The Unruined Heart

 

The Use of the Seven Swords through the Heart.

The swords through your heart

are not the ones which caused your wounds,

but rather, these mighty swords of Strength,

were earned by your struggles through hard times.

Sword of Surrender: to withstand this time of learning.

Sword of Veils: to pierce the hidden meanings of this time.

Sword of Healing: to lance one's own agony, bitterness.

Sword of New Life: to cut through, cut loose, plant anew.

Sword of Courage: to speak up, row on, touch others.

Sword of Life Force: to draw from, lean on, purify.

Sword of Love: often heaviest to lift consistently;

turns one away from war, to instead,

fall into the arms of the Immaculate Strength.

O Immaculate Heart of My Mother,

give me shelter in the beautiful chambers of your heart.

Keep me strong, fierce, loving, and able in this world.

Remind me daily, that despite my imperfections,

my heart remains,

completely unruined.

- Clarissa Pinkola Estes (2011), Untie the Strong Woman, p.79.

Art: "Closed Eyes" by Odilon Redon

Prayer

You can not reach all suffering humanity all the time.

You can hold all souls as whole in your heart, not just their horrors and losses.

This is the stronger prayer:

Wholeness despite holes through and through.

Hold all the injured as whole,

and on the torn red beribboned slingshot

of your heart...

aim, draw back hard, harder

and release all your holiest and  most healing thoughts 

to fly across all divides,

to fly across all big waters,

to vault across all insanities...

Bid the holy to fly - and to land at this moment

in exactly the places most needed.

Souls sense being fiercely prayed for,

on, over, with, daily.

Knowing that someone

who knows you not

is nonetheless praying,

pouring will and strength into you, 

for you, into and for those you pray for:

This is inestimable medicine for the soul.

Continue then and tend

to the poor in spirit,

the poor in soul,

the poor in health,

the poor in want,

right before you:

the ailing kin, the street man,

the road mother, the broken friend,

the innocent child, the torn,

the wondering, the wandering.

I tell you,

those who would care across the ocean only,

and not care for those they can wash

who are standing right before them,

are not fully caring yet.

I know you understand this:

That we desperately

want all humanity to not hurt...

and that this is one of the worthiest

prayers we know.

Thus, we bend to tend, 

in whatever ways we are called,

to those within our reach - 

wherever that reach reaches...

for there are times

when Creator has no hands,

only ours...

Thus, in this tending, we keep the greatest

blood contract with Creator,

with our Holy Mother, 

our souls have ever signed...

So may it be for thee

so may it be for me

And so may it be for us all.

Aymen

Aymen

Aymen

And with oceanic love...

Excerpt from: Untie the Strong Woman - "Remembering Our Billions" - by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Painting: "Ukrainian Praying Woman" by Fedir Krychevsky

The Virgin of Guadalupe

The Mother I most often carry with me everywhere is the woodswoman La Nuestra Senora, Our Lady Guadalupe, she whose mantle is fashioned of moss from the north side of trees at sunset, she who has star shards caught in her wild silver hair. Her gown is soft, coarse-woven cloth with the thorns and weed seeds and petals of wild roses caught in it.

She has dirty hands from growing things earthy, and from her day and night work alongside her hard-working sons and daughters, their children, their elders, all.

La Guadalupe is no symmetrical thing with palms equally outstretched and frozen in time.

She is ever in motion.

If there is emotion, she is there.

If there is commotion, she is there.

If there is elation, she is there.

Impatience, she is there.

Fatigue, she is there.

Fear, unrest, sorrow,

Beauty, inspiration,

She is there.

And she is demure in a sense, yes, but different from those who would fade her essence into an anemia: Yes, she is demure as in demurring, that is, refusing to be contained and made small.

And she is calm, yes, but not without will to rise again and again. Instead, yes, she is calm as the mighty ocean is calm as it moves in enormous troughs and pinnacles, its huge waves like a heartbeat: easy, intentional, muscular.

And she is pure, yes, but not as in never going dark, never having doubt, never taking a wrong turn for a time, but rather pure, yes, as a gemstone is cut into a hundred sparkling facets - that kind of pure, meaning gem-cut by travail, adventure, and challenge — and yet fully without a streak of dead glass in any facet. ... (pp. 17-18)

The Memorae

Very often I am asked how a soul just coming to truly be with Our Lady might think about Maria, Nuestra Madre Grande. I say:

How to comprehend her, be close to her.

The exotic locale is not necessary to apprehend her. She is found in a shard of glass, in a broken curb, in a hurt heart, and in any soul knowing or unknowing, yet crazy in love with the mysteries, with the divine spark, the creative fire — and not quite so in love with mundane and petty challenges only.

Think of her not in the ways you've been told/sold.

Rather, seek her with your own eyes without blinders

and your own heart without shutters.

Look low instead of high.

Look right under your nose.

She comes in many guises and disguises.

Hidden, right out in the open.

And you will know her immediately by her immaculate

and undivided heart for humanity.

This is the Guadalupe I think you know of, or sense, or want to know, or are very close to for years now. Our Lady is joy-centric and sorrow-mending. She is one who is present in every way. In so understanding one's own pull to the Holy Woman, thus do we untie the Strong Woman.

Here, please allow me to pray strength into your hands and heart — and inspiration and daring — and fire — to lift the Great Woman away from whichever Lilliputians have tied her down into more manageable form.

No matter which dissertation or diminution she has been tied down by, she is greater than any Lilliputian mind by far. (p. 21)

*

The Virgin of Guadalupe as presented by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

La Loba, the Wolf Woman

There is an old woman who lives in a hidden place that everyone knows in their souls but few have ever seen. As in the fairy tales of Eastern Europe, she seems to wait for lost or wandering people and seekers to come to her place. She calls herself many names: ‘La Huesera’, Bone Woman; ‘La Trapera’, The Gatherer; and ‘La Loba’, Wolf Woman. The sole work of La Loba is the collecting of bones. She collects and preserves that which is in danger of being lost to the world.

La Loba parallels world myths in which the dead are brought back to life. In Egyptian mythos, Isis accomplishes this service for her dead brother Osiris, who is dismembered by his evil brother Set. Isis works from dusk to dawn each night to piece her brother back together again before morning, else the sun will not rise. The Christ raised Lazarus, who had been dead so long he ‘stinketh’. Demeter calls forth her pale daughter Persephone from the Land of the Dead once a year. And La Loba sings over the bones.

When La Loba sings, she sings from the knowing of ‘los ovarios’, a knowing deep within the body, deep within the mind, deep within the soul. The symbols of seed and bone are very similar. If one has the root stock, the basis, the original part, if one has the seed of corn, any havoc can be repaired, devastations can be resewn, fields can be rested, hard seed can be soaked to soften it, to help it break open and thrive. To have the seed means to have the key to life. To be with the cycle of the seed means to dance with life, dance with death, dance into life again. This embodies the Life and Death Goddess in her most ancient and principled form. Because she turns in these constant cycles, I call her the Life/Death/Life Mother.

If something has been lost, it is she to whom one must appeal, speak with, listen to. Her psychic advice is sometimes harsh or difficult to put into practice but always transformative and restorative.
La Loba. the old one in the desert, is a collector of bones. In archetypal symbology, bones represent the indestructible force. They do not lend themselves to easy reduction. They are by their structure hard to burn, nearly impossible to pulverize. In myth and story they represent the indestructible soul-spirit. We know the soul-spirit can be injured, even maimed, but it is nearly impossible to kill.
You can dent the soul and bend it. You can hurt it and scar it. You can leave the marks of illness upon it, and the scorch marks of fear. But it does not die, for it is protected by La Loba in the underworld. She is both the finder and the incubator of bones.

~ Excerpt from ‘Women Who Run with the Wolves’ by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

She Is Known By Many Names

She is known by many names and many images, and has appeared in different epochs of time, to people across the world, in exactly the shapes and images the soul would most readily understand her, apprehend her, be able to embrace her and be embraced by her.

She wears a thousand names, thousands of skin tones, thousands of costumes to represent her being patroness of deserts, mountains, stars, streams, and oceans. If there are more than six billion people on earth, then thereby she comes to us in literally six billions of images. Yet at her center is only one great Immaculate Heart.

She is intuition, she is far-seer, she is deep listener, she is loyal heart. She encourages humans to remain multi-lingual; fluent in the languages of dreams, passion, and poetry. She whispers from night dreams, she leaves behind on the terrain of a woman’s soul a coarse hair and muddy footprints. These fill women with longing to find her, free her, and love her.

She is ideas, feelings, urges, and memory. She has been lost and half forgotten for a long, long time. She is the source, the light, the night, the dark, and daybreak. She is the smell of good mud and the back leg of the fox. The birds which tell us secrets belong to her. She is the voice that says, ‘This way, this way.'

We are the proof of this ineffable female numen. Our existence parallels hers.

- Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD



Drawing: Madonna by Rogier van der Weyden (1400-1464)

Letting Go - An Act of Love

The phrase ‘letting go’ perhaps tends to be used rather casually. But there surely is a difference between letting go an unkind remark someone might have said to us, between urging ourselves to ‘let it go’, and the letting go of something so deep that it feels like death. This type of letting go is never easy and requires enormous courage. This type of letting go takes us on a journey that is highly personal, and only the person involved can do this in her or his own time. It is a lone process: no one can do it for us.
It is the act of letting go of a loved one. 
As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in one of his poems: "We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go." Letting go of a loved one is a recognition that we never really owned anyone or anything. It is a conscious act of great love and faith. For no one wants to part from a beloved one. 

The act of letting go itself seems to be an ongoing state of being; like the tides, one's emotions tend to ebb and flow, and these processes never seem to go quite in a straight line. But slowly, slowly, a little drop becomes the ocean and things find the level which is intended for them.

Often we have dreams of what we want in life, including who we want to be with, and how we want things to be. But sometimes life itself says 'no': we realize with terrible finality that our dreams are not to be, and our most sought-after aspirations are doomed to remain unrealized. Then what?
The author Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes such a situation as: "leaving what cannot be." But what is this "leaving?" How do we stop reading the same chapter again and again? How do we stop the same looped recording playing over and over in our thoughts?

This more profound act of letting go is a deep acceptance, a surrender to what is, a realization of how things truly are, and a leaving behind of any desire for how we would like or prefer things to be. Saying ‘yes’ to this type of letting go irrevocably changes and transforms us. It is not a matter of hardening our hearts, of closing them so that no pain can enter. For if we close our hearts in this way, and with this intent, then not only do we not let pain in: we allow pain that is there to become trapped and to find no escape. The pain stays within us.
Instead, if only we open our hearts completely, if we open our hearts as wide as the summer skies, then not only all our joys and loves are embraced, but also all our pain and suffering and emotional turmoil. This is the marvelous paradox: in embracing our pain we also truly ‘let it go’. Inner freedom comes from this.

And so letting go is a deep acceptance, a surrender to what is. Every living soul on this earth, whether in physical or in spiritual despair or distress, is walking this road at some stage in her or his life. And it is up to each and every one of us to break through that hidden isolation and take that one step nearer to the real freedom which comes with truly ‘letting go’

Painting by Isil Gönen

Mother's Day

We need only remember her. We need only call her by the heart-name every human being has set into their very souls before they ever came to earth, that one word each of us knew before we could even feed ourselves, before we could even walk. The very first word inscribed into the hearts of all of humanity across the entire planet:

Mama

Mami

Madre

Mamo

Mommie

Makuahine

Maji

Majka

Moer

MànaAnya

Móthair

Maman

Máti

Mère

Okaasan

Mutter

Mor

Mari

Motina

Matka

Mother

Text: Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Painting The Soul of the Rose by John William Waterhouse

Letting Go

Dear Brave Souls

To let go 

Some have a hard time 

letting go of what is no longer, 

what cannot be, what is not,

what has never been. 

People say 

'just let go, 

just let go, 

just let go' 

scattering the platitude like confetti 

immediately swept away by any wind. 

What is it exactly, this letting go? 

No longer allowing the eye

to be caught by the hook...

No longer fastening the lock on the door, 

just letting the door swing as it will...

No longer visiting the graves 

where there is no love 

and no blessing in both directions...

No longer reviewing and reviewing the past, 

even the last moment, 

as though there will be a test. 

There will not be a test, dear soul.

What is it exactly, 

this letting go?

Not reading the same chapter over and over

and over and over, futilely attempting 

to make the indelible facts be rewritten… 

Making new memories of quality

to bathe old scars and new life...

Moving into a larger world 

in which the past 

is but a dot on the landscape

rather than the only continent in sight.

We all find our ways… 

letting go is shaking loose,

letting go is turning

in your great coat, into a new wind

forward into new sky and open road

leaving what cannot be,

and taking all treasure

from the wreck. 

Each in her own way.

Each in his own way.

