That moment in a great conversation which inspires a person to ask if you've ever read ______? Are you someone who tracks down the book and devours it right away? I'm low-key jealous of people like that because I usually lack the focus to follow through, so these ideas that inspired you to suggest the book to me will probably not get to fruit. Unless... they do. One day friend gave me her copy of Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD. I didn't start reading it right away, but when I did, I immediately understood why the timing mattered.
One of the wildest women friends I ever got to spend time with gave me her hardcover copy of the book after making several references to it throughout our wild conversations. I think she got exasperated with me never getting around to reading it and finally just handed me the book off her shelf. We had plans to collaborate on a business together. We were both artists, so we were going to call our store Muse, because we were always inspiring one another in our art, like the Greek Muses. A few months into building the business together, she died suddenly in an accident and everything changed.
A week after the memorial, I came upon the book and opened it to read the first line: "Wildlife and wild women are both endangered species." Reading those words right after losing my wild woman friend really shook me. It was like a call from a wild animal gone extinct. It's hard to describe the deep existential pulse into my soul. The intensity of this story takes a lot of bandwidth from my nervous system and it took me a long time to sort through. It took a decade to finish reading the book. Keeping the book safe with a bookmark indicating that there was more to the story was important to me like protecting the last of my habitat. The weight of it kept me grounded.
The stories became my otherwordly conversation with my ghost friend. The reason that something this powerful is possible through story is because stories are about the Archetypal symbols that guide our lives.
Defining the concept of archetypes is so ineffably tricky it has almost become it's own cosmic joke, but allow me to describe as best I can. Archetypes are symbols, yes, but they are active stories that must be experienced in order to impart critical life wisdom and cues. Some say that archetypes can be thought of as the equivalent to human instincts, or the nudges that make certain things attractive to us when it is appropriate for us to act accordingly. This set of symbols is universal, recognizable to people all over the world regardless of cultural background because they are innate to human experience. Our relationship with each symbol is personal and subjective, because it has to do with where we're at in our process of growing/healing/learning. The relationship with the archetype comes in the form of an emotional response, and so one person's relationship to a specific archetype will be different than someone else's based on their past experiences. Everyone recognizes the archetypal symbol of the Mother or Father, but these symbols evoke different feelings in everyone.
Years ago when we were building our business together, I had asked my friend about becoming an LLC, and she used to joke about being the "Ghost Partner" which we both laughed off. In my survivor grief, I resented myself for not recognizing that as a warning. I saw this as a blind spot in my intuition due to my fear of death.
In retrospect, I believe my soul asked for help with learning about death and grief in this incarnation, because I was scared. I blamed myself for a long time until one night I dreamed that my friend came to explain that she knew her time was coming, and she was scared so she needed a friend to be there. She explained that she understood what a toll it would take on me, but not to worry, she had a gift that would last me the rest of of my life. I woke up confused. A couple nights later I dreamed that I was dialing the phone and calling my friend just like I had so many times. When she answered I started chatting her ear off like usual until she started giggling and cut me off, "Amelia! I'm dead." And in my dream I remember replying, "what the fuck, dead?! This isn't funny, you better have a good explanation-" she continued, "yeah, I'm so dead in fact that we can only communicate in dreams and through your art." And there it was: the gift of intuition through creativity which would last me the rest of my life, and possibly into the next.
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