Feral

This week, I got into an uncharacteristically heated exchange with another woman. I was eating my lunch and soaking up the welcome winter sun with my backpack, books, journal, and coat spread across a park bench. She approached with her dog, cast a friendly and assertive “hello” in my direction, and plopped down on the other end of the bench, on the corner of my coat. With polite irritation, I moved my things over to make room for her. Then I sat feeling my belly twisting, the anger building with each little vibration her movements sent through the bench and up my spine. It all reached a climax inside of me. I could sit there and feel annoyed. I could move and feel displaced. Or I could face the fear of speaking my boundaries. I took a deep breath, put my arm around my inner little one, and chose the latter.

“I’m not interested in sharing my bench,” I said to her flatly. Without missing a beat, she shot back at me, “It’s not your bench.”

“But I was here first,” I replied, wincing at how childish that sounded. “And it would have been nice if you had asked if you could join me.”

“I have been coming here for years,” she responded with emphasis, “and we always share these benches with each other. This is a public place.” I had never seen her there before and no one else had ever sat on a bench with me without saying anything first.

“A public place,” I echoed, “where we have to follow your rules.”

“Or we have to go by yours,” she shot back.

“I have a large sphere of personal space,” I protested, “and you are showing me that I don’t have the right to decide what happens with my boundaries, with my body.”

“It sounds like this is about way more than what’s happening right now,” she sneered.

“Yes, it is,” I retorted, “and thank you for being one more person showing me it isn’t safe for me to speak up for myself.”

“You are speaking up for yourself,” she replied, with no hint of sarcasm, “Good for you!” I paused, letting her words sink in. As terrifying and exhilarating as it was for me to be meeting her challenge, as much as I both respected and felt enraged by her defense, something in me shifted.

“You’re right,” I said, with equal force, but more self-reflectively. “I am speaking my truth. But that doesn’t mean I will get what I want.”

“That’s right,” she replied.

“And now I get to decide what to do,” I continued, mostly to myself. I packed up my things, rose, and walked back to work, deeply unsettled. As the fire faded, a sense of shame, embarrassment, and hot grief rose. I went to the bathroom, hunkered down in the corner with my knees to my chest, and sobbed like a battered child. There were few words and no thoughts, no images – just hot, pure, wet emotion. All I could manage for myself was a simple phrase – “Feel what you are feeling now. We can make sense of this later.” After a while, I rose, lighter and more present, but still shaken. I regarded myself in the mirror. “That was really scary and really hard,” I said into my red eyes. “Be gentle with yourself the rest of today. That didn’t turn out how you expected, but you did the right thing. You did the right thing.”

I realize now that in many ways I didn’t do the “right” thing. There are many other things I could have done, all with different motivations and possible outcomes. But in that moment, I couldn’t bear to keep the peace by once again giving up my place or seething silently because of what I believed was another’s indiscretion, regardless of the objective truth of the matter. My instinct, my body, my impulse trumped propriety, politeness, compassion. I needed to face her retaliation, I needed to lock horns with her, I needed to see where the limits really were instead of being ruled by my own conditioned acquiescence. It wasn’t that I needed to be right. I needed to let my vitality live through me, no matter the cost.

Coming back out into the world after months of solitude, grief, and inner reflection has not been what I imagined it would be. There has been some blossoming of connection, synergy, and opportunity, but it has mostly been fraught with conflict. In my attempt to be authentic and integral, I find myself wounding or rejecting others, others misunderstanding or antagonizing me, or circumstances simply not complying with my preferences. This has created a new type of distressing isolation – one borne not of my voluntary withdrawal from the world but from what appears to be the world’s disapproval of my new form. It is as though I have been reborn into a body that’s a pile of damp and shaky knees and elbows, and I haven’t sorted out how to move in it without causing damage to myself or others. Perhaps I am simply coming to terms with the fact that living with more conviction will sometimes require me to fight over a bench and lose – my preferred spot, a potential friend, my sense of justice, or all of the above.

I recently started a course in Celtic Shamanism. A powerful underworld journey during the introductory class led to an encounter with the dragon that has been circling my dreamworld for the past few years and left me hopeful about building a deeper connection with my inner guides. Last night, the facilitator guided us back to our childhood homes to receive a gift from our 7-year-old selves. My little one gave me a cat she had made out of clay, all misshapen from her pudgy fingers, awkwardly glazed, and fired hard as stone. I promptly took it out into the stone circle in our front yard and smashed it to pieces as she watched, screaming and crying, through the window. Then I ripped the crepe myrtle tree I had always loved to shreds with my claws, and set the house on fire with her inside it. As everyone else in the class shared how they had tenderly cradled the gifts they received, all I said was that what I did with mine was deeply disturbing. After class, I approached the facilitator and told her I was concerned about a dark and destructive energy in me. She congratulated me on not being silenced by shame.

“If I recall correctly,” she replied, “you’re running dragon energy.” I nodded. “You have a lot of power,” she continued. “This may be from past trauma – this life or another – when you were persecuted or tortured for sharing your gifts. If you don’t face this, it will hold you back from whatever you try to do.” I know this is true. Some destructive force has tempted me for years with the safety and comfort of community, addiction, and romance. When I broke free to reclaim my life time and time again, it has hounded me with fear, overwhelm, confusion, criticism. Everything I do is either too big or too small, too safe or too risky, too brash or too timid. I sobbed on the drive home: “I give up. I fucking give up on trying to be better or do better, or do anything at all.” The facilitator was right. This dragon has its claws in me and there is no escape. And she’s also right that it has something I need, that being consumed by an archetypal predator, if we can surrender ourselves, offers a profound transformation. I just don’t understand what that means or what is being asked of me.

Today I began re-reading Clarissa Pinkola Este’s classic book Women Who Run With The Wolves, and happened upon the myth of the Little Red Shoes. In it, a poor, barefoot child crafts red shoes for herself out of bits and scraps she gathers, and is then enticed into a gilded carriage by an old woman who offers her comforts in exchange for being good and burns her red shoes as trash. The girl then becomes obsessed, despite disapproval by everyone, with a pair of new shiny red shoes that become enchanted and dance her into a feverish state beyond her will. She is only able to escape by cutting off her own feet.

This is the tale of the feral woman, the one who betrays her creative life for one of domesticated ease, and must free her vital, wild self though great sacrifice. Along the way, she discovers that the price she pays for the protection promised by accepting someone else’s judgement, dictates, rules – no matter how well-intended – is the dilution or complete stifling of her self-expression and life-force. She finds herself so hungry for freedom and joy that she disregards her natural instincts and wisdom in desperate, reckless pursuit of anything that resembles the self she lost. She becomes like the wolves who – after starving in the deep winter snows – go on a spring killing spree of far more life than they can consume. Sometimes the casualties are strangers in the park. Sometimes they are true friends we push away. And sometimes they are precious gifts from our sacred inner selves.

Once we realize we are trapped, the way out isn’t always clear and is never easy. Sometimes we have to reinstate our instinct to run. Sometimes we are too deadened to escape, we lack the resources to do so, or we realize the urge to run is just another way the red shoes dance us to death with the promise of redemption that never comes. It seems to me that the way to regain our feral creativity is to rediscover the way we lived before we were tamed: to piece together our own red shoes from the scraps we gather throughout our days. Instead of sneaking pleasures that gorge and numb us, we sneak moments that feed our creative life, and then we share them. We love what we love in small ways so that we lose the fear that it is dangerous to do so. As we gradually become more conscious and powerful over time, the very force that once precipitated our destruction becomes the fierceness that defends our creative life against all threats from temptation, assault, and insignificance.

I resist the urge to burn down my life because I know that in the ashes I will find not creative liberation, but paralyzing fear. I choose the more arduous path because it is the truer integration of instinct and wisdom. I cook a healthy lunch and go for a hike. I stare into a sketch of my dragon’s face and meditate on the sensation of being crushed by its presence. I do my laundry and pay my bills. I face Clarissa’s words which inspire both grief and hope. I wash my hair and go to bed on-time. I cry with that inner little one and tell her she has every right not to trust me – that it’s my responsibility to do whatever it takes to win back her generosity, joy, and innocence. And I write. Always, I write these words that are beautiful and true in my eyes, because I need to hear my own song even as I stumble. I need to piece together my own red shoes. The dragon is lurking out there in the wild and I have no idea what will happen next time we meet. But I’m losing the fear of becoming food, because then you might just hear my voice on its fiery breath.

Nancy

“There is a wild voice inside all of us, one that whispers, ‘Stay here long enough… Stay here long enough to revive your hope, to drop your terminal cool, to give up defensive half-truths, to creep, carve, bash your way through. Stay here long enough to see what is right for you, to become strong, to try the try that will make it. Stay here long enough to make the finish line – it matters not how long it takes or in what style.” – Clarissa Pinkola Estes