lovaliss's Diaryland Diary

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Women Who Run With Wolves

When I read all of you ladies' entries in here, my heart feels like it's exploding with love. I just got insecure about the grammar of this post and questioned my placement of the marks but then thought, it's okay, ignore your inhibitions, they're all made up self lies and past issues come back to haunt you anyway, "all you need is love...love love love." But actually, after I just wrote that, I felt sick to my stomach. I asked myself why. And my Self answered because the Beatles make me feel sick to my stomach. I asked "Why do they make you feel sick to your stomach?" The answer was: because your sister got their greatest collections CD the year after our brother died, and you hate everything you ever hear now by the Beatles, Boyz II Men, Alanis Morsiette, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Pearl Jam--all things associated with his death. Even though at the same time of my hating I also feel a longing--I hate them, they make me feel sick, but I cannot escape a part of them, I always try to listen to them and hope to feel nostalgia instead of hate; I think occasionally it happens and sometimes it does not.

That is precisely it. That feeling in between hating and longing. I feel I'm perpetually stuck. That sounds young and naive and stupid, but I am absolutely serious and want to say that I stand up for myself and anything I ever feel as valid, because I don't stand up for it in real life.

But I am not lying, nor am I lying because I went on a tangent. I love everything and everyone I connect to in here. It feels like our own secret blanket fort. Long forgotten by other travelers. But a protected place to unfold my most ugly and in my mind "stupid" thoughts, even though as I think that I am correcting myself telling myself nothing I think is "stupid." If that is true, then I wrote this after starting the book my best friend here gave me called "Women Who Run With the Wolves." I feel silly typing it. Then I question myself why,a and the answering is because I've been trained to think that anything focused on women's experience or words is trivial and fretful and not to be taken seriously. Well fuck that. I'm taking it seriously. As I started "Women Who Run With Wolves," this popped out, so here it is, though this was only the rough draft:

