…too much domestication is like forbidding the vital essence to dance. In its proper and healthy state, the wild self is not docile or vacuous. It is alert and responsive to any given movement or moment. It is not locked into an absolute and repetitive pattern for any and all circumstances. It has creative choice. The instinct injured woman has no choice. She just stays stuck.
There are many ways to be stuck. The instinct-injured woman usually gives herself away because she has a difficult time asking for help or recognising her own needs. Her natural instincts to fight or flee are drastically slowed or extincted. Recognition of the sensations of satiation, off-taste, suspicion, caution, and the drive to love fully and freely are inhibited or exaggerated.
…It is play, not properness that is the central artery, the core, the brain stem of creative life. Be good, no creative life. Sit still, no creative life. Speak, think, act only demurely, little creative juice. Any group, society, institution, or organization that encourages women to revile the eccentric; to be suspicious of the new and unusual; to avoid the fervent, the vital, the innovative; to impersonalise the personal, is asking for a culture of dead women.
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Most of us would do better if we became more adept at watching the fire under our work, if we watched more closely the cooking process for nourishing the wild Self. Too often we turn away from the pot, from the oven. We forget to watch, forget to add fuel, and forget to stir. We mistakenly think the fire and the cooking are like one of those feisty houseplants that can go without water for eight months before the poor thing keels over. It is not so. The fire bears, requires watching, for it is easy to let the flame go out.
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The time with Wild Woman is hard at first. To repair injured instinct, banish naivete, and over time to learn the deepest aspects of psyche and soul, to hold on to what we have learned, to not turn away, to speak out for what we stand for...all this takes a boundless and mystical endurance. When we come up out of the underworld after one of our undertakings there, we may appear unchanged outwardly, but inwardly we have reclaimed a vast and womanly wildness. On the surface we are still friendly, but beneath the skin, we are most certainly no longer tame.
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