Calls of the Wild

To take pleasure in a world filled with many kinds of beauty is a joy in life to which all women are entitled. To support only one kind of beauty is to be somehow unobservant of nature. - Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Last night we had the strangest dream. We will not go over the whole long saga, but there was one thing in particular…We were in Dupont Circle trying to hail a cab. Only we didn’t need a ride we needed to be carried since we had, attached to our feet, metal poles covered with black film containers. It was an uncomfortable get up to say the least. Then a very nice cab driver carried us to our car. He only carried us half way because we asked him to put us down and discovered we could walk quite well on our stilts. Then the livery driver became a confidant as we discussed with him our dilemma: how to get back to New York in the 1978 Robins egg blue Cougar given that we don’t have a driver’s license. There is more but that doesn’t concern us here now. What we are interested in are the stilts.

It reminds us of a story of the “Girl with the Red Shoes” that we read in Clarissa Pinkola Estés book…Here’s a blurb from Amazon…

“The Roots of Obsession - With a gift for penetrating the shadows that darken our lives, Dr. Estés helps us grasp how the starvation for inner life corresponds with disastrous outer choices, and the way to recover and restore your critical inner balance. Using a fairy tale deeply rooted in our psyches – "The Red Shoes" – Dr. Estés illuminates how people are driven to excessive behaviors. In our culture, she begins, we may travel life’s path in one of two ways: in hand-made shoes – crafted with love and care according to the unique needs of the individual soul; or in red shoes – initially promising instant fulfillment, but ultimately leading to a hollow, painful, split existence. Drawing from real-world examples, Dr. Estés analyzes the deep-seated hunger that leads to addictions and explains how to tap instinctual forces that offer strength and life direction.”

In the story the girl gets her feet chopped off in order to release her from her past and start fresh. So when we dreamt of walking on the stilts we thought of this story and how accurate it is for who and where we are now.