Running With Wolves
Jul. 22nd, 2006 06:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qosI never thought much about wolves growing up, except when I read The Jungle Book and memorized the law of the pack. When I got older, I found out that my sister had an affinity with wolves the way I later came to have one with bears. Later still, as I was looking at fairy tales through the lenses of feminism and women's spirituality, I gained an appreciation for Wolf as a symbol of the wild and dangerous, especially in the area of the sexual.
Funny thing about wolves: we use them as symbols, as literary shorthad for the untamed, the dangerous, the wicked -- but wolves are among the most social and orderly of animals: cooperative, nurturing of the young, disciplined. But we use them to represent the untamed and anti-social. We call criminals "wolves" among us.
When I started writing my novel, the elite of the mercenary troop who invaded my heroine's home were known collectively as The Wolves. To me it symbolized strength, skill, and cunning beyond that of the average man, and pack loyalty.
But wolves meant nothing to me personally until I was a few months into being a mother, and desperate to try to reconcile myself to my new reality. I picked up Clarissa Pinkoles Estes' Women Who Run With the Wolves, and it was a sanity-saver. (She should get the credit for my filtered post of a day or so ago about "feral" -- since that's where I learned the definition of feral as "once tame, now wild.") It was a huge psychological turning point for me when I had the image "Mommies who run with the wolves": which was myself as a Native American woman, carrying my daughter on my back, running with wolves through the forest. My daughter, not at all concerned about this unorthodox behavior, was wearing a "lost boys" style bear-ears cap, waving a bone rattle, and laughing. That was when I realized I could be a Good Mother in my own way, not have to limit myself to the way that my mother was a Good Mother.
So to me, wolves have always symbolized what is both admirable and alien to myself. Whether the wild pack in the forest, or the dangerous men of the warrior-breed, I found myself using "Wolf" to symbolize what I both desired and feared to become (or embrace).
Then, during my most recent spiritual direction session, my director and I were discussing my iminent return to seminary. I said that not only did I yearn for the community, and for others of 'my own kind' who delighted in the combination of intellectualism and spirituality, I also felt that I brought a unique gift to that community: a vision of what lies beyond its borders. Because I, Journeyer-like, speak the language of the academy and of orthodoxy, I can communicate alien theology and beliefs in ways that are more easily understood, which stress the places of commonality first, giving my sisters and brothers an experience of recognition, before stretching their paradigms and asking them to absorb (although not necessarily agree with) the radical.
His response, in part was, "You are the wild woman. You are the woman who runs with the wolves."
*blink, blink*
I, a Wolf to others?
What a fascinating thought. . . .
Funny thing about wolves: we use them as symbols, as literary shorthad for the untamed, the dangerous, the wicked -- but wolves are among the most social and orderly of animals: cooperative, nurturing of the young, disciplined. But we use them to represent the untamed and anti-social. We call criminals "wolves" among us.
When I started writing my novel, the elite of the mercenary troop who invaded my heroine's home were known collectively as The Wolves. To me it symbolized strength, skill, and cunning beyond that of the average man, and pack loyalty.
But wolves meant nothing to me personally until I was a few months into being a mother, and desperate to try to reconcile myself to my new reality. I picked up Clarissa Pinkoles Estes' Women Who Run With the Wolves, and it was a sanity-saver. (She should get the credit for my filtered post of a day or so ago about "feral" -- since that's where I learned the definition of feral as "once tame, now wild.") It was a huge psychological turning point for me when I had the image "Mommies who run with the wolves": which was myself as a Native American woman, carrying my daughter on my back, running with wolves through the forest. My daughter, not at all concerned about this unorthodox behavior, was wearing a "lost boys" style bear-ears cap, waving a bone rattle, and laughing. That was when I realized I could be a Good Mother in my own way, not have to limit myself to the way that my mother was a Good Mother.
So to me, wolves have always symbolized what is both admirable and alien to myself. Whether the wild pack in the forest, or the dangerous men of the warrior-breed, I found myself using "Wolf" to symbolize what I both desired and feared to become (or embrace).
Then, during my most recent spiritual direction session, my director and I were discussing my iminent return to seminary. I said that not only did I yearn for the community, and for others of 'my own kind' who delighted in the combination of intellectualism and spirituality, I also felt that I brought a unique gift to that community: a vision of what lies beyond its borders. Because I, Journeyer-like, speak the language of the academy and of orthodoxy, I can communicate alien theology and beliefs in ways that are more easily understood, which stress the places of commonality first, giving my sisters and brothers an experience of recognition, before stretching their paradigms and asking them to absorb (although not necessarily agree with) the radical.
His response, in part was, "You are the wild woman. You are the woman who runs with the wolves."
*blink, blink*
I, a Wolf to others?
What a fascinating thought. . . .