The Archetype of the Wild Women and My Generations of Mothers

I'm not sure where we lost Her. Perhaps it's been an ebb and flow of loss, missing Her face, missing our wholeness, missing our self. She was lost when Mary lost her to heart failure. Nine years old, heart broken, alone, unsure, empty. She covered for that loss with sternness and games of not needing that she passed onto us, but I saw her cry out the night my grandfather died, the Wild Woman howled, screamed from Mary, and I held her in my arms as she wept. She had been missing Her face, she allowed my grandpa to give that sense of self and security, so when he was gone the missing returned, only this time with a vengeance and depth that stabbed right through her draining her into the earth, rooting her to that very spot.
She came peeking out in my mother, behind a shy, kind, and subtly mischievous grin. She showed Her face in her love for animals, in her sorrow for seeing anyone or anything in pain. She laughs wildly from the gut with Her head thrown back through my mother's grin as she gallops on her horse across the foothills.
She emerged out of me in full force, sassy, unapologetic, with a little edge of bite for all the years She had been muzzled. I sauntered from the beginning, jumping and twirling, shaking and wriggling, leaping away on my tip toes refusing to be ashamed, but I'd soon learn to be ashamed when I was called a �bad� girl. She played jokes through me, teased authority through me, spoke the truth through me, even when everyone told me it was rude and better to lie and be �nice.�
But I lost Her face, born into a tradition that had long decided She would be hidden, giving lip service to Her mystery while silencing Her voice. Her face was taken from me. Her myth was dangled in front of me only to be just out of reach of feeling even a brush of Her on my fingertips. We look for Her in our pioneer heritage because we have been afraid to look for Her right here and right now lest we be ex-communicated for voicing we believe we should be allowed to pray in Her name. So we cling to the stories of my Grandmothers in order to not lose Her forever. I've mourned the loss of Her but didn't know it was Her I was feeling as Loss. In not knowing Her face I have learned the oppressors ways and lashed out at Her absence by lashing out at my own mother when she left me out of grief when our brother died. Taught to be afraid, suspicious, competitive, and spiteful of Her by being these things to my female peers in the game of being �worthy enough� for a �worthy husband� which was to say I was being taught the painful lie that I wasn't worth being loved just on my own as is.
In not knowing Her, She has been subject to every disrespect and hate that �Father� ever has been and ever will be. He did not nor is he still protecting her from anything�the �protection� was and is domination in disguise. He put a muzzle on Her, locked Her in a closet, and called it love, holding the key to the closet and saying when it was time God the Man would reveal it to the human Man and they would let us know. It's emotional abuse, not love. In not knowing Her we have been lost and wandering aimlessly behind men, asking permission to commune with God, asking permission to call upon the holy, asking permission to be acknowledged as valuable, but never daring to ask for permission to speak and thus only speak what is pre-approved for a woman to speak and say with nicey nice syrupy dripping voices and blank dead expressions with ghoulish smiles and hollow eyes. She is absent and we know it, but we've been encouraged to think the Synthetic Feminine dripping with sugar coated honey is Her. It's too sweet. Artificial sweetener created by lost men narrating what a submissive woman looks like and I need a drink of Her water for my sticky, thirsty mouth just thinking about it. She is silent in her absence, and so we have been banished to silence as well, told it is the natural way, God's way. But �God's way� has long been a cover for His way, the White Mormon Male Ego way, just read the history of slavery and the �Curse of Ham/Cain� and Native American Genocide called instead �Manifest Destiny� or Deseret or Zion, or the ever increasing �lightening skin of the Lamanites� as they return to �righteousness� and the (should have been unnecessary) struggle for �women's rights� which were spun to be a cunning plan from Satan tempting selfish women to follow their selfish temptations to live for themselves and not His love and approval.
The arrogance is soul-crushing and suffocating and I refuse to sit in a pew with the false God, that is Male Ego disguised as righteousness, lording over me on the stand. I refuse to let Her be crushed and emotionally molested any longer. This is why I left. You can believe me or not, it is not up to me to convince you. She and I couldn't take it anymore or we were going to spiritually die if we stayed, the River Beneath the River came to me in a dream and showed me this, so we chose to live, we chose love and laughter instead of bowed heads and obedience, even though She told me it would also mean inexplicable grief. But I agreed to the terms in the dream. And then it happened in real life, beyond my wildest imagination, beyond what I could have ever guessed my future and life would have been, I did what the dream showed me I would do, but I did not interpret it until after it happened. Before it had it remained coded, a mystery, cemented in my mind because I knew it meant something but I did not know what. I have no doubts. I never wonder anymore if I did the right thing. It is not even a question. I followed Her, the Light from the Abyss, I realize now I always have, it's why I had the courage to talk back. Girls who sass back to boys and adults grow up to be brave. It has always been Her voice.
I am taking off my shoes, leaving them in front of my chair, and slipping out the Sunday School classroom window. I am honoring my mothers and grandmothers by honoring Her, even if they can't see this past their years of learned fear. I am being true to my faith, Her faith, because it manifests itself to be true. I can feel the dew of the grass wetting my toes through my tights, this is Her. I am running, running, running, and laughing the whole time, I feel Her like a secret in me, she is in blanket forts, in tree forts, in every special tiny place that is only mine to know about. We are giggling and chuckling alone. We are dancing and sprinting. We are riding Sugar Bar Siz over the foothills. We are feeling the wind on our face and the tiny droplets of moisture squeezing out the corners of our eyes. We are warming our hands in Sugar Bar Siz's chest, our face pressed into him, the smell of his warm coat mingled with sweat in our nose. I have found Her at last, though I realize I knew Her all along. But they told me that secret feeling was called �Heavenly Father,� they dubbed his voice over Hers but sometimes �his words� (man's words disguised) were saying something different than Her mouth and I could tell, I could feel the discrepancy. The dubbing was too fast, slightly off key, in a different cantor than the rest, and Her lips were mouthing the truth but I could not catch it in time to know what She was really saying. Heavenly Mother. Wild Woman. The River Beneath the River. The Great Woman. The Light from the Abyss. The Wolf Woman. The Bone Woman. All archetypes, because She is like gravity, a principle of science, I only describe her archetypes, not to be confused with a literal anthropomorphic Her. She is as real as gravity and time, shifting and changing with location and conditions, and She is not human, not contained, only the feminine essence best represented as a principle of balance in the universe. I am not lost, I am home, no longer motherless. She is alive in my eyes and I know you can see it though for some the muzzle is like a radioactive cell phone that interferes with your Feminine. You feel afraid because you have been taught to fear Her and hide Her as a result She has been hidden away, her soul misunderstood as �selfish.� She is not selfish.

Recently I have been reading this book my best friend gave to me here. She is one of those women that makes people stop and listen to her, because of her way of being, because of the radiance in her eyes, because of the way she treats people, because of her bravery, because of the way she talks back when it's necessary, because of the way she does not talk back when it's necessary. It is a pleasure, which is a stupid word in my opinion and if I knew a better one I would use it, to know her, to love her, to feel her love for me.

4:55 a.m. - 2012-06-12

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