Sage Sweetwater living her Dream, making an original contribution, a useful and stunning contribution to her women's culture.

Women's spirituality from deep within--Rio Abajo Rio--"the river beneath the river"

Clarissa Pinkola Estes' women's psychology and Sage Sweetwater's women's philosophy merge berries on the trail....(Sage Sweetwater living her Dream, photo by Sage Sweetwater---her late winter wolf cub learning the Call of the Wild on Sage's eleven acres in the Colorado Wet Mountains.)

Extracted from the WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES by Clarissa Pinkola Estes





QUOTES from WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

"Do not cringe and make yourself small if you are called the black sheep, the maverick, the lone wolf. Those with slow seeing say a nonconformist is a blight on society. But it has been proven over the centuries, that being different means standing at the edge, means one is practically guaranteed to make an original contribution, a useful and stunning contribution to her culture." (p.212)

"If you want to create, you have to sacrifice superficiality, some security, and often your desire to be liked, to draw up your most intense insights, your most far-reaching visions." (p.239)

"Psychically, it is good to make a halfway place, a way station, a considered place in which to rest and mend after one escapes a famine. It is not too much to take one year, two years, to assess one's wounds, seek guidance, apply the medicines, consider the future. A year or two is scant time. The feral woman is a woman making her way back. She is learning to wake up, pay attention, stop being naοve, uninformed. She takes her life in her own hands. To re-learn the deep feminine instincts, it is vital to see how they were decommissioned to begin with." (p.272)

"The difference between comfort and nurture is this: if you have a plant that is sick because you keep it in a dark closet, and you say soothing words to it, that is comfort. If you take the plant out of the closet and put it in the sun, give it something to drink, and then talk to it, that is nurture." (p.350)

"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." (p.361)

"Being able to say that one is a survivor is an accomplishment. For many, the power is in the name itself. And yet comes a time in the individuation process when the threat or trauma is significantly past. Then is the time to go to the next stage after survivorship, to healing and thriving. ... One can take so much pride in being a survivor that it becomes a hazard to further creative development. ... Once the threat is past, there is a potential trap in calling ourselves by names taken on during the most terrible time of our lives. It creates a mind-set that is potentially limiting. It is not good to base the soul identity solely on the feats and losses and victories of the bad times." (pp.210, 211)

"What is the basic nutrition for the soul? Well, it differs from creature to creature, but here are some combinations. ... For some women air, night, sunlight, and trees are necessities. For others, words, paper, and books are the only things that satiate. For others, color, form, shadow, and clay at the absolutes. Some women must leap, bow, and run, for their souls crave dance. Yet others crave only a tree-leaning peace." (p.210)

"Seventy-five percent confident will do nicely. Seventy-five percent is a goodly amount. Remember, we say that a flower is blooming whether it is in half, three-quarters, or full bloom." (p.185)

"A person who has untangled Skeleton Woman knows patience, knows better how to wait. He is not shocked or afraid of spareness. He is not overwhelmed by fruition. His needs to attain, to 'have right now,' are transformed into a finer craft of finding all facets of relationship, observing how cycles of relationship work together. He is not afraid to relate to the beauty of fierceness, the beauty of the unknown, the beauty of the not-beautiful. And in learning and working at all these, he becomes the quintessential wild-lover." (pp.158-159)

"If you are surrounded by people who cross their eyes and look with disgust up at the ceiling when you are in the room, when you speak, when you act and react, then you are with the people who douse passions - yours and probably their own as well. These are not the people who care about you, your work, your life." (p.115) 

"Like the word wild, the word witch has come to be understood as a pejorative, but long ago it was an appellation given to both old and young women healers, the word witch deriving from the word wit, meaning wise. This was before cultures carrying the one-God-only religious image began to overwhelm the older pantheistic cultures which understood the Deity through multiple religious images of the universe and all its phenomena." (p.96)

"When the soulful life is being threatened, it is not only acceptable to draw the line and mean it, it is required." (p.75)

"Because women have a soul-need to express themselves in their own soulful ways, they must develop and blossom in ways that are sensible to them and without molestation from others." (p.57)

"When women open the doors of their own lives and survey the carnage there in those out-of-the-way places, they most often find they have been allowing summary assassinations of their most crucial dreams, goals, and hopes." (p.53)

"In a single human being there are many other beings, all with their own values, motives, and devices. Some psychological technologies suggest we arrest these beings, count them, name them, force them into harness till they shuffle along like vanquished slaves. But to do this would halt the dance of wildish lights in a woman's eyes; it would halt her heat lightning and arrest all throwing of sparks. Rather than corrupt her natural beauty, our work is to build for all these beings a wildish countryside wherein the artists among them can make, the lovers love, the healers heal." (p.38)

