I come from a long line of tellers: mesemondok, old Hungarian women who tell while sitting on wooden chairs with their plastic pocketbooks on their laps, their knees apart, their skirts touching the ground... and cuentistas, old Latina women who stand, robust of breast, hips wide, and cry out the story ranchera style. Both clans storytell in the plain voice of women who have lived blood and babies, bread and bones. For them, story is a medicine which strengthens and arights the individual and the community.
Clarissa Pinkola EstesI have to go to the woods, and I have to meet the wolf, or else my life will never begin.
Clarissa Pinkola EstesSince time out of mind, a considered act of heroism has been the cure for stultifying ambivalence.
Clarissa Pinkola EstesMy brain has no heart, and my heart has no brain. That's why when I speak my mind, I appear heartless and when I do what's in my heart I seem thoughtless.
Clarissa Pinkola EstesWhen women hear those words, an old, old memory is stirred and brought back to life. The memory is of our absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild feminine, a relationship which may have become ghostly from neglect, buried by over-domestication, outlawed by the surrounding culture, or no longer understood anymore. We may have forgotten her names, we may not answer when she calls ours, but in our bones we know her, we yearn toward her, we know she belongs to us and we to her.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes