Columns
Monday, 1 September 2003
Maidens
I’m in my second year of watching what happens to a society’s young maidens who don’t have elders to pass on the teaching stories. They become hard, mean and pointy. Their eyes glaze over. They destroy their families with their violence and themselves through self-mutilation.
If an impressionable young woman has a guide to help sift through these horrors, that’s one thing. But often times, our daughters are left to fend for themselves.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. and author of Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, calls the story, The Handless Maiden, a blueprint of a women’s soul life. It is a story of initiation into the dark underground forest of the psyche. It is about the rite of endurance that women once learned from their elders. The modern day maidens who I teach about this endurance are the young women in Juvenile Hall.
Now, a woman’s life is about rites of passage. We don’t expect that a woman with a strong, toothy spirit would come through life without some hardship. Thriving after trauma is what makes a sturdy, intuitive soul. But this soul making needs guidance.
Estes points out that the pads of a wolf pups’ paws are soft as clay when the pup is born. It is only through following their parents’ treks that toughen their paws up. Only then, can these pups climb over rocks, even broken glass, and go on to live full, wolfish and wild lives.
I teach the teens what I know: journaling, feeling, songwriting. Basically I howl my wolf song at them and I help them discover theirs. I tell them that there is a path they can follow that will turn into a life. Mostly I sit and listen.
Of course, the girls in the hall are only some of the daughters I teach.
Last year, I borrowed my friend’s daughter to take her on a first blood celebration. I took her to the beach on a new moon (bring a flashlight) and mumbled something about the Goddess. I made her a card that had two photographs of us together: one when she was three and the other more recent. We ate fish and chips. It was cheesy. I had no idea what I was doing, but I do know this: Thanks to my wolf spirit, she will never forget her first blood celebration.
If you need a daughter to mentor, please contact Kathleen Richen, Director of Friends Outside, founder of the Friends of JSC program and Wolf Woman extraordinaire at 543-3888.
The girls in Juvenile Hall have been initiated into their underground forest. They need us to tell them, “Ah, welcome to the underworld. Yes. It is very dark, frightening and smelly in here. Yes. You lost your innocence. Yes, you made a poor bargain, but you are still here. You are still breathing. You are crying. Good. Now, we can begin.”
May all of us and all of our daughters, always be juicy.