jankp's Full Review: Clarissa Pinkola Estes - Women Who Run With the Wo...
Wolves know how to live comfortably with the seasons and cycles of life. They take the ups and downs and valleys in stride and endure to become stronger and wiser in their relationships. Mating for life, they certainly can teach us something. This is an awesome book, although intimidating at over 500 pages. It's the kind of book you should study in installments and either take notes on or buy for your library. The author is a Carl Jung expert and describes the vital role of myth in our psychological development. She uses story after mythical story to analyze point by point what it all means for us.
One major story is the one about Bluebeard. He courted three sisters, but the older ones rejected him because of his beard. The youngest one married him, ignoring his blue beard, and one day he told her he was going away for a while and here are the keys to all the rooms in the house, but one which she was forbidden to enter. Her sisters asked her if they could try to find which was the forbidden door as a game and she agreed. When at last they found it, she decided to open the door. It was filled with rotting, headless corpses and skulls! She ran out, closing it, and tried to clean the key, but it kept bleeding. Nothing she did would stop the flow and so she hid it in her clothes closet. Bluebeard came back and immediately saw the missing key. He knows she didn't 'lose it,' and opens her closet where all her dresses are soaked with blood. He condemns her to death, but she pleads for time to get right with God. He allows this and she is rescued by her brothers who kill Bluebeard. The brothers symbolize her growing consciousness that is able to kill what threatens her life, namely her naivete and lack of awareness of herself. She found the corruption in her soul or psyche she had buried or locked away and it kept bleeding, paining her, until she acknowledged it.
There's also a section on how our sexuality is meant to be earthy and lusty so we can laugh at jokes about it. I'd love to tell you the short story about General Eisenhower visiting his troops in Rwanda and how the native women greeted him, but I'll let you imagine it and get the book to read for yourself. To sum this lengthy book up, Estes maintains that we can go home again...home to our soul, that is. We've buried it, denied it in order to be more accepted by the society of men who are themselves of the wild nature we women have within us. They have been our Bluebeards. Estes says the soul will know when it's time to heal our wounds. Maybe it's your time. Now.
Mythology * Fiction - The wild woman. She is the internal, eternal essence of the feminine: instinctive, intuitive, primitive, powerful. In this remar...More at Barnes and Noble
Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. Her...More at Alibris
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