Evocative and exhilarating! I need to reread this. Many, many times.
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... a scar is stronger than skin... (c)
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The body is a multilingual being. (c)
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Even if one has friends, those friends may not be suns. (c)
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When a life is too controlled, there becomes less and less life to control. (c)
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Nothing makes the light, the wonder, the treasure stand out so well as darkness. (c)
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Talismans are reminders of what is felt but not seen, what is so, but not immediately obvious. (c)
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Stories are medicine. (c)
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Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. (c)
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Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. Story greases the hoists and pulleys, it causes adrenaline to surge, shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning, that lead us back to our own real lives as knowing wildish women. (c)
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Dogs are the magicians of the universe. (c)
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There is nothing wrong with ducks, I assure them, or with swans. But ducks are ducks and swans are swans. (c)
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I like to use mice. What if you were raised by the mice people? (c)
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Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered. ...
To take the world into one's arms and act towards it in a soul-filled and soul-strengthening manner is a powerful act of wildish spirit. (с)
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We are all filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed. (c)
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Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on. (c)
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Every creature on earth returns to home. It is ironic that we have made wildlife refuges for ibis, pelican, egret, wolf, crane, deer, mouse, moose, and bear, but not for ourselves in the places we live day after day. We understand that the loss of habitat is the most disastrous event that can occur to a free creature. (c)
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I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories... water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom. (c)
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Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down. (c)
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The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door. (с)
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A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling the wild smell. She might have to drive into the wind. She may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows.
She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. She may feel she will die if she doesn’t dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained. (c)
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Practice listening to your intuition, your inner voice; ask questions; be curious; see what you see; hear what you hear; and then act upon what you know to be true. These intuitive powers were given to your soul at birth.
(c)
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It is good to have many personae, to make collections, sew up several, collect them as we go along in life. As we become older, with such a collection at our behest, we find we can portray any aspect of self most anytime we wish. However, at some point, most particularly as one grows into past mid-life and on into old age, one's personas shift and meld in mysterious ways. Eventually, there is a kind of 'meltdown', a loss of personae complete, thereby revealing what would, in its greatest light, be called 'the true self. (c)
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Go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin. (c)
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When the personal soul life is burnt to ashes, a woman loses the vital treasure ... In her unconscious, the desire for the red shoes, a wild joy, not only continues, it swells and floods ... (c)
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You are born to one mother, but if you are lucky, you will have more than one. And among them all you will find most of what you need. (c)
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I was an aesthete rather than an athlete, and my only wish was to be an ecstatic wanderer. (c)
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I’ve not forgotten the song of those dark years, hambre del alma, the song of the starved soul. But neither have I forgotten the joyous canto hondo, the deep song, the words of which come back to us when we do the work of soulful reclamation. (c)
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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. (c)