The breaking of the bond between a woman and her wildish nature is often misunderstood as the intuition itself being broken. This is not the fact. It is not intuition which is broken, but rather the matrilineal blessing on intuition, the handing down of intuitive reliance between a woman and all females of her lines who have gone before her – it is that long river of women that has been dammed. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Lineage. Matrilineal lines. Ancestors. Those words have been finding me a lot lately. I admit that I haven’t been paying attention to their call.
Then I read this quote this morning on Ronna Detrick’s site and looked it up in my own battered copy of Women Who Run with the Wolves. Sure enough, I had underlined it. The colour of the line tells me that it first attracted me back in 2003.
I missed my Great Grandmothers even then.
I’m lucky. My relationship with my Mom and my Grandmothers is and was very good. But it occurs to me as I write this, that they never really told me stories about their Grandmothers. I have heard a few, but it doesn’t take very long even for my Oma – who, though in her 90s still remembers everything – to run out of stories about the women who came before. My Mother’s family immigrated to Canada when she was three. She never knew her Grandmothers, so neither do I. Their stories were not passed on.
But I know it goes deeper than that. There is a reason that women’s stories stopped being told.
This post and I have spent several hours together as I waited for inspiration on how to end it. I wanted some great stroke of insight that would tell me where to go next, but the truth is that I don’t know. Part of me wants to simply hit delete. But there is a knowing deep in my core that is telling me to sit with these questions. To put them down and sit with them and then listen for the next steps.
And so I will.
xo
Whether or not you’ve been paying attention to the call, Meghan; it/they have most-definitely been paying attention to you. I LOVE that you are listening for it, welcoming it, writing it…no matter what. xoxo (And thank you for the lovely ping-back! I’m honored and grateful.)
I love this, so often we try and get to quickly to ‘answers’ I think.
Meghan, I know you posted this a long time ago, but I’ve only just read it (being directed here by Susannah Conway’s Journal Your Life course (wonderful – love your video). But, to Grandmothers. I was lucky to know two of my Great Grandmothers, one only briefly but I have shadowy memories of her, and I kind of remember what it felt like to be with her. I was so fortunate that my other Great Grandmother lived well into her 90s and died when I was 17. We became very close in my teenage years. She had a deep wisdom, but she was also a wonderful storyteller. When she died I found that although I had listened to her stories time and time again I suddenly had questions, so I started to research my (our)family history (way before Ancestry.com!)and it has been such a fabulous journey. I have discovered all of my great, and my great great grandmothers, and in some cases much much further back. And I know other people think I am a little bit mad when I tell them this, but some of my grandmothers speak to me (not in the hearing voices sense). Sometimes, across the centuries, just by finding out little bits of their stories, where and when they were born, how they made a living, who they married, the children they bore and how they died. Sometimes it can all be written down in a few short lines, but sometimes they tell me so much more – often in the still quiet of an archive office. Sometimes I’ve found some fact or another and it has triggered a memory that my grandmother had long forgotten. Whatever route you take I really hope you do find your great grandmothers, they have a lot to teach us.