(quotes from the chapter “Homing: Returning to OneSelf” in Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes unless otherwise noted)

How Do We Answer the Call of the Crone?

Release the Old and Make Way for the New

When a woman goes home according to her own cycles, others around her are given their own individuation work, their own vital issues to deal with.  Her return to home allows others growth and development too.  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

This quote has been a guiding light to me since I first read it in the 90s.  And, as I note in my Master’s thesis: “In claiming my own space, I was trying to remove myself from the center of my family swirl, from being responsible for everyone’s emotions and having no time for my own.  I worked to give everyone back their own feelings and to begin to deal with mine.  While this was a healthy move, it was and is painful.  It requires my holding a boundary line when I, myself, am unsure of just exactly where that line should be to be the best for all concerned…My family began is own individuation work, kicking and screaming the whole way.  Healthy or not they very much wanted things to go back to the way they had always been.”

In The Female Hero in American and British Literature, Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope note:

The traditional female ideal of assuming responsibility for the lives of those around her is not only egotistical but doomed to failure…the myth that women are spiritually superior – responsible for saving men and children through remaining spiritually pure and selfless – oppresses both women and those around them.  The female hero ceases to be the still

center of power, inactive herself, who seeks to control the actions of those around her.  By electing to live her own life, she automatically frees those around her to live theirs…by emerging from behind the false facade of the ideal female image to be admired, she frees those around her of the guilt that her saintly countenance and selfless sacrifice impose on them, binding them to her and impeding their own psychological development.

The need to be responsible for everyone, putting ourself last in line, is one of the learned ways of being that it is time to release.  While “it is good to be generous and kind and helpful like the great healer archetype”, it is good only to a point.

Beyond that, it exerts a hindering influence on our lives…a major entrapment constructed by the requirements placed upon us by our own cultures, mainly pressures to prove that we are not just standing around taking up space and enjoying ourselves, but that we have redeemable value – in some parts of the world…to prove that we have value and therefore should be allowed to live.  These pressures are introduced into our psyches when we are very young and unable to judge or resist them.  They become law to us…unless or until we challenge them…The basic wild instinct that determines ‘only this far and no farther, only this much and no more’ must be retrieved and developed.  (Pinkola-Estes)

Recognize and Acknowledge the Call

You are accomplishing things but none of what you are doing feels good or substantial or gives you a feeling of satisfaction.  You are doing what you believe you have chosen to do, but the outcomes are dust.  “Discontent is the secret door to significant and life-giving change.”

For some, home is the taking up of an endeavor of some sort.  Women begin to sing again after years of finding reason not to.   They commit themselves to learn something they’ve been heartfelt about for a long time.  They seek out the lost people and things in their lives.  They take back their voices and write.  They rest.  They make some corner of the world their own.  They execute immense or intense decisions.  They do something that leaves footprints.

…When the culture, the society, or the psyche does not support this cycle to return home, many women learn to leap over the gate or dig under the fence anyway.  They become chronically ill and purloin reading time in bed.  They smile that fangy smile as if all is well and go on a subtle work slowdown for the duration…when the cycle is distrubed, many feel that in order to free themselves to go they must pick a fight with their boss, their children, their parents, or their mate in order to assert their psychic needs..If a woman has to fight for what is rightfully hers, she feels justified, feels absolutely vindicated in her desire to go home…If you can, it is better to teach your people that you will be more and also different when you return, that you are not abandoning them but learning yourself anew and bringing yourself back to your real life.

Understand What Is Being Asked of You

(from the chapter “Homing: Returning to OneSelf” in Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The seal woman returns to the sea, not because she just feels like it, not because today is a good day to go, not because her life is all nice and tidy – there is no nice and tidy time for anyone.  She goes because it is time, and therefore she must.

To not go home when so called is to become a zombie – someone who functions and may even accomplish things but one who has numbed herself to the Call.

1. Going home does not necessarily cost money.  It costs time.  It costs a strong act of will to say “I am going” and mean it.
2. Going home is not one size fits all.  The exact placement of the aperture to home changes from time to time, so its location may be different this month than last.  Rereading passages of books and single poems that are touching.  Spending even a few minute near water.  Lying on the ground watching clouds.  Walking or driving for an hour, any direction, then returning.  Greeting sunrise…..whatever helps you be centered and at peace…Home is where a thought or feeling can be sustained instead of being interrupted.
3. You are becoming a medial woman – a woman who “stands between the world of consensual reality and the mystical unconscious” to mediate between them.
4. You will bring new ideas to life, exhange old ideas for innovative one.
5. Not everyone will welcome this.
6. You do not raise your hand and politely ask if you may, please, begin breaking the rules now.

When the time has come to toss the rule book (probably the one you learned from in school), and you know it in your bones, the “raising-your-hand” moment is long past.  You have donned your fierce and are standing up — many times alone (or at least it sure

feels that way) –  for your heart and your spirit, “the way it’s always been done” be damned. And the real truth is, you are neither alone nor the first one to reach that point in your life.  While that may not make it easier, it does let you know that there is indeed a tribe of women out here waiting to welcome you with open arms.  We need you!  We need your fierce and your resolve and your energy, because we are out here changing the world:  one woman at a time. After living life a certain number of decades, it becomes abundantly clear that whatever rules are written in the accepted rule book, they are not ours.  Our story is not in the book. The rules do not work for us (nor were they meant to).  Audre Lourde puts it rather succinctly: …and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.

  What is stretching out inside of you?  What in your soul longs for re-connection?  What feels the greatness of unfolding Mystery when you gaze upon a marigold, or look up at the stars?  What in you might explode in a brilliant rush of heat and light?

Follow that.   (T. Thorn Coyle, in Making Magic of Your Life)

Next Post:  A Woman’s Guide to Breaking the Rules.