"I'm always taken by how deeply women like to dig in the earth. They plant bulbs for the spring. They poke blackened fingers into mucky soil, transplanting sharp-smelling tomato plants. I think they are digging down to the two-million-year-old woman. They are looking for her toes and her paws. They want her for a present to themselves, for with her they feel of a piece and at peace." (p.33)

"The creation Mother is always also the Death Mother and vice versa. Because of this dual nature, or double-tasking, the great work before us is to learn to understand what around and about us and what within us must live, and what must die. Our work is to apprehend the timing of both; to allow what must die to die, and what must live to live." (p.32) 

"...[W]hat Jung called 'the moral obligation' to live out and to express what one has learned in the descent or ascent to the wild Self. This moral obligation he speaks of means to live what we perceive, be it found in the psychic Elysian fields, the isles of the dead, the bone deserts of the psyche, the face of the mountain, the rock of the sea, the lush underworld - anyplace where La Que Sabe breathes upon us, changing us. Our work is to show we have been breathed upon - to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowings, from body, from dreams and journeys of all sorts." (p.31)

"Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayermaking, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts. And even with these well-crafted practices, much of what occurs in this ineffable world remains forever mysterious to us, for it breaks physical laws and rational laws as we know them." (p.30)

"We find lingering evidence of archetype in the images and symbols found in stories, literature, poetry, painting, and religion. It would appear that its glow, its voice, and its fragrance are meant to cause us to be raised up from contemplating the shit on our tails to occasionally traveling in the company of the stars." (p.29)

"The craft of questions, the craft of stories, the craft of the hands - all these are the making of something, and that something is soul. Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase." (p.14)

"The nurture for telling stories comes from the might and endowments of my people who have gone before me. In my experience, the telling moment of the story draws its power from a towering column of humanity joined one to the other across time and space, elaborately dressed in the rags and robes or nakedness of their time, and filled to the bursting with life still being lived. If there is a single source of story and the numen of story, this long chain of humans is it." (p.19)

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QUOTES extracted from THE BUCKSKIN SKIRT OAR TRAVELER by Sage Sweetwater

"Such inspirational tales are told around the fires along the banks of the trading scene when the village people are bartering for her snowshoes.  The Buckskin Skirt Oar Traveler commences telling the dreams in October and doesn't end until spring just before the river thaws.  Tom Henry did it this way, saying the dreams were tales of a sacred nature and they should never be recounted during the warmer months when he said underwater spirits emerged.

"Using the sole of the snowshoe to walk upon the soul of Mother Snow with wine-berry-colored tassels on the bottom of the snowshoe frame muffles the sound of the crunching through the snow's crust, which is why this dream is told quietly in a crisp whisper.

"The Snow Berry Woman dream is where the soul might be warned of the great fear of aging that lies ahead.  women of primitive times were considered old when they could not keep up on the migratory trek.

"The dream of modern-day women is to not follow an established trail, but break new trails all on our own.  This dream gives us a taste of what's being done and what remains to be done to save our wildness and find our independence.  And the dream all pans out in the name of the berry---huckleberry, gooseberry, raspberry, and blueberry.  The only way to find the berries is to break trail in the spring, free to roam and free of restraint.

"Perhaps the primitive women on those migratory treks just simply didn't want to keep up because they were bored.  Following the same trails year after year, arriving only to find that all was taken by the time they got there made the women feel their age.

"Snow Berry Woman shriveled like a dried old berry way before her time because of monotony and there was nothing left on the bush for her to feed on.  she withered away simply because she never ventured on to another path...where Raven Seven Dreams lives.

"Raven Seven Dreams is the last Dreamcatcher: Weaving the Snowshoe.  Raven Seven Dreams has lived for many berry moons because she is a leader, not a follower.  She leads wolf to food, and out of kindness, wolf leaves Raven Seven Dreams leftovers in return.

"And those are the Seven Dreams the way the Buckskin Skirt Oar Traveler sees them.  They are needed to sustain the web of life.  She pulls her toboggan stacked with Dreamcatcher: Weaving the Snowshoe, wearing her own snowshoes, the beavertails, on her way to the winter trading scene." (p.106-107)

THE BUCKSKIN SKIRT OAR TRAVELER

http://www.booksforchristians.com/bk_detail.asp?isbn=1420821601

FROM THE CONVENT TO THE RAWHIDE: THE SAGA OF SADIE CADE AND VI MONTANA

http://www.booksforchristians.com/bk_detail.asp?isbn=1425926339





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