The She-Wolf Inside Us

Carving a block of artist’s linoleum into a design inspired by the book Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

There is an ancient folktale from the heart of the desert Southwest about “a woman who was a wolf who was a woman” that you can find beautifully described in the book Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of The Wild Woman Archetype by Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Jungian Analyst and Cantadora, keeper of the old stories in the Latina tradition. Wolf Woman, also known as Loba Girl, or La Huesera or Bone Woman, climbs the canyons, and sifts through the arroyos or dry riverbeds, looking for wolf bones. She reassembles them by a fire over which she sings until its eyes open and it springs back to life! Off it runs like the wind and in the distance you can see it has transformed into a woman laughing. . .or perhaps howling.

In the opening chapter of her book entitled “The Howl: Resurrection of the Wild Woman” Dr Estés explains how the act of singing over the bones is about the need to call back the dead and dismembered parts of ourselves that we have undervalued and buried that need to be reclaimed. The story shows us this process is literally enlivening and empowering, and gives voice to a creature inside us that is like a wolf in the wild, free from captivity. She explains that “A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.” and yet so much of the over culture in our society teaches women to remain a diminished version of themselves, over-domesticating us to such a degree we lose our instinctual nature, inner wildness, intuition and creativity.

She says, “Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species” illuminating the parallel ways in which both wolves and women are demonized, undervalued, underesourced for what they offer the world. She says,

“Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mates, and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave. Yet both have been hounded, harassed, and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors. They have been the targets of those who would clean up the wilds as well as the wildish environs of the psyche, extincting the instinctual, and leaving no trace of it behind. The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar”

Through her analysis of various ancient folktales in the remaining chapters of her book, Dr. Estés offers insightful ways for women to reconnect with the inner wolf as a path to liberation from societal constraints, and a life in harmony with their true authentic selves.

Handcrafted multi block linocut print inspired by Dr Clarrissa Pink Estes’ bestselling book Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.

There is something profound about this story about “a woman who was a wolf who was a woman” because it reveals a more ancient worldview where the separation between humans and the wild did not exist. David Hinton, author of Wild Mind, Wild Earth, speaks about this worldview in an interview with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee in this month’s Emergence Magazine podcast. He asserts that it is precisely the modern idea that human identity is separate and detached from the wild that gave rise to and justified the destruction of wildlife on a massive scale leading to the current ecological crisis or sixth extinction. Long before this modern way of thinking, people living on every continent had a sense of kinship with the wild. He talks about the vital need to reweave ourselves back into a sense of being part of and belonging to the ecosystem, to think of the animals and plants are our relatives so that any destruction of the wild can only be conceived of as destroying ourselves. He argues, “It requires a transformation in our assumptions about the nature of what we are and what the world is. Otherwise, that instrumental and exploitative relation will remain”. I believe through retelling and celebrating an ancient folktale like Loba Girl, or Wolf Woman, we can bring back to life this worldview, which can reweave us back into deep and intimate kinship with the wild.

There is yet more to this folktale that further develops the idea of a merging of both human and more-than-human, and the gift that this overlapping of identities offers. Dr. Estés elaborates how Wolf Woman lives in the crack between the worlds, sometimes known as the home of the Mist Beings, or spirit world: the liminal place between rationality and mythos. Wolf Woman is also both the Creation Mother and the Death Mother, a double sided archetype that teaches us the timing of each of these so that we can “allow what must die to die, and what must live to live”. One other names she has includes La Que Sabe or The One Who Knows. Not surprisingly, Loba Girl is also a folktale that originates from a geographical borderland: the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

Gloria Anzaldua, Chicana feminist queer poet and author of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, writes about the borderlands as an “open wound” that needs to be healed. She says, “the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks”. She explores the fluidity of borders, questioning the political, national, racial, cultural and gender boundaries imposed upon us. I find this very insightful and relevant to this story of Loba Girl because the act of gathering bones is not just about identifying the dismembered parts of ourselves as individuals, but it can also be about gathering the scattered relics of our collective human heritage, discovering how they belong together and recognizing the power of honoring and singing over them as a whole, to wake up our collective voice, our authentic human voice that is unseparable from what is wild.

I absolutely love how these two fierce women encourage us think more deeply about the borderlands which is both the geographical setting and also the central theme and point of tension around which this folktale mediates. The liminal place, whether it is between wolf and woman, between life and death, between disconnection and connection, is a powerful transformative realm which is the home of what Dr. Estés calls the “Medial Woman”. She says,

“The medial woman stands between the worlds of consensual reality and the mystical unconscious and mediates between them. The medial woman is the transmitter and receiver between two or more values or ideas. She is the one who brings new ideas to life, exchanges old ideas for innovative ones, translates between the world of the rational and the world of the imaginal. She ‘hears’ things, ‘knows’ things, and ‘senses’ what should come next”

Yet the medial archetype is neither understood nor honored in mainstream culture, and many women today unknowingly have made choices that have not served their medial nature. I love how Dr. Estés opens her book up with this folktale of Wolf Woman, which is an invitation to discover this medial woman inside of ourselves. How might we all be empowered by gathering up and singing over the discarded, scattered and buried parts of ourselves? What sense of wholeness, freedom, connection and voice might we discover? Dr. Estés ends her first chapter with a poignant question: “Today the old one inside you is collecting bones. What is she re-making?”

In the process of gathering folktales from vastly different cultures and landscapes, I have discovered that these stories are like the bones of humanity, an ancient intertwined root system of synchronicities that our contemporary world has buried, killed, dismembered and scattered irreverently so all we have left is a sense of disconnection from each other and separateness from the wild. Wolf Woman gathers them up again, She knows they belong together, the song She sings is about their connectedness, and its power brings to life something deeply instinctual, wild and free and collectively human all at the same time.

I created a piece of art inspired by this folktale for all you Wolf Women out there! Whether you are a gray wolf, arctic wolf, red wolf, northwestern Great Plains wolf or Mexican wolf. . .or any variety of wolf. . .May we gather, honor and sing over the ancient intertwined root system of buried bones that connect us all together, so we can run wild again as a pack, howling with our true voices… The She-Wolf is inside all of us. Do you hear her howling? She is howling inside me.

A handcrafted multi-block linocut print inspired by Wolf Woman or Loba Girl.

Blog Post Cover Photo Credit: Image by Vincent Boulanger on Pixabay.

References:

Pinkola-Estes, Clarissa (1992). Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: The Random House Publishing Group.

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee (Host), April 30, 2024. An Ethics of Wild Mind - A Conversation with David Hinton. [Audio Podcast Episode]. Emergence Magazine Podcast. https://emergencemagazine.org/podcast/.

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