Rare Birds....of a feather flock together

Too wild  I'm back into reading Woman Who Run with Wolves this morning and on Chapter 5. 

Main story is Skeleton Woman, Facing Life/Death/Life Nature of Love 

Story above, 

Skeleton Woman, Chapter 5-words from WWRW, Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Hunting: When the Heart is a Lonely Hunter

While the instinctual lives of wolves include loyalty and lifelong bonds of trust and devotion, humans sometimes have trouble with these matters. If we were to use archetypal terms to describe what determines the strong bond among wolves, we might surmise that in integrity of their relationship is derived from their submission to the ancient Life/Death/Life Nature. 

The Life/Death/Life nature is a cycle of animation, development, decline, and death that is always followed by reanimation. This cycle affects all physical life and all facets of psychological life.  Everything the sun, novas, and the moon, as well as the affairs of humans and those of the tiniest creatures, like cells and atoms has this fluttering, then faltering, then fluttering again. 

Unlike Humans, wolves do not deem the ups and downs of life, energy, power, food, opportunity as startling or punitive. The peaks and valleys just are, and wolves ride them as efficiently, as fluidly as possible. The instinctual nature has the miraculous ability to life through all negative consequence, and still maintain relationship to self, to another.

Among wolves, the life/death/life cycle of nature and fate are met with grace and wit and the endurance to stay tight with one’s mate and to live long and as well as can be. But in order for humans to live and give loyalty in this most fit manner, in this way which is most wise, most preserving, and most feeling, one has to group against the very thing one fears most. There is no way around it, as we shall see. One must sleep with Lady Death.

Skeleton Woman is a hunting story about love. In stories from the north love is not a romantic tryst between two lovers. Stories from the circumpolar regions describe love as a union of two beings whose strength together enables one or both to enter into communication with the soul-world and to participate in fate as dance with life and death.

To understand this story, we have to see that there, in one of the harshest environs and one of the most stressed hunting cultures in the world, love does not mean a flirtation or a pursuit for simple ego-pleasure, but a visible bond composed of the psychic sinew of endurance, a union which prevails through bounty and austerity, through the most complicated and most simple days and nights. The union of two beings is seen as angakok magic in itself, as a relationship through which “the powers that be” become known to both individuals. 

But there are requirements for this kind of union. In order to create this enduring love, one invites a third partner to the union. The third partner is Skeleton Woman. She is also called Lady Death, and as such, she is the Life/Death/Life nature in one of her many guises. In this from, Lady Death is not a disease, but a deity.

In a relationship she has the role of the oracle who knows when it is time for cycle to begin and end. As such, she is the wildish aspect of relationship, the one of whom men are most terrified…and sometimes women also, for when faith in the transformative has been lost, the natural cycle of increase and attrition are feared as well.

To create enduring love, Skeleton Woman must be admitted to the relationship and be embraced by both lovers. Here, in this old Inuit story, are the psychic stages for mastery of that embraces. This story was given to me by Mary Uukalat. Let us peer at the images which rise from the smoke of this story.    

I'm in awe when events pop up like this, our anniversary and reading this story today...just what the spirit ordered...some Good Orderly Direction...love reading stories like this and delving deeping in understand on a spiritual level from the ancient ones. 

Here's some more info...The Story of the Skeleton Woman   Not just for the Woman...