wild woman

by

Palettal Prose: Nourishing the Creative Life

Creativity is a shapechanger. One moment it takes this form, the next that. It is like a dazzling spirit who appears to us all, yet is hard to describe for no one agrees on what they saw in that brilliant flash. Are the wielding of pigments and canvas, or paint chips and wallpaper, evidence of its existence? How about pen and paper, flower borders on the green path, building a university? Yes, yes. Ironing a collar well, cooking up a revolution? Yes. Touching with love the leaves of a plant, pulling down ‘the big deal’, tying off the loom, findings one’s voice, loving someone well? Yes. Catching the hot body of the newborn, raising a child to adulthood, helping raise a nation from its knees? yes. Tending to a marriage like the orchard it is, digging for psychic gold, finding the shapely word, sewing a blue curtain? All are of the creative life. All these things are from the Wild Woman, the Rio Abajo Rio, the river beneath the river, which flows and flows into our lives.

Some say the creative life is in ideas, some say it is in doing. It seems in most instances to be in a simple being. It is virtuosity, although that is very fine in itself. It is the love of something, having so much love for something—whether a person, a word, an image, an idea, the land, or humanity—that all that can be done with the overflow is to create. It is not a matter of wanting to, not a singular act of will; one solely must.

The creative force flows over the terrain of our psyches looking for the natural hallows, the arroyos, the channels that exist in us. We become its tributaries, its basins; we are its pools, ponds, streams, and sanctuaries. The wild creative force flows into whatever beds we have, those we are born with as well as those we dig with our own hands. We don’t have to fill them, we only have to build them.

~Clarissa Pinkolo Estes, Ph.D., Women Who Run With the Wolves

by

Palettal Prose: A Prayer for Guidance Through the Darkness

     Wild Woman, push us into the cauldron, swirling us into the darkest depths of the earth. Let us emerge with mud in our hair, snails on our feet, and lichen on our arms. Let owls, ravens, and starlings fly in our wake–wolves, cats, and snakes follow our footsteps. Let our spines become as thick and strong as the redwood.

Our power is endless. Our strength is staggering. Our creativity has no boundaries. Our possibilities are limitless.

~Yancy Lael, We’Moon

stagsolstice

by

Palettal Prose: Wild Woman Stalks

Wild Woman stalks the corners

of my heart

her keen eye discerning,

nose ever sniffing

her fangs patient and poised

knowing what in the name of Life

must be consumed

She lives deeply in the pulse

of Life/Death/Life

She plants seeds, offers nurturance,

but does not spare the blade

in the Season of Reaping.

She knows the Grand Cycle

knows Her place as it shifts along the hoop

She dances The Wheel, returning Her bones to the earth below

to feed all those from whom She has nursed her own existence

the Dance of the Wild–She lives inside me

so as i wander in wonder amidst the cycle

i offer songful prayer to the bodies of the healers

i pull for my plate of harvest into tinctures

the blood that i spill to create is always my own,

from this body or that,

always mine

and forever Sacred.

Wild Woman Stalks

by

Palettal Prose: Calling Wild

     I call to the North, to the

darkness that corrupts and

buries, poisoning the daylight.

    I call to the South, to the 

fires that lick and burn, guitless

and harsh.

I call to the East, to madness

that masquerades as truth

without apology.

     I call to the West, to storms

that torment and roil, ravaging

everything in their path.

Come close, bear witness

As I dig deep in the mud and

Press it softly to my skin.

I am the darkness

I am utter failure.

I am unredeemed loss.

I am forgetting and forgotten.

I am unbearable weakness.

I am the fire.

I am dark passion.

I am biter and angry.

I am mistake made over

and over without regret.

I am unsatiated desire.

I am great hungering flesh.

I am the madness.

I am babbling and confused.

I refuse to follow.

I do not know the way

and will not ask.

I imagine things

that cannot be seen,

and believe in things

I cannot prove.

I am the storm.

I am always,

always,

ALWAYS TOO LOUD.

I am rough.

I am fierce.

I refuse to keep to small.

I am messy and wicked and

I am big, soft, round,

unrepentant flesh.

Come to me, sisters.

I am foul-tempered,

arrogant,

selfish

and rude.

Come together

there’s trouble to brew.

~Katharine Saunders, We’Moon