Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés's blog

They tried to stop her at the border
No visa for her kind, you know...
undocumented, some were certain.
Border guards, La migra, didn’t like the looks of
her. No one cared that
her many, many relatives were waiting for her
back home in Santa Fe USA, and
in surrounding little villages with names like
La Cienega, over near Chupadero, and Española.

"We are all los inmigrantes, and the soul is The First Immigrant: The Soul cannot be held back by any imaginary boundary drawn against it; not by mountain ranges, not by rivers, nor by human scorn.

The Soul, goes everywhere, like an old woman in her right mind, going anywhere she wishes, saying whatever she wants, bending to mend whatever is within her reach. Wherever the Soul migrates, it brings blessed and often desperately needed new life."
--cpe

In our immigrant family, there were many Stations of the Cross, depending on resonant circumstances -- fleeing from war, or surviving travails post-war, finding their ways through the refugee camps, making their way into a culture not at war, but with daily opprobrium toward immigrants.

Internecine: ways of disagreeing which are destructive to all sides.

In our time, when it too often has come down to our listening hard, but not being able to tell some priests from most politicians -- as they too often sound exactly alike, choosing the same rhetorical references and processes to defeat or demand a cause ... we, in our beliefs, our striving to hold life sacred, have to go a different way.

Mother Africa: for hundreds of years she's groaned under humans who have harmed her by looting her treasures, setting enmity between peoples, and by forcing stones atop her greatest minds and hearts so they could not grow into giants.

But, also I sense from knowing many souls who were born into the earth there, that in Mother Africa is rooted the mysterious Heart of the World, a Heart of Humanity that ever beats strong no matter what, and that is oddly ever vulnerable ... yet ever invincible ... ever wounded ... yet ever covered with flowers of acacia ... the honey of which flows like deep amber sweetwater.

What I know of consecrated life, I have learned from my loveship with the ones I some times call affectionately "madwomen in black," our nuns ... and los hombres con pechos, male priests, brothers and monks who are mothers.
-- cpe
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I am not a theologian, rather growing up in the north woods, perhaps I'm more a tree-ologian. As a wandering preacher, even as a backwoods mystic, I do not know everything I wish I could know about convent life, about consecrated life lived in community where souls are involved in a lifelong lapidary project with one another ...

A story is not something we tell. A story is a living being that shows up in answer to our questions about the mysteries of life ... Often enough, a story comes forward on its own, having traveled a long distance to be with us, often hoping to remember us back into some layer of the mysterium, the parts that most nourish our souls ... and the souls of others.
-- cpe
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In my Latino heritage, the following story is one spun together during a time with La señora Maria Elena, a member of my spirit family -- she, a muñecadora, a marionette maker, who lived in a fronterizo, border village near Nogales long ago.

When women are silent, it does not mean they agree.

In our Magyar family, in one of our make-story times when my aunts and grandmothers would make up stories about our lives and days and nights, we made this story:

When I was a child, after we got a new priest at the immigrant Hungarian church, my grandmother Katerin started making the ashes for Ash Wednesday by herself. She said the new priest was impatient, and didn't burn the ashes well enough at high enough flame so his ashes only made a faint mark on foreheads on Ash Wednesday.

That's how I learned to walk around happily with my grandmother's homemade palm frond ashes making a dark black cross on my forehead... sort of like a miner's headlight beaming to the world...

right there on the forehead, all of us on that high holy day signaling each other, 'Yes we are together on a pilgrimage of remembering... remembering life's median which is not cruelty, nor ignorance, but wisdom. Shed everything that is not wisdom. Shed everything that is not well needed.

The other side of the family too, during La cuaresma, Lent, would tell whomever asked, that Cuaresma was a time of penitence for life wrongly lived, a time of fasting to mortify the body, and a time of doing good... that last part, actually should come first, but too often it was not emphasized and seemed an almost "nice but not necessary."

To have integrity, one has to question one’s integrity.
-- cpe
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The Blessing Song

Long ago, in every tribal group, including the long-ago ethnic ones you yourself come from -- no decision, no journey was undertaken without first singing a blessing song over the decider, the traveler...

But not a nice little jingle wishing the traveler well. No. No greeting card sentiments.

Watching and attempting to understand all the Vatican's decisions over all these years, is like reading a Gothic novel with every third page torn out.

Tears are a river that take you somewhere.
Weeping creates a river around the little boat
carrying your soul-life.
Tears can lift that little boat off rocks,
off dry ground, carrying it downriver
to someplace new, someplace better.
--cpe

Members of the Scar Clan

A river of tears is one of the strongest evidences of a "crash and burn" initiation into the Scar Clan.

Scar Clan is part of an ageless tribe of human beings, not defined by geography, racial color, national affiliation, nor language.

