This is a time of year when I start feeling really bold. I wonder if it's because the promise of the new year excites me so much? It feels like getting a new pee chee folder at school, crisp and ready to write I Heart So-and-So five million times on it, a perfectly clean slate with the potential for any number of wonderful things to happen. The earliest days of manifesting in action!
Last year I decided to carry A Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, around with me everywhere I went in order to allow her messages to infuse me. I didn't end up carrying her everywhere, but I did stuff it in many a satchel during the earlier part of the year. Without being overly intentional about it, balancing this act of mothering and turning the creative wheel did end up being the motif for my year. In other words, it all worked out as I'd originally hoped.
This year, I'm going to take the easy route and carry my all-time favorite book with me. I own two copies because I can't bear to walk to the other end of the house to find it if I want to read in bath or bed. I'm sure it comes to no surprise that my favorite book in the ENTIRE WORLD ever written is Women Who Run With the Wolves. When I open the stinky pages of this aged thing, the hairs stand up all over me and I know I am finding the words that are blueprinted on every inch of my own soul.
This is the work of my very favorite photographer, Sarah Maingot. Can I bottle this?
It doesn't matter how many times I read it, I still find myself jumping up and down in confirmation that I am a criatura, that the aspects of woman that have been coerced and driven out over the centuries are not whispering under my skin, but screaming to pick up the *stories, the bundles for healing, the dreams, songs, signs and symbols* and feel, as CPE refers to it as "the sureness of their soulfooting". My hope this year is to reconnect with the archetype that speaks to me the most.
Maybe I'm hopping up and down howling all the time because this trail of crumbs is not new or unknown to me. Rather because it feels so warmly...familiar. By some strange twist of lightening striking in the moment of my birth, I have always known that I would be on this path. It's almost as if the tiny little genetic code of wild trickled down quietly through the women before me, but lined up in a quick blast for me, so that there would be no question about why my fur twitches when the wind blows in two directions at once and why I'm passionately drawn to other bitches with sixth senses who prefer to preserve their instinctual nature over...
Photo by Sarah Maingot.
...let's just say that I can smell you on the wind, sister.
