Response to Reading

My first reading selection was from "Women Who Run With the Wolves", by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD.

Here it is:

Chapter 6:
Finding Ones Pack: Belonging as a Blessing
a brief summary with a few comments and observations of my own.

This is the story of the ugly duckling. He does not fit into his seeming family of origin and must move ever onward in his quest for belonging, acceptance. Sometimes he seems to be accepted for awhile, but some wild part of his soul is always left outside of the arrangement, hungry, unfulfilled, until eventually he is cast out again and again and must venture onward striving to survive, and feed his wild and beautiful soul, and simply be.

There is a saying I heard once in the early 1990's. “Pain pushes until the vision pulls” . I don't know who said it, but I do know that it has so often been true in my own life. Things get messier and messier, and more and more painful, when they just are not working anymore. If I can give myself permission to step outside the box, the confines of the culture or society in which I have found temporary asylum, and do something different, anything at all, I can sometimes grasp the vision that leads me to my next, and better home. But when I fight it, or hold on, or can't find trust in the divine, or clear inner perception, life or the situation can get very messy indeed. Trying to survive while ones soul is starving for recognition, for beauty, for acceptance, wears down ones defenses, ones resiliency. It can and has become life threatening for many at one time or another.

Eventually the ugly duckling does find his pack, the others like himself and they recognize him long before he comes to realize he is home at last. When one is born or lives to long on the fringe, outside of ones true family, true pack, ones senses and perceptions become dazed, fragmented, clouded by the mere effort of survival in many an inhospitable place. It takes time to recover, to recognize safety, to hear the song you are singing and realize its being sung by another. This time of transition, can seem surreal, dreamlike, and the duckling finds himself in a tentative un -trusting wonder at his new environment. He may be numb and toss wildly back and forth within his own skin and psyche as he begins to believe his own reflection and his own senses that the others are in some way actually like himself.

How do we get there? Ms. Pinkola Estes states that we must hold on, hold out, and keep searching, keep doing our work, keep creating our art, believing it will carry us to our pack. Trusting that it and we will at last be recognized by those to whom we belong, instead of those who would merely use us for their own agendas. Thus the duckling and the exiled wild woman (or man) both, begin to learn what it might mean to thrive, rather then merely survive. A different initiation, the next step and a journey of its own.