The way to maintain one’s connection to the wild is to ask yourself what it is that you want. This is the sorting of the seed from the dirt. One of the most important discriminations we can make in this matter is the difference between things that beckon to us and things that call from our souls.
A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.
The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.
I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and you laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.
The quintessential feminine Self stands at the center of the psyche and it is wild, meaning natural and free, and utterly wise. It is not ‘something’ we must strive to create. This Self is already fully present, burning strong and waiting for us to come into its presence.
To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.
The point of art is not simply to express ourselves, but to create an external, concrete form in which the soul of our lives can be evoked and contained.
Be wild; that is how to clear the river.
My brain has no heart, and my heart has no brain. That’s why when I speak my mind, I appear heartless and when I do what’s in my heart I seem thoughtless.
To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex. It means meeting one’s own numinosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one’s own way. It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know. It means to stand and live.
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.
For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need.
There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too, have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.
When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.
Freud’s translator accidentally omitted ‘fashion’ in the psychoanalytic list of primary instinctual drives; along with the drive to sexuality there is the drive to wear odd garments that may cut off circulation, occlude vision, make toes grow sideways, cause riots.
If you’ve lost focus, just sit down and be still. Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away, and it will renew itself. You need do no more.
The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life.
Dogs are the magicians of the universe.
Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything – we need only listen.
It’s not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades.