Even though we have only heard or seen or dreamt a wondrous wild world that we belonged to once, even though we have not yet or only momentarily touched it, even though we do not identify ourselves as a part of it, the memory of it is a beacon that guides us towards what we belong to.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves
That we are at all is the great mystery. The unknown force animating us, present in all that is blooming and fading, is our deepest felt sense, and strangely, the feeling we most often overlook. Like breathing, this aliveness — this passionate presence — is taken for granted, and we pay attention instead to an endless stream of thoughts.
Catherine Ingram
Learn the craft of knowing how to open your heart and to turn on your creativity. There's a light inside of you.
Judith Jamison
Remember this in the dark times; Life is flowing, and you are still and strong within yourself.
Cate
From all journeys, be they imaginative or geographic, the most important souvenirs to be collected are the reminders that peoples' lives are fortified by family and friends; by our ability to create our lives like creating a piece of art; and by our efforts to reconcile our material needs with the importance of our connections to each other.
Loreena McKennit (Liner notes from The Book of Secrets)
What is the basic nutrition for the soul? Well, it differs from creature to creature, but here are some combinations..... For some women air, night, sunlight, and trees are necessities. For others, words, paper, and books are the only things that satiate. For others, color, form, shadow, and clay are the absolutes. Some women must leap, bow, and run, for their souls crave dance. Yet others crave only a tree-leaning peace.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves
To live sacred lives requires that we live at the edge of what we do not know.
Anne Hillman
Our bodies come from the body of Mother Earth and to her body we will return, "Earth our body, water our blood, air our breath, and fire our spirit." . . . Spirit is a radiant star within each of us, an inner core directly linked to the inner core of the earth and the heart of nature. From spirit, life's purpose and intention emanate, and innermost power flows. Spirit is divine and unique within each of us. It is beyond the limitations of time, space or belief. It is our most authentic self.
Gail Faith Edwards, Opening Our Wild Hearts to the Healing Herbs
Women, please let your own sun, your concentrated energy, your own submerged authentic vital power shine out from you.
Raicho Hiratsuko, Women's Manifesto 1911
The Goddess has many names and faces. She is creator, nurturer, healer, protector, defender, source-of-life, and source-of-all-knowing. She fosters respect and reverence for the sacredness of all life. Even as death-wielder, destroyer, and mother of destruction, the Dark One, the goddess represents the awesome cycle of birth and death. She is the wheel-of-life-ever-turning. She is the springtime bud and fully opened flower, the fallen leaf and the dormant root. The Goddess personifies all aspects of womanhood and is a model for women's psychic wholeness. With Her help women discover their incredible strength and intrinsic beauty.
Gail Faith Edwards, Opening Our Wild Hearts to the Healing Herbs
Magic is not about power over other people, it is about calling forth your own power from within. It is about being an instrument in the divine orchestra. The reason old people are good at it is that it takes a long time to learn – many seasons of observation, many life experiences to make the connections. We cannot cause change without changing ourselves. We become the power that we call forth.
Allegra Taylor, Older Than Time
The only trust required is to know that when there is one ending there will be another beginning.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves
Something happens in the company of women. Souls open like the sun, rising between blue mountains.
Rebecca Rajswasser
The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them and learn to give them away wherever they are needed. There are times when one needs a story more than one needs food to stay alive, for stories are food for the soul.
Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel
As humans we possess a deep yearning to understand all that nature embodies and to move in harmony with the natural world around us. To contemplate nature is to become familiar with the Goddess and her ways, for in nature, She reveals Her deepest mysteries.
Gail Faith Edwards, Opening Our Wild Hearts to the Healing Herbs
The craft of questions, the craft of stories, the craft of the hands - all these are the making of something, and that something is soul. Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves
We cross the border every time we step from the mundane world to the lands of myth, from mainstream culture to the pages of a folklore text or a fantasy book. Standing at the crossroads, we must remember to give food to Hecate, wine to Janus, flowers, songs, smoke and dreams to all the guardians along the way. Tricksters, shamans, artists, storytellers: they all cast paths of marigold petals and open the doors hidden in the hedge.
Terri Windling
Earth Mother, Star Mother, you who are called by a thousand names, may all remember we are cells in your body and dance together…..
Starhawk
Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered, Wild Woman comes back.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves
Creativity springs from the yearning to be the fullness of who you are.
Ram Dass
Somewhere there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work which needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.
Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark
Old Kali came bustlin round my doorstep the other day. You know who I mean, the Great Black Mother who knows how to change things. Powerful Woman!
Suzy Coffee
The wild woman carries the bundles for healing; she carries everything a woman needs to be and know. She carries the medicine for all things.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves
I am a woman, a part of and the whole of the first circle, the circle that transcends space and time, the circle of women joined. I am woman, a human being of extraordinary strength, wisdom and grace. And this is true.
Ann Valliant, The Womancraft Guide Manual Collection
Just being in the pristine awareness of here and now, you become as a reflecting pool, and those who gather around tend see their own images. What has been murky suddenly clears up, and sometimes in that clearing there is a fierceness. Truth and love don't always show up as honey dipped. Sometimes it takes a great courageousness of heart to allow a stripping away of all that is extra, all that we have been holding onto for so long.
Catherine Ingram
There is a vitality, a vibrant life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
Martha Graham
I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves
