TAMMY VITALE

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Mother Earth She Comforts Me, Tammy Vitale

Clarissa Pinkola-Estes, in Women Who Run with the Wolves, says:

In order to coverse with the wild feminine, a woman must temporarily leave the world and inhabit a state of aloneness in the oldest sense of the word.  Long ago the word alone was treates as two words, all one…That is precisely the goal of solitude to be all one.  It is the cure for the frazzled state so common to modern women, the one that makes her, as the old saying goes, ‘leap onto her horse and ride off in all directions.'”

She continues:  If we are gasping for creative energy; if we have trouble pulling down the fertile, the imaginative, the ideational; if we have difficulty focusing on our personal vision, acting on it, or following through with it, then something has gone wrong at the waterspill jucture between the headwaters and the tributary…Wild Woman is the river beneath the river, when she flows into us, we flow…”

Sometimes we are so used to hungering for something we can’t name that we no longer notice we are hungry.  We name it “tired,” out-of-sorts,” and strive to be superwoman and push on through.  What we need to do is stop, and listen, and feed from a life-giving, not a soul-deadening force.

Artist's Pallette in the Painted Desert (natural colors) by Tammy V

Having just come back from the wild – or at least as wild as I’m comfortable to get (camping with a tent or sleeping bag between me and wild animals is not my idea of fun – more my idea of invading their space which I am happy not to do), I find myself  not quite ready to re-enter the “push toward success” – or maybe I just want to rename success as the thing that feeds my soul and maybe my bank account instead of the thing that feeds my bank account and maybe my soul.  If there’s going to be a “maybe” in the equation, I have decided that I definitely do not wish it to apply to soul.

Easier said than done as all the property taxes, house insurance and 6 month car insurance bill sat waiting for me on my return.  Rough landing!  Of course, I knew they were coming and had planned ahead for all by the car insurance

Muir's Grove by S. Vitale (I hiked waaaay back into the Sierras, 6 weeks after major foot surgery. It was grueling and I've never for one minute been sorry!)

which I forgot is now coming twice yearly instead of once in April….and the dogs need their teeth done…and we need to add gutters to a wing roof to see if that won’t help the leak we can’t seem to fix.  You know how it goes.  The soul stirs from vacation and that space of suspension and then you return to “reality.”

Well, this is my year of extraordinary (and is living up to that for sure!) where things are not going to be the same.

Rather than define re-entry as again taking up with the bank account side of the equation, I’m going to relegate that to secondary status and focus on ways to keep the Wylde by my side this re-entry, and way to keep my focus on what is really important, and ways to make conscious choices about that instead of descending into all the stories of how I’m going to be a bag lady if I don’t get a “regular” (i.e. 40hours+ a week working for someone else) job.  Paying attention, I recognize that I have a choice in how this plays out.  So I have assembled an arsenal of reminders for myself – and you’re welcome to peruse them for things that help you too.

  1. Wylde Women’s Wisdom:  yes, I subscribe to the quotes which I have collected under that name so th

    Montana - first time I ever say rainbow clouds! photo by Tammy V

    at I get daily reminders of the things I love and that are important to me.  Even though I collect them, I don’t always have them at hand when needed.  This way, just like you, I have one quote a day in my in-box that reminds me to breathe if only for the seconds it takes to read.

  2. Poetry.  It’s faster than prose and more densely packed with visions of the world as it may be seen if we care to look with our soul’s eyes.  Here’s Mountain Lion by Linda Hogan:  She lives on the dangerous side/of the clearing/in the yellow-eyed shadow of a darker fear./We have seen each other inside mortal dusk…I was the wild thing she had learned to fear./Her power lived in a dream of my leaving./   And Patty Digh’s Poetry Wednesday blog:  I come into the peace of wild things.  We have an effect on everything around us.  What ripples are you sending into the wild?
  3. Annie Dillard’s book, Holy the Firm, is small and quick and achingly beautiful:  “There is no one but us.  There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkard time, that our innocent fathers are all dead–as if innocence had ever been–and our children busy and troulbed, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a flase start, failed, yieled to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasure, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved,  But there is no one but us.  There never has been.”  (we all live an imperfect life.  And it is perfectly okay.)(See Michele Woodwards book:  I am Not Superwoman: Further Essays on Happier Living, blog size bites of real life.  Real life).

    Morning in my back yard by Tammy V
  4. Wild Thing by the Troggs – music for the aurally inclined (of a certain age)
  5. Where the Wild Things Are the book – because it is magical (and I can still say it by heart even though Daughter is now 34 not 3)
  6. Where the Wild Things Are the movie – a bit darker, Daughter says not so magical, but I thought it was interesting and certainly speaks to the Wylde in each of us (which isn’t always magical, so lets allow that we do indeed have a dark side, and invite it into the light and make friends)
  7. A hike into the wilderness however you define that (and in a pinch I can definitely define my back yard that way).
  8. Try new (exotic) food.  My granddaughter adventures in her world through taste.  In her hand?  Now, what does it taste like?  I’m not saying you should follow her example to the detail, I am saying that we get in ruts with what we eat.  Try something new, somewhere new.  Just the change will engage you (and at the very least create new synapses in your brain as you negotiate a strange place – wilderness it may not be, but different it will).
"Fairy Pipes" in my backyard - I've lived here 16 years. They appeared twice one summer and no more.

 

Wylde Women’s Wisdom

General Wolf Rules for Life:

1.  Eat; 2. Rest; 3. Rove in between; 4.  Render loyalty; 5.  Love the children; 6 Cavil in moonlight; 7. Tune your ears; 8.  Attend to the bones; 9.  Make love; 10.  Howl often.  Clariss Pinkola-Estes

Rules for Living Wylde

1.  Protect the wild places (inside and out).

2.  Clear the rivers.  Without water there is no life.

3.  Rumble, erupt and spew:  recognize that sharp points will dull as new spires rise with a great deal of commotion.

4.  Reflect the moon.  Do not be afraid of darkness.

5.  Honor the creature in you and her needs for life (a safe nest, food, space to roam, a place to play).

6.  Acknowledge that healed means having been broken, and that broken can put old things together in marvelous new ways.

7.  Name “mis-takes/mis-steps” as stepping stones on your learning path, not stumbling blocks.

8.  Welcome movement and transformation and the chaos out of which they arrive as a given to be welcomed as the norm.  Understand that some years are quieter/noiser than others.

9.  Respect your instincts.

10.  Listen to your intuition.

11.  Celebrate your divinity daily. (Tammy Vitale)

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