Stories are medicine . . . They have such power; they do not require that we do, be act anything--we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories. Stories engender the excitement, sadness, questions, longings, and understandings that spontaneously bring the archetype, in this case Wild Woman, back to surface. -Clarissa Pinkola Estes- Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype Throughout the tides of life, we receive calls to action, calls to inspiration, calls to illumination. If we allow them to fade into the background unanswered, they grow dimmer and dimmer until only a fragment of their message echoes in our minds. My calls to write began as an impulse to document my childhood, and later evolved into a palliative measure that sought to make sense of teenage tumult. During both periods, my letters were torn from their pages for fear that, when found, they would incite mockery or patronization. The birthing of my innermost anxieties and joys onto the page was intimately bound to my sense of value. I cultivated an ability to compose academic essays, and troubled by the prospect of intimate creativity, I ignored the calls to write for none other than myself.
As Saturn returned, I heard whispers upon the breeze entreating me to write, quickly muted by the turbulence of work and commotion of ontological unknowns. The tension of creativity denied laid the foundation for a blinkered resolve that hardened my focus in the direction of quantifiable success; the joy of creativity was thus an indulgent, hedonistic affair. It seemed that only tragedy could be violent enough to penetrate my fortified tower of emotional petrification. In the months that led to tragedy, I fashioned my mind into a fortress, isolated and replete with a bastion of sentries myopic in their identification of threats to a disconnected existence. As the waters of grief washed through me, my defenses eroded against waves plunging with slow ferocity. Stones of fear and uncertainty crumbled to the depths, revealing a vulnerability that anchored me in a new truth: trauma was an initiatory rite that marked entry into a land of unknowns. Storms of overwhelm and numbness ebbed and flowed, transforming me into a castaway drifting along an ocean between, hoping for new shores. Held within the liminality of existing in a pregnant state of becoming, I reached for a pencil and journal. I found solace in the medicine of words, a paramedical response to the unravelling of spiritual and existential trauma. A contortion of conversational stream muddled by the shifting topography of selves, the osmotic energies of others, and a landscape of lineage, my mind does not always seem to be my own. It is in a perpetual state of unfolding, of deepening and releasing of selfhoods past, and sometimes I find that I am more bystander, and less empress. Like a puzzle thrust into the air, my mind is at once coherent and chaotic. The ambiguity of confused connections can render me lost in my own mindscape. As a way to discern the constellation of connected pieces as meaningful images, writing is a faithful practice of self-knowledge. It has empowered me to be purveyor of my mind animated by a desire to architect the rocks of concepts and trees of meaning. The practice of bearing witness to cycles of growth, pressure and regrowth blossoms with the sign-less languages of intuition, guidance that must be trusted and heeded. Through writing, I pen my way back to my spirit. ©Sophie Steele
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AuthorWriter, teacher, and activist working to explode barriers and correct inequity. I aspire to enrich our ecosystems of learning and growth by integrating creativity, healing and wisdom. ArchivesCategories
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