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