This comes with love. Hang in there. No one deserves to be nailing the hem of their cloak to the crossroad that once was, but that is not now.

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Painting by Helene Knoop

Touching Empty Ground

Through the lives we lived, I learned the harshest gift-lesson to accept, and the most powerful I know - that is, knowledge, an absolute certainty that life repeats itself, renews itself, no matter how many times it is stabbed, stripped to the bone, hurled to the ground, hurt, ridiculed, ignored, scorned, looked down upon, tortured, or made helpless.

I learned from my dear people as much about the grave, about facing the demons, and about rebirth as I have learned in all my psychoanalytic training and all my twenty-five years of clinical practice. I know that those who are in some ways and for some time shorn of belief in life itself - that they ultimately are the ones who will come to know best that Eden lies underneath the empty field, that the new seed goes first to the empty and open places - even when the open place is a grieving heart, a tortured mind, or a devastated spirit.

What is this faithful process of spirit and seed that touches empty ground and makes it rich again? Its greater workings I cannot claim to understand. But I know this: Whatever we set our days to might be the least of what we do, if we do not also understand that something is waiting for us to make ground for it, something that lingers near us, something that loves, something that waits for the right ground to be made so it can make its full presence known.

I am certain that as we stand in the care of this faithful force, that what has seemed dead is dead no longer, what has seemed lost is no longer lost, that which some have claimed impossible is made clearly possible, and what ground is fallow is only resting - resting and waiting for the blessed seed to arrive on the wind with all Godspeed.

Excerpt from The Faithful Gardener ( 1995, Harper Collins) by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

photo: India Flint, Botanical Alchemist

No Lack of Love

Dear Ones, 

If you have ever been called defiant, incorrigible, forward, cunning, insurgent, unruly, rebellious...take heart. There is yet time...practice. Andele! And again. 

To begin with, take on meaning wherever you can, as though it is the air you must breathe in order to not only survive, but to thrive. Find work and events that leave you feeling well used, rather than just aggravated and angry. If on the road you encounter a sign that reads "Keep Out", understand the true nature of wisdom, consider carefully and most of the time, do not "keep out". Remember, there is almost nothing that cannot be helped or improved by love, warmth, mercy and a small but wild gleam in one's eye. 

Caveats? Beware of people with smiles that light up quickly, but drop away like black eels as soon as you turn away. Beware of grinning people carrying daggers who say they are not daggers but rather gladioli that just happen to be painted to look like daggers. Avoid those who maintain minds so narrow that they can see through a keyhole with both eyes. 

To remain strong choose able fellow travelers. Bypass whiners, blamers and complainers. Whiners trail long slimy weeds behind for everyone to trip over; blamers waste everyones time by pointing to the same problems over and over, without ever truly putting their own cajones or ovarios on the line. Complainers drain and delay everyone with petty predictabilities. Their ice cream is always too cold and their soup is always too hot. 

Elude, as well, people who nip away at your time, your resources, just a little here and there. "Surely you don't mind...." they wheedle. Mind. 

Practice mercy. Don't be ashamed to be a person of faith, whichever faith that might be. If you follow Christ, act like Christ, if you follow Buddha, echo Buddha. Whether you love Theotokos, or the Goddess, or The Prophet or study the great Rebbes--all the great ones are characterized by kindness and kinship with all, rather than by bickering, keel-hauling and killing. When you hear a politician or "reformer" disparaging the poor, the uneducated, the sick, the lonely, the tormented, the helpless--change sides. 

Rekindle forgotten beatitudes: Speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. Practice Descansos y flores blancos: planting the dark ground with white flowers wherever atrocities or death have taken place. Be mindful that in la lucha, matters of deep change, God is often put on trial by detractors. Step forward as lead counsel for the defense. 

Vigor and humor are the keys to longevity, helping one to rise up again and again. Do not forget to appall your critics often: Tell them "I have worse news for you yet; there's more of my work yet to come; much, much more." In disheartening moments, remember that you can weep and be fierce at the same time. Let the tiny lights of your tears be lights on the path for others. Resist much. You will be asked to accept the conventional wisdom: "First you crawl, then you walk." Confound them all! Get up off your knees. Fly first. Soar second. 

So it may be for you, so may it be for me, so may it be for all of us. 

No lack of love,
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
On behalf of "The Grandmother of the World"

Photo: 'Masks' by Molly Kate Taylor
www.raggedwing.org