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"Although I did not call her by that name then, my love for wild woman began when I was a little child. I was an aesthete rather than an athlete, and my only wish was to be an ecstatic wanderer. Rather than chairs and tables, I preferred the ground, trees and caves, for in those places I felt I could lean against the cheek of God.

The river always called to be visited after dark, the fields needed to be walked in so they could make their rustle talk. Fires needed to be built in the forest at night, and stories needed to be told outside the hearing of grown ups.

I was lucky to be brought up in nature. There, lightning strikes taught me about sudden death and the evanescence of life. Mice litters showed that death was softened by new life. When I unearthed "Indian beads", fossils from the loam, I understood that humans have been here for a long, long time. I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald green frogs as bracelets.

A wolf mother killed one of her mortally injured pups; this taught a hard compassion and the necessity of allowing death to come to the dying. The fuzzy caterpillars which fell from the brances and crawled back up again taught single-mindedness. Climbing to the tops of trees taught what sex would someday feel like.

My own post-World War II generation grew up in a time when women were infantilized and treated as property. They were kept as fallow gardens.... but thankfully there was always wild seed which arrived on the wind. Though what they wrote was unauthorized, women blazed away anyway. Though what they painted went unrecognized, it fed the soul anyway. Women had to beg for the instruments and the spaces needed for their arts, and if none were forthcoming, they made speace in trees, caves woods, and closets.

Dancing was barely tolerated, if at all, so they danced in the forest where no one could see them, or in the basement, or on the way out to empty the trash. Self-decoration caused suspicion. Joyful body or dress increased the danger of being harmed or sexually assaulted. The very clothes on one's shoulders could not be called one's own.

It was a time when parents who abused their children were simply called "strict", when the spiritual lacerations of profoundly exploited women were referred to as "nervous breakdowns", when girls who were tightly girdled, tightly reined, and tightly muzzled were called "nice" and those other females who managed to slip the collar for a minute or two were branded "bad".

So like many women before and after me, I lived my life was a disguised criatura, creature. Like my kith and kin before me, I swagger-staggered in high heels, and I wore a dress and hat to church. But my fabulous tail often fell below my hemline, and my ears twitched until my hat pitched,at the very least, down over both my eyes, and sometimes clear across the room.

I've not forgotten the song of those dark years, hambre del alma, the song of the starved soul. But neither have I forgotten the joyous canto hondo, the deep song, the words of which come back to us when we do the work of soulful reclamation."

- Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves