What It Means to Be Feral

At the last Grove of Artemis circle I was asked to give a talk titled, "What It Means To Be Feral, What It Means To Be Fierce." That was the extent of my instructions. Now, one of the things that people who know me in the mundane world sometimes find surprising is that I love public speaking. Honestly and truly, I really do. People are surprised because I'm so soft-spoken at times that they assume I don't have an "outside" voice. Back in high school I was in a mime troupe and an acting club. Both were church related, and I always had to play Jesus because I was taller than everyone else and had curly dark hair at the time. Isn't that funny? Can you picture it now? Ha! Anyway, I was so thrilled to have the opportunity to talk about a subject so near and dear to my heart and undoubtedly close to the hearts of the other women in the room.

So, when I saw what the assignment was, immediately my thought was, "Oh, I need to take another look at Women Who Run with the Wolves to brush up on some of the concepts in there." If you have not read that book, let me say it's amazing and life transforming... if you can stick with it. It reads like a term paper at times, and many people I know never made it all the way through. That said, it's worth reading all the way through. It changed my life. Back when I was teaching, I used to tell the kids stories during our long bus rides for field trips. They were insatiable for stories. Since I was reading that book at the time, which is full of fables regarding wild women, I retold the stories for the kids. They loved hearing them and sometimes could tell me, to my surprise and delight, other versions of the same story they had heard (expecially "La Llorona"). The point of the book, though, is to help women get in touch with their wild natures by examining the Wild Woman archetype.

Here is the talk I gave. It was actually ad-libbed, but I tried really hard to get these points across:

“What it Means to be Feral, What it Means to be Fierce”

Grove of Artemis - July 18, 2008

(adapted from Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD)

· We are all female animals and, as such, we all have an innate, irrevocable, undeniable instinctual nature. All of our mothers before us, from the one-celled all the way through to the one who gave birth to us, have imparted an enormous abundance of wisdom to us both in our DNA hard wiring and through the lessons they have taught us experientially.

· We always have access to this reservoir of wisdom through our instincts. No matter how shadowy our connection with our indigenous self is due to neglect, over-domestication or societal oppression, we always have our wild woman inside. She is part of all women of all cultures, without exception.

· Disconnect from feral mind leads to imbalance both physically, mentally and spiritually. This is the woman who does not recognize her own bodily cycles. She does what she thinks she should do rather than what her heart tells her. She takes too little to meet her needs or even nothing at all. She doubts or disbelieves in her own magic. She stays when she should go and doesn’t let go of what needs to die. She fears her wild nature because society has told her it is dangerous and ravenous. She thinks if she embraces it, she’ll go mad and her life will be turned upside down, and she doesn’t believe she has the courage for that.

· Connection with the wild self is surprising safe, sane and not necessarily about turning everything all around and topsy-turvy. The connected woman is like any other healthy female animal. She is in tune with the pulse of Nature, the ebb and flow of her own being. She is intensely devoted to those she loves – her children, her family and her clan, and this dedication drives her to passionately care for and protect them. She finds occupation in the world creating, inventing and adapting to create a life in which she can thrive. She knows to let go when it is time and respects the cycles of life and death. When she has need of inspiration, she knows she can look inside for stories, songs, words, symbols and dreams to guide her, because inside are all her mothers since the beginning of time, as well as the Great Mother of us all. She does not tolerate abuse towards herself or anyone she loves. She runs after injustice and rights the wrongs she sees. She embodies the alpha matrilineal line and rejoices in the company of other strong, fierce, feral women.

· If a woman’s life is like a train moving along a track, the disconnected woman is sitting somewhere in the back, thinking wishful thoughts or sleeping. This shadowy soul sits back and waits for life to happen to her, and this is truly what is dangerous. The feral woman sits up in the engineer’s seat, facing the world with enthusiasm and curiosity, using her magic to lay the track before her train so that it goes where she wants it to go. She is safer, because she is alert and uses her instincts to pay attention to the world around her. She is happier, because she is healthier all around.

· The destruction of pristine wilderness and the subversion of the feral female psyche go hand in hand. The same societies that would “clean up” the wolves, the bears and the coyotes are the ones who want to sanitize the minds of women. We all know however, that the wild woman inside of us is our true guide. She is our indigenous nature, our connection to the All. She is our great wisdom.