La Loba: Wolf Woman, Keeper of the Bones
La Loba: Wolf Woman, Keeper of the Bones
I've seen this wolf before and I've seen this girl.
So, in Spanish I call her Río Abajo Río, the river beneath the river; La Mujer Grande, the Great Woman; Luz del abismo, the light from the abyss; La Loba, the wolf woman; or La Huesera, the bone woman.
- Clarissa Pinkola Estés
from Women Who Run With the Wolves
Through the new leaf shadows on the dry sand, a big black horse and a Hungarian man with a cane walk in silence, side by side. Every few steps, the horse pauses and waits for the man, rope held in his hand, to catch up.
The man had a stroke last year and his left side is stronger than his right. His speech is clear through the thick music of his accent. He’s worked hard to regain function in his body and is frustrated by the lapse between thought and action as he works with the horse.
This time spent with the horses is a birthday present from his daughter, and it wouldn’t have happened without her insistence. She wanted him to ride and I’m too careful, too controlling. We compromised with this time of communication on the ground.
The man and the horse walk the length of the riding arena and back to the mounting steps where the man sits to rest. The black horse drops his head down low and close in front of the man. The sky is rare blue, striking, like Giotto’s Arena Chapel.
Occasionally in sessions with people, I am haunted by a question. It’s usually something unrelated to the horses entirely, something odd, out of place, sometimes prying, but the questions feel like they’ve arrived from someplace else, somewhere beyond me. Like an obsession, the question won’t let go of me until it’s acknowledged until it is asked. It might not need an answer, but it always needs to be spoken.
“Did you see any wolves when you were growing up in Hungary?”
“Never seen, no. But once a pack came down from the mountains and they closed school. People walked to the shops in groups of two or more. They would eat you, the wolves, they watched us. You did not walk alone.”
The horse moves his head and I pull back on the rope to keep the bones of his big face from butting the man’s torso.
“Don’t do that,” the man says. “I invited the horse to come closer. I did that on purpose. He won’t hurt me.”
Women Who Run With the Wolves
Like questions, I can be haunted by books.
I’ll think I’ve read them. I’ll think about them. I’ll find quotes from them. They’ll wait on my shelves or downloaded on a screen, for years, whispering in the background until it’s time for me to explore them.
Women Who Run With the Wolves by Dr.
is one of those books. I’ve started reading it so many times over the past decade, but the moment wasn’t right to go further than the first chapter.The time is now right for the question.
I’m fascinated by the names Estés gives for the primordial sense of our wild woman: Los Loba, the wolf woman, La Huesera, the bone woman.
The bone woman exists, like the collective unconscious, in that liminal space between dreams and waking. She’s the keeper of the stories, “This land between the worlds is that inexplicable place we all recognize once we experience it, but its nuances slip away and shape-change if one tries to pin them down, except when we use poetry, music, dance or story.”
She is the forgotten part of me that waits, dormant, both here and not here. She’s the hypnogogic state, the sweet spot as I’m waking, not quite risen into urgency and not fully under and offline to my physical senses.
In the moments that she’s come to me in waking hours, she feels like the reverberation of a question, someone else’s voice, a prodding that urges me to assign it words, to give it a place in ordinary time.
Where the wolf woman lives, time doesn’t matter. The interstitial place where the creations, inspirations, the unspoken stories rest is the antidote to the pressures I have learned to place on myself.
An old woman waits by the fire, and Estés, a Jungian analyst, leaves me with homework: “These are some good questions to ask till one decides on the song, one’s true song: What has happened to my soul-voice? What are the buried bones of my life? In what condition is my relationship to the instinctual Self? When was the last time I ran free? How do I make life come alive again? Where has La Loba gone to?”
0-Six is Fierce
I was scrolling social media when I learned about one of Yellowstone’s famous wolves, O-Six, or The 06 Female, known by the name that was used to track her. She strayed beyond the protected borders of the park in 2012 where she was shot by a hunter and killed.
Since then, O-Six has been the subject of many books, poems, podcasts, tributes and songs.
Here is an excerpt from master obituarist Will Stenberg’s depiction of her life:
Part of the reason lone wolves are so rare is that life is hard for wolves even in packs - alone, it's almost impossible. A typical wolf hunting party is 4 wolves, with yearlings chasing down, exhausting, and routing prey before a big male delivers the killing bite. . .When, in middle-age, she [06] finally decided to mate, she surprised everyone again. Rejecting all the big bad wolves offering to start dynasties with her, she chose two male yearlings - basically, teenage wolves who didn't know their ass from their elbow - to be her mates. This went against tradition again in that wolves tend to be pair-bonded. She formed a trio.
Then, she taught these kids how to hunt.
Together, they started the Lamar Canyon Pack, and the 06 Female again shocked wolf experts by bringing all of her pups through their first year of life, a practically unheard-of feat.
Meanwhile, she mystified and amazed in another way. Doug Smith, the Park's most expert wolf darter - and possibly the best in the world - spent 3 years trying to dart and collar her. This is a good practice, unfortunately necessary for the protection of the wolf population, but Doug talks eloquently about how she would look him straight in the eye with an expression of total and complete disdain - and then, basically, disappear, using the terrain to make her impossible to target.
