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.

When a woman is frozen of feeling, when she can no longer feel herself, when her blood, her passion, no longer reach the extremities of her psyche, when she is desperate; then a fantasy life is far more pleasurable than anything else she can set her sights upon. Her little match lights, because they have no wood to burn, instead burn up the psyche as though it were a big dry log. The psyche begins to play tricks on itself; it lives now in the fantasy fire of all yearning fulfilled. This kind of fantasizing is like a lie: If you tell it often enough, you begin to believe it.

It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What's needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take 'everyone on Earth' to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

Be wild; that is how to clear the river.

So, let us push on now, and remember ourselves back to the wild soul. Let us sing her flesh back onto our bones.

Wolves never look more funny than when they have lost the scent and scrabble to find it again: they hop in the air; they run in circles, they plow up the ground with their noses . . . .

All strong souls first go to hell before they do the healing of the world they came here for. If we are lucky, we return to help those still trapped below.