Women Who Run With the Wolves

I found this book in a used bookstore in Catalina and was immediatly drawn to the title. This is a portion from Women Who Run With the Wolves:
There is a time in our lives, usually in midlife, when a woman has to make a decision-possibly the most important psychic decision of her future life-about whether to be bitter or not. Women often come to this in their late thirties or early forties. They are at the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they’ve “had it” and “the last straw has broken the camel’s back” and they’re “pissed off and pooped out .” Their dreams of their twenties may be lying in a crumple. There may be broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises.
A body who has lived a long time accumulates debris. It cannot be avoided. But if a woman will return to the instinctual nature instead of sinking into bitterness, she will be revivified, reborn,. The woman who returns to Wild Woman, too, will come back to life. She will want to play. She will still want to grow. But first, there has to a cleansing.
Women have died a thousand deaths before they are twenty years old. They’ve gone in this direction or that, and have been cut off. They have hopes and dreams that have been cut off also. Anyone who says otherwise is still asleep. All that is grist for the mill of descansos.
While all these things deepen individuation, differentiation, growing up and growing out, blossoming, becoming awake and aware and conscious, they are also profound tragedies and have to be grieved as such.
To make descansos means taking a look at your life and marking where the small deaths, las muertes chicitas, and the big deaths, las muertes grandotas, have taken place. I like to make a time-line of a woman’s life on a big long sheet of white butcher paper, and to mark with a cross the places along the graph, starting with her infancy all the way to the present where parts and pieces of her self and her life have died.
We mark where there were roads not taken, paths that were cut off, ambushes, betrayals and deaths. I put a little cross along the tim-line at the places that should have been mourned, or still need to be mourned. And then I write in the background “forgotten” for those things that the woman senses but have not yet surfaced. I also write “forgiven” over those things the woman has for the most part released.
I encourage you to make descansos, to sit down with a time-line of your life and say”where are the crosses? Where are the places that must be remembered, must be blessed?” In all are meanings that you’ve brought forward into your life today. They must be remembered, but they must be forgotten at the same time. It takes time. And patience.
Be gentle with yourself and make the descansos, the resting places for the aspects of yourself that were on their way to somewhere, but never arrived. Descansos mark the death sites, the dark times, but they are also love notes to your suffering. They are transformative. There is a lot to be said for pinning things to the earth so they don’t follow us around. There is a lot to be said for laying them to rest.