In this tradition a story is 'holy,' and it is used as medicine," she told Radiance magazine. "The story is not told to lift you up, to make you feel better, or to entertain you, although all those things can be true. The story is meant to take the spirit into a descent to find something that is lost or missing and to bring it back to consciousness again.

Tell the truth about your wound, and then you will get a truthful picture of the remedy to apply to it. Don't pack whatever is easiest or most available into the emptiness. Hold out for the right medicine. You will recognize it because it makes your life stronger rather than weaker.

If you've lost focus, just sit down and be still. Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away, and it will renew itself. You need do no more.

When a woman is exhorted to be compliant, cooperative, and quiet, to not make upset or go against the old guard, she is pressed into living a most unnatural life- a life that is self-blinding.. . without innovation. The world-wide issue for women is that under such conditions they are not only silenced, they are put to sleep. Their concerns, their viewpoints, their own truths are vaporized.

This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.

When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.

Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered.