Wild hearts day

Late this chilly afternoon, I bundled up and took a drive up the Gorge to the recycling transfer site (fancy name for the town dump), and got so carried away ogling the scenery it's a wonder I made it back home in one piece.

The sun had come out, spot-lighting snow-covered nooks and crannies on the cliffs high above the river and glowing through the clouds that clung to the peaks. As the clouds formed and re-formed, the interplay of light and shadow constantly shifted. Fog wafted around in the little valleys between the peaks and floated out into the Gorge. The wind was calm, so the river's surface was still and reflective ... mirroring the deep green of the Douglas firs on the mountainsides below the snow level, the glistening white snow above, as well as the patches of blue sky that peeked out here and there from behind the clouds. I passed numerous stands of birch, bare of their leaves, like ranks of silvery-brown skeletons.

There was an invigorating wildness to it, and yet at the same time it seemed peaceful and orderly.

More inspiration on this gloriously elemental Valentine's Day:

Wild woman resides in the guts, not in the head. She can track and run and summon and repel. She is the Life/Death/Life force, she is the incubator. She is intuition, she is far-seer, she is deep listener, she is loyal heart. She encourages humans to remain multi-lingual; fluent in the languages of dreams, passion, and poetry. She whispers from night dreams, she leaves behind on the terrain of a woman's soul a coarse hair and muddy footprints. These fill women with longing to find her, free her and love her.

-- Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

Comments

[Joanne]

How nice that nature makes your trip to the recycling transfer site such a pleasure! I can just picture the movement shed by the shifting clouds/light. It does give a sense of our earth, ever moving.

[Sharon]

Love the quote you've chosen. I read "Women Who Run With the Wolves" sixteen years ago, and it was a life-changing experience for me. It was one of the first books where I underlined and starred passages so I could find them again quickly. I just opened my copy to the section The Man on the River - where she says "animus is the soul-force in women" - which eerily addresses where I am right now in my life. Time to do some reading....

[Kitty]

I've found "Women Who Run With the Wolves" is perfect for opening to a random page and getting just what I need to know at that moment.