Non-Ordinary Reality
I’m working toward the second level of my certification as an equine-assisted coach. The women studying with me are all friends and colleagues. In the container of our sessions together there are few subjects we don’t touch and there isn’t much that I am not willing to try.
We’re learning how to lead our clients into non-ordinary reality, how to guide them to find their visions, and I’m shocked at my resistance to the work.
Most of our waking life is spent in company with the constant, linear, verbal chatter inside our heads. That noise has a habit of getting in the way of our deeper knowings, the gut instincts and images that are saturated in personal wisdom. Our sleeping dreams contain treasure troves of insight but for most of us, they’re hard to decipher if we remember them at all when we wake.
Through the use of ancient tools like repetitive drumming, we can learn to access the in-between spaces of waking and dreaming, connecting with the brain patterns that shush our ego’s constant noise. We experience these states naturally in the hypnagogic/hypnopompic states when our consciousness is transitioning from waking to sleeping.
We access this state when we’re in deep meditation, when we’re in prayer. I’ve personally experienced my own transformations coming from spontaneous moments of non-ordinary consciousness in my life. Why am I so resistant to learning how to access these states consciously, to guide others?
It’s not that I don’t trust the work, it’s that I don’t trust myself. I think about the madness of my grandmother, how she was in and out of hospitals, hooked on medications and treatments that never worked. If I sink below the plumb lines and the spirit levels of my control, will I become her?
Am I already her but I’ve been able to hoodwink a facade that appears sane enough to pass for normal in society?
I’m lying on the hard, studio floor of the farm where we meet to refine our tools and I close my eyes and sink into the sound of the drum.
My thoughts expand and contract as I imagine my way down an earthen tunnel nestled between the massive roots of a tree. I follow a hollow glimmer of light that appears closer and closer.
I arrive in a meadow clearing of a forest and am instantaneously sitting in a clear stream, the water moving over smooth little rocks that fit into the arches of my bare feet. The water is neither hot nor cold. The twilight in this imagined world accentuates the shadows of the surrounding trees and the dew on the long grasses that flow along the stream bank.
There are hooves in the water in front of me.
“Seriously?” I say. “You?”
The horse ignores me and dips its lips into the water to take an unbothered drink.
I’d come here to connect with my internal guides, the symbols that I’d created to protect my knowings. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a horse is my power animal, but I’m oddly annoyed. It’s like figuring out my true love was actually my best friend after all, like he was there the whole fucking time and I wasn’t ready to see it.
The horse continues to ignore me.
I clamber up the bank and stand in the long meadow grass.
“Is there something that I need to figure out?”
And just like that, a wolf comes and sits on its haunches beside me, tucked in close like a dog in heel. And like a pup, the wolf slides its head into the cup of my palm, just where the length of my arm ends. The fit is perfect, like the wolf has been there all along trotting beside me, keeping watch, bearing her teeth when it’s needed.
“Oh, there you are,” I say, leaning into the solid warmth of her.
Now that I know she’s there, she hasn’t left. Waking or sleeping, she nudges me with her big, strong nose when I drift off course. And when I’m being particularly dense, she sends the horses in to remind me back into balance.
Thank you, wolf lady.
Sea Wolf
The red sand path cuts through the smooth, black lava field that leads to the jagged-edged short cliffs where the ocean, minute by minute, wave-carves her way back into the earth.
There are shrines and markers along the path, stone-stacked memorials of the constant watch and honor the residents of the island give the volcano whose active whim continually reshapes the landscape.
The time change has rocked my bones into a metronome that follows the surf. I ache towards the water with a longing that surprises me. I hear whale song in my dreams.
At the head of the path a market blooms on Saturdays. Wise aunties tell me what to eat and I trust them to nourish me with tastes that slot like a remedy for homesickness. I have longed to be on this island my whole life but I didn’t know I needed to be here until she found me, until I was ready, until I received the call.
In the market, there is nothing that I need to buy. I have everything I want. But a picture stops me as I walk past a woman and her child selling images.
I’m picking up the clear envelope enclosing it before I’ve fully come to a stop, like someone is going to take it from me if I don’t act fast.
The woman smiles at me as she rearranges stones to keep the strong wind from stealing all her items. “That was my daughter’s first drawing. She makes a lot of art now, but that was the first.”
The image on the card is a black-and-white digital drawing of a girl and a wolf. The girl stares out at the viewer. The wolf stares steadily at the girl. The girl’s hair is a shawl that contains secrets. The wolf’s coat is thick and rugged, the shadows that form it appear like figures dancing in firelight, like tree branches.
I have seen this wolf before.
I have seen this girl.
I pay the woman double what she asks for the image and I slide it carefully into my bag as I would a sacred icon.
The wave metronome rocks me forward and my palm cups the air at my side. La Loba, wolf woman, maybe we’re just homesick for ourselves.
I will trust your questions to lead me as we navigate our way through this world together.
It is not so coincidental that wolves and coyotes, bears and wildish women have similar reputations. They all share related instinctual archetypes, and as such, both are erroneously reputed to be ingracious, wholly and innately dangerous, and ravenous . . .
. . . She is both friend and mother to all those who have lost their way, all those who need a learning, all those who have a riddle to solve, all those out in the forest or the desert wandering and searching.
- Clarissa Pinkola Estés
from Women Who Run With the Wolves
