Think8 Women

In the flush of late afternoon I pulled a sweaty three-year-old in a red wagon trying to keep up with the older boys dancing the dirt path toward home.

As we rounded the last bend of the forest I stopped, arrested by a field of dandelion plumes ignited by a low-slung sun.  Blazing, bursting golden flames, my heart pounded at this glory, ripped open in awe. I could barely breathe.

The two boys ahead, laughing and teasing each other, stayed oblivious.

I ran, awkwardly jerking the wagon behind me. I had to get the camera. No one would ever see this if I didn’t somehow capture it.

But it was too late. The image still burning my eyes, I knew I was the only witness to that terrible beauty. It was now my sole responsibility to capture it or it would be lost forever.

I would draw it. Grabbing paper and pencil – after all, I was an art major – I sketched it out. But my lines didn’t cut it.

Tried tracing it in words… they too failed me.

I laid my head on the table and sobbed. Which is where, hours later, my (then) husband found me, still sobbing. He thought something catastrophic must have happened.

It had.

The artist within had fully awakened.

All this time she thought she was rich. But she was a pauper. And worse… now she knew it.

It’s one thing to be poor and not be aware of how dirt-poor you are.  It’s another thing to have your life shatter around you in shards of emptiness.

Looking back over my shoulder, it was a profound and painful awakening.  A gift.

But at that moment, I had nothing — except that desperate voice inside begging me to keep searching, keep digging! Surely I was not that poor– I must have treasures buried somewhere. This could not be all there was to me!

I had no choice but to dig.  And not a shovel in sight.

Over the next ten years, with bloodied hands and makeshift tools, I ripped up dirt, not even sure what I was looking for– maybe if I found whatever it was, then I could make sense of my place on the earth. I might even be able to hold the beauty and the pain I had been shown – and had sown in life – and maybe, just maybe, I might be able to pass it on to others.

But that day, in the shards of my broken image, I caught a glimpse what I was meant to become.  And the voice kept urging me on. There was no turning back.

We each have that voice within us.

You know the one.  Whispering that you are not fully alive yet. That you were meant to do something bigger than to crouch in a small box.

Unanswered, the voice begins shouting, in dreams, over chocolate, under cramps, demanding you dig faster and work harder until you find out exactly who you are and what you are meant to be doing with everything you know is buried below.

I know this to be true not only in my own life, but also in the life of every woman I have had the honor of working with—she only shows up when she finally says YES to her own work. The excavation of who she is and the piles of treasure that she is meant to dig up, polish and bring to the world.

Once we start working, we cannot wait to see how the pieces all fit together – nothing wasted– as we create and recreate our own lives.

Yes create. We are all creative. Creating is who we are as women and how we bring ourselves to the world. In fact, life is a constant act of creating. We either create or we stop the ‘create’. It is that simple.

Last weekend it was my honor to work with a brilliant woman bursting with newly defined Life and Purpose.  She will change the world with the work she is creating. During one session she asked if I had read WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES.

I had not thought of this book for years. When it came out in 1992, I was down in deep hole, divorced and desperate to understand how to be for myself, for my sons and live alone in the world.

Starved, I had gulped Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ words about the true nature of a woman’s soul journey.  Her words and stories (along with a other mentors and teachers on my path) helped me find my own purpose and gave me courage to forge the tools I now keep sharply honed.

In fact you might say I am leading the charge of Women Who Run with Shovels.

I plan to feast again on her book this week but let me leave you with some of her words.

 

Nancy

“When women open the door of their own lives and survey the carnage there in those out-of-the-way places, they most often find they have been allowing assassination of their most crucial dreams, goals and hopes. They find lifeless thoughts and feelings and desires, ones which were once graceful and promising are now drained of blood.”

——

 “Through it all we learn not to be misled by the nagging voice at the back of the mind that says, “This is silly… I’m just making all this up.” We learn to ignore that voice and listen to what is heard beyond that. We learn to follow what we hear—all those things that bring us closer to acute awareness… and a clear view of the soul.”

——–

“Within us is the potential to be fleshed out again as the creatures we once were. Within us are the bones to change ourselves and our world. Within us is the breath and our truths and our longings—together they are the song, the creation hymn we have been yearning to sing.”

                    -Clarissa Pinkola Estés

                    WOMAN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES