Posted on:Life Lessons Publishing writing

Falling into Wonder

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Great blog posts are a little like the holes covered in smooth water on forest pathways where your foot sinks in deep and you’re falling and twisting; adjusting to the shift in equilibrium. Recovering your balance, you might find that you’re facing a different attitude direction now, and the path of your day has changed, ever so slightly.

That makes me think about trajectory. Turning your foot a few degrees in a new direction will not change your world overmuch if you aren’t planning on going very far. But making a tiny adjustment to how you walk through your life can, over the long haul, bring you to a very, very different destination from the one you thought you were heading towards.

Starting out a day with a steaming bowl of Crap Soup with a side order of Unfortunate Circumstances will always set your internal GPS on an expressway to Meltdown City. Reading something that changes your mind, just a little, is a reset move that lets you input a new route for your wreck-of-a-day, putting you on course for a much better destination.

As I wander the Internet, especially on my own Crap Soup days, I love to find myself stuck, neck deep in someone’s clever pile of wonder. Their carefully chosen words and images encircle me like tendrils and hold fast. I can go no further until I’ve drank my fill of what they are offering and when I am released, I am just a little bit different. I have new words now. I have something in my head that wasn’t there this morning and I’m on a new quest to find a little altar in my mind or in my living space where I can put it on display.

I hope that’s happening to others when they trip on a search word and fall, head first into this blog site. I hope they push themselves up and find they have a little bit of something I wrote stuck in their hair and it’s talking to them, like some enchanted leaf; turning their head just a tiny bit and sending them on a trajectory towards more and more wonder.

Even when I am too busy to post here, like I have been lately, I notice that new people are dropping by all the time. I love to get your emails and feedback! I really love that you all tend to come back again, now that you know the way here. There are footprints of nearly 1500 of you on this blog and closing in on 6,000 on the other, over at http://laughingmyrearendoffliterally.blogspot.com/

I’m imagining myself as a wood sprite, positioned in the trees above and watching as unsuspecting visitors stumble in to this joint. It delights me to know when you’ve gone back into the archives and dug out some words that you want to take home with you.

I recently had the weird experience of having someone who was conducting an expensive self awareness workshop at a university be handed a little memory card I had done with some powerful questions written on it. They had a little epiphany and asked if they could copy it and hand it out to their attendees because it was exactly what they needed to hear. Discussions of pending book projects and intellectual property were had. I decided that while I wait for the publishing world’s response to my manuscripts, I would push ahead and get the Three Questions project going. And so, I have dug a new small web hole that you’re invited to trip into. Soon, I’ll have some products (wallet size cards) for the project and you can carry them to remind you of how easy it can be to communicate clearly with others. http://crystalclearmeaning.wix.com/crystalclearmeaning

I’m doing a fair amount of wandering whenever I have free time, reading through your sites too and sharing the gems and shiny things with links back to where you dropped them. It’s always a really good day when I trip over a diamond and fall into a big pool of wonder.

Posted on:Clarissa Pinkola Estes Life Lessons poetry What it takes to be a successful writer writing

Clarissa, Inner Wolves and Digging for the Roots

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This morning, I am in search of rich language, like loamy, nutrient laden, black and vibrant soil where I can dig my hands down deep and find the root of the story. Like a dear friend who needs no invitation; moving easily to my cupboards for cup and spoon and pouring from my coffee pot; at home in my home, I found Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I should say that I found her again. In 1995, she came into my life because I couldn’t resist her book titled, Women Who Run With The Wolves.

I have a thing for wolves. Who doesn’t? Well, apparently people with guns in Michigan, and Montana, and people who see wolves as some kind of competition in their testosterone laden quest to piss on every tree and own every inch of soil for miles around. I believe they are jealous of wolves and their easy mastery of life in the wild and so they encroach on wolf territory, hunting them down like rabid vermin instead of learning to co-exist with such magnificent creatures and examples of family loyalty.

The draw to Clarissa’s words, for me, was how they cut through the dance around what women should be and put a spotlight on what we truly are. She wrote of women’s native magnificence and our family nature.

She wrote of the nature of our cravings, our need for creating; be it in a kitchen, a science laboratory, an art studio, a bedroom or the creation of a home nest where our brood is safe and nurtured. I don’t read her words everyday though they do seem to find me again whenever I need them most. Her words are like the person you see, after years of absence, and an unexpected smile breaks across your face. They are like long awaited warm sun heating your cold arms, heralding a hard earned spring.

She moves me. She inspires me. She fucks my head up something fierce with side hikes down forest pathways that I have never dared to walk before. It’s time to read that book again. Somewhere in its pages, are the roots I started digging for on this particular morning. I just know it.

 

 

“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.”

― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With The Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman

http://www.clarissapinkolaestes.com/works.htm

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes

From her website: Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, is an internationally recognized scholar, award-winning poet, Diplomate senior Jungian psychoanalyst, and cantadora (keeper of the old stories in the Latina tradition.). Dr. Estés is  managing editor and columnist writing on politics, spirituality and culture at the newsblog TheModerateVoice.comand a columnist at The National Catholic Reporter online.