Have you heard La Loba’s song?
Part two: considering the symbolism of the La Loba story and the importance of discernment in the gathering of our bones
Just a quick note if you haven’t read my post ‘Have you met La Loba?’ – do read that first because then this one will make more sense.
So last time we met La Loba and considered the symbolism of the desert, the bones and the cave in the story. Following on, let’s consider what it means to sing over the bones and the transformation of the bones to wolf and then to woman.
To sing over the bones is to breathe life back into the self or soul. La Loba sits with the skeleton she has recreated and listens to hear the song it wants her to sing. Just as every skeleton has its own song, every woman has her own way of bringing life back to her soul, her own way of feeling fully alive. Some of us find that aliveness in nature, in the garden or somewhere outdoors. Perhaps the sea calls to us or walking in the forest.
I feel most alive when I am outdoors and that is partly what sparked my interest in making inks and pigments from my garden and from the wild spaces I like to inhabit. Maybe you find your aliveness in creativity or running or travel or cooking. Whatever makes you feel most alive is the song that brings vitality back to your soul. The song vibrates through the psyche, cracking open parts of the self that have closed down, revealing parts that were hidden, bringing the fragments back together.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes says this is “our meditation practice as women, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of ourselves, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of life itself.”
And when La Loba sings, she sings from the deepest level of knowing; from deep within the body and deep within the soul. If we think about this, we often will have this deep sense of knowing, an intuition, an instinct. We feel it viscerally but often ignore it, because we have been conditioned away from trusting it. This is for another time, but the instinctual nature of women has been squashed, tamed and controlled for centuries so it is hardly surprising that we barely recognise or trust it now. However, La Loba does know it and does trust it and so she sings the bones back to life.
“The metaphors in this story typify the entire process for bringing a woman to her full instinctual wildish senses. Within us is the old one who collects bones. Within us are the soul bones of this wild Self. Within us is the potential to be fleshed out again as the creature we once were. Within us are the bones to change ourselves and change our world. Within us are the breath and our truths and our longings – together they are the song, the creation hymn we have been yearning to sing.” (From chapter 1 of Women Who Run With The Wolves)
I really feel this. The urge to find my bones and my wildish, instinctual self. The urge to be who I truly am without apology or withholding. The urge to live my truths and my longings, my dualities and paradoxes. The urge to sing heartily my creation hymn. Do you feel it too?
As La Loba sings the wolf is transformed from a skeleton to a fully fleshed creature with its furry coat and flicking tail. It awakes and runs from the cave. This transformation is symbolic of becoming our fullest self, the integration of the wild soul with the self we present to the world. The shape shifting from wolf to woman may represent the fulfilment of this integration; the wolf representing the instinctual nature of the feminine, the woman representing the human face of the feminine. Where does she go? Perhaps she becomes La Loba in another desert, in another story. Perhaps she helps other women to find and gather their bones and integrate their inner wolf?
What I do know, for sure, is that the more of us that do this work of finding, gathering and singing over our bones, the better off all womanhood will be. As Marianne Williamson said, in A Return to Love, it does not serve us to play small, “And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
I also believe that men will be better off. They too have had their instinctual nature squashed and their light dimmed for centuries. There is a world of difference between the divine masculine and the patriarchal masculine. We’ll explore that another day. In the meantime, let’s remember that there are male wolves who also need to gather their bones and sing themselves back to life. Maybe you know one.
Discernment and the bones
I’d like to dig a bit deeper in the gathering of bones and the discernment of which bones go where, which are no longer required, and which may never have been ours in the first place. And I want to acknowledge a great conversation I had with my bestie, Claire, on this very subject, which prompted me to add this into this week’s post.
In a future post I will share with you a poem that I channelled during one of my darkest moments in March 2021. I say that the poem was channelled because it came to me rather than from me. Maybe it was my soul voice speaking to me. The essence of the poem is that I felt the two sisters of menopause and grief were devouring me, stripping me back to my bones and leaving those bones to dry in the desert wind.
Reflecting on that poem now, it occurs to me that this rite of passage for me wasn’t just a dark night of the soul, it was offering me the opportunity to see my bones with new eyes. I see the importance of really examining our bones – not just the bones that we are gathering now, but those that we have been carrying with us. As we think about La Loba carefully picking through the bones to reassemble the wolf skeleton, it is also our work to carefully sort through our own bones in reassembling ourselves.
There will be bones that we have collected over our lifetime which served a purpose once upon a time, but which are hindering us now. For example, when I was a career girl in my 30s, my bones certainly included qualities that served me well in London in the 90s in the world of customer magazine publishing. Some bones I have lost that I would like to retrieve, and others I really need to let go off because they carry too much hard masculine energy.
There will be bones that we inherited from our parents or ancestors that felt vital to our existence in the past. And some that were always a hindrance, but we didn’t dare put them down for fear of disapproval or rejection. And there will be ancestral bones that were never ours to carry (generational trauma, for example) but that we picked up and carried anyway because we didn’t know where to leave them or how to let them go.
So, our work is not just to gather our bones, but to carefully collate and curate them too. To gently and mindfully bury those bones that we need to let go of. To retrieve and replace those that are vital to our aliveness going forward. Anything that does not make us feel alive is a bone to leave behind. As a collector of many things (and still sorting through things my parents collected that I may just have to bite the bullet and put in the recycling), I know the letting go can be a very tough, emotive and emotional process. The reward is how much lighter we could feel when we no longer carry that weight, and how much more space and energy we have for our ‘aliveness’.
As we journey into the darker half of the year (in the northern hemisphere, at least), in this traditional time to reflect and let go, I invite you to spend some time with your bones and to contemplate what no longer serves you. Here are some questions to guide your excavations and curation:
What are the buried bones of my life?
What bones am I carrying that are not mine, and maybe never were?
What bones did I collect along the way, that no longer serve me now?
What are the bones that stand as constants for me and are vital for my aliveness?
A reminder: bones can be traits, qualities, values, places, landscapes, passions, states of being, dreams, stories we hold in our hearts, losses or trauma (that make us who we are and often are the source of our gift), art, poetry, books, relationships, experiences etc. They can also be attachments and objects that have accompanied us this far and now need to be let go of.
Coming up….
An invitation
I am thinking of hosting a gathering for discussion and journaling on either Saturday 2 or Saturday 9 December, at 4pm GMT. Would you like to join? Please leave a comment and let me know which date works best. I will send the invitation and link nearer the time to those who want to join in.
My book recommendation for this month is The Wisdom Of Wolves; How Wolves Can Teach Us To Be More Human by Elli H. Radinger. There’ll be an overview in my post next week.
Art for your heart: I have followed artist Lucy Campbell for some time and just love her drawings of drawings of women and wolves, so I thought you might like them too.
Visit https://lupiart.com
Until next time…
These last two posts have given me much to think about Tina - have read both several times! Interested in joining your gathering on either 2nd or 9th 😊