagination into reality. Although I haven’t met Dr. Estés in person, she is one of the shining and living examples of such women whom I respect and adore. I am grateful for her work, and I will continue to consult with her and Wild Woman as I follow her sage advice that “the work is to keep doing the work.”

Furthermore, I wholeheartedly hear her calling below, to awaken us in this amazing time we live. Never before in our history, have women had so much opportunity to make a difference in the world when we choose to use our unique gifts. For ourselves first and foremost, and in turn for the world because I believe what the world needs most is the joy we experience through our handmade red shoes:

“Let us admit it. We women are building a motherland; each with her own plot of soil eked from a night of dreams, a day of work. We are spreading this soil in larger and larger circles, slowly, slowly. One day it will be a continuous land, a resurrected land come back from the dead. Munda de la Madre, psychic motherworld, coexisting and coequal with all other worlds. This world is being made from our lives, our cries, our laughter, our bones. It is a world worth making, a world worth living in, a world in which there is a prevailing and decent wild sanity.

“When we think of reclamation it may bring to mind bulldozers or carpenters, the restoration of an old structure, and that is the modern usage of the word. However, the old meaning is this: The word reclamation is derived from the old French reclaimer, meaning “to call back the hawk which has been let fly.” Yes, to cause something of the wild to return when it is called. It is therefore by its meaning an excellent word for us. We are using the voices of our minds, our lives, and our souls to call back intuition, imagination; to call back the Wild Woman, And she comes.

“Women cannot get away from this. If there is to be change, we are it. We carry La Que Sabe, the One Who Knows. If there is to be inner change, individual woman must do it. If there is to be world change, we women have our own way of helping to achieve it. Wild Woman whispers the words and the ways to us, and we follow. She has been running and stopping and waiting to see if we are catching up. She has something, many things, to show us.”

May we all be protected and guided by Wild Woman as we each pursue our soul’s longing cradled in the chamber behind our heart!