Deep within the mythic imagination of the Desert Southwest, La Loba—Wolf Woman—gathers the buried forgotten bones of Wolf, singing them back to life again. Today, a 700-mile steel U.S. Mexico border wall cuts through this ancient landscape, disrupting wildlife movement and human migration, inviting us to reflect on whether borders protect or harm, stirring deeper questions about security, sovereignty, and national identity. Yet the wall is only one expression of a deeper condition: a world increasingly shaped by fracture, division, and polarization—like a body of bones scattered beyond recognition, awaiting the one who might learn to see their relation again. What might La Loba offer us today if her voice were invited into this contemporary conversation? When the world stands at a threshold, the questions living inside our oldest stories return to meet us —offering what they have always carried, if we are ready to listen.
Read MoreReassembling Rites: Piecing Together the Ancestral Bones
There is an archetype that weaves its way through many ancient myths and folktales that centers around the sacred work of recovering and reassembling what has been disassembled. This ritual of singing over the ancestral bones, honoring, mourning over, and reclaiming what has been buried or lost, is a devotional act. In these stories, grieving takes center stage and plays a transformative role allowing the folk-heroine or mythological heroine to reach a place of wholeness, aliveness, and joy again.
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Photo Credit: Thomas Bonometti on Unsplash.
Where the She-Wolf Howls: Awakening the scattered fragments of our wild humanity back into belonging
There is an ancient folktale from the desert Southwest about “a woman who was a wolf who was a woman” also known as “Loba Girl” or Wolf Woman who climbs the canyons, and sifts through the arroyos or dry riverbeds, gathering wolf bones over which she sings, until they spring back to life and run off laughing with the voice of a woman. Inspired by Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ retelling of this story in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, this folktale invites us to call back to life those buried and discarded parts of ourselves, so that we can find our true voice again.
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