Old family people spoke sadly and in whispers about the tale of the Erl King ... he who hides in dark thickets, seeks out the vulnerable, childlike heart. The Erl King twists the child-heart into a blinded thing, addling the innocent mind, vampirizing the child's dancing spirit...

Small bright post-it notes flutter all around the monitor I use while transferring my handwritten work to computer. One of those paper “sails” I call el piloto, the smallest guiding sail, the one built to cup the wind to try to hold to the course ... even when shivering on its mast in the midst of gale.

Since time out of mind,
dark forces rise up to kill
The Light of the World.

Part One, The Spirit that will not die:

We Latinos are of an ancient culture which barely survived the bloody holocaust unleashed by Conquistadores. We know by heart this fact of the murderous dark being ever against the transforming light.

Editor's Note: If you are looking for Bishop Thomas Gumbleton's homily for the third Sunday of Advent, please follow this link: Third Sunday of Advent. Dr. Estes column begins below:

Building a grotto to La Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe:
Fifteen years ago or so, I moved myself and all my books and writings to a tiny blue house. From the point of view of some 'moderns,' there's one fast way to become a kind of "instant eccentric" in the increasingly gentrified southwest...

My grandmother said that if you listened to stories about Mother Maria for nine weeks straight without interruption ... or if you said the rosary for nine days straight without your mind wandering once ... or if you walked to one of Mama Marushka’s shrines in the woods for nine nights in a row -- nine being the number of months Blessed Mother carried the living Christo before giving birth to the Light of the world -- that if you would do any of these, that Blessed Mother would appear to you and answer any question you might have about how to live on earth fully ensouled.

What if the Good Samaritan had left the injured man to die by the side of the road... instead of ministering to him? The injured man would have had nothing to say to encourage others to care for Life, for no one had helped him with his own injuries.

"Water can wear through stone,"
good advice my grandmother said ...
but not if that prayer puts us to sleep
causing "sinful patience" or an aeternal "put-up-with,"
rather than rousing us to new ideas and actions.
Consider then, an additional path of heart ...
When the wound to a people or the soul is ancient
or ongoing, and hierarchies chronically
disturb the healings,
then, what say you my sister subversive soul,
what say you my brother co-conspirator,
let us rise up to heal the wounds,
bypassing the hierarchy completely ...

“New seed is faithful. It roots deepest in the places that are most empty.”
                   --cpe

The night after the election of Barack Obama, Collin Powell was interviewed by CNN. He did not say about Barack: “Look what he did!” Instead Powell said about the people: “Look what we did!”

This is the prayer I prayed before I filled out the secret paper ballot whilst sitting in my pickup truck in a rain storm this week: Please help me vote for the souls who can do the most to help those who suffer most ...

Loss of "The Bounty"

You're wearing your scars inside-out, man,
Hardened Scars on the outside
Softest heart buried far down in the bilges....
That's backward, man; such a captain
disheartens, insults, barks orders far too harsh,
claims he's being lenient
when he orders sailors to be whipped in public,
instead of merely ordering they be hung til dead

Dear Brave Souls:

My columns at NCR will resume this coming week.

Levántate, da voces en la noche, al comenzar las vigilias;
Derrama como agua tu corazón ante la presencia del Señor;
Alza tus manos a él implorando la vida de tus pequeñitos,
Que desfallecen de hambre en las entradas de todas las calles.

Don’t just stand there, Rise Up!! Cry out! Cry out in the dark! Cry out at your vigil... Let your heart pour out like water ...let everyone and God see you are bold! Lift your hands! Lift! Your! Hands!... else your little children shall starve on every road.

Lamentations, 2:19

There is a place in soul and psyche, La selva subterránea, The underground forest... a mysterious locus which acts as El refugio, a protected place where the exhausted spirit can safely rest... and where attracted by La luz violeta the violet light from worldly wounds, angels come to tend to souls with infinite tenderness.

Since the time I first told my grandmother that e.e. cummings had written: "I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten-thousand stars how not to dance..." my grandmother ever after called him Saint E-E, and said he was just the kind of leader of the soul the world was longing for.

Oh do not be too exuberant, for as you know, we’ll have to tie down those leaping bones, cramming them into a much smaller carapace. As in foot binding, we’ll let the true spirit ache under man-made strictures, and force the children to forget or else pretend that they cannot see what they truly see, hear what they truly hear, know what they truly know.

There is no dearth of mystics in our time. There are only fewer eyes filled with the love of beholding them, less talk, less teaching about mystery and mystical matters and outcomes, more blinders so that fewer can easily recognize, straight from the soul, the roar of the wind we call the sensory presence of the Holy Ghost ... the Creative Fire.