In her book Women Who Run With The Wolves, Clarissa Estes tells the very haunting story of Skeleton-Woman, a skeleton caught in a fisherman’s net. At first, the fisherman is afraid of Skeleton-Woman, then he opens his home to her and takes her in and accepts her. He feeds her and when he sleeps he dreams, and when he dreams, he cries, and Skeleton-Woman drinks his tears and comes to life.
The fisherman gives her his heart. When Skeleton Woman uses the fisherman’s heart, she receives the only thing that really matters, the only thing capable of creating pure and innocent feeling. The story contains a promise: if you allow a woman to become more palpable in your life, she will make your life larger in return. When you help to free her from her tangled and misunderstood state and realize her as a teacher and a lover, she becomes your ally and your partner.
Giving one’s heart for new creation, for new life, writes Estes, for the forces of Life/Death/Life, is a descent into the realm of feeling and emotion. It may be difficult for us, especially if we have been wounded by disappointment or by sorrow. But when we help bring Skeleton-Woman to full life, we come close to the one that has always been close to us.
Maria read me this story this morning, and then gave it to me to read. We were both quiet, numbed a bit by the intense feeling of it, and the many implications for us. This, we both said, is our story, it was our story and is our story still.
When a man gives his whole heart, writes Estes, he becomes an amazing force – he becomes an inspiratrice, a role that in the past has been reserved for women only. When he and Skeleton Woman become lovers and sleep together, then he becomes truly fertile, he is invested with feminine powers in a masculine world. He carries the seeds of new life and necessary deaths. He inspires new works within himself, but also in those close to him.
“Over the years, I have seen this in others and experienced it in myself,” writes Estes. “It is a profound occasion when you create something of value through your lover’s belief in you, through his heartfelt feeling about your work, your project, your subject. it is an amazing phenomenon.” And, she adds, it is not necessarily limited to a lover. It can occur through anyone who gives his or her heart to another in a deep manner.
The bond is a gift to the man as well as the woman. His embrace of the Life/Death/Life nature will eventually give him countless ideas and life plots and situations and colors and images without parallel. For the Life/Death/Life nature, the Wild Woman archetype, has at her disposal all that ever was and ever will be. When she creates, sings flesh onto her skeletal frame, the person whose heart she uses feels it, it is filled with creation himself, it bursts with creation.
In our world, it seems we sometimes compete to see who is the greatest victim. Women often have hard lives, so do men. Life is wonderful, but it rarely easy for anyone. Men so often hide their hearts, bury them in greed and anger and hurt. I lived so much of my life in disappointment and sorrow, I had given up on love and life, I thought of myself as on the edge of life. I had closed myself off to feeling and connection, my home was a moat and the bridge was always up. In one sense, I was already dead.
Perhaps that was why I plunged myself so deeply into hospice work, I was preparing to die and wanted to know how it worked, I wanted to swim in this awful and beautiful stream.
When I met Maria, we drank of so many tears of the other, we both came to life. We found the only thing that truly matters. In helping her to free herself of her tangled and misunderstood state, I was freeing myself. I very much honor the idea of the Inspiratrice.
It would be wonderful to be one.
It is not for me to say what kind of force I am, but I do believe an amazing force entered my consciousness and revived my soul, I changed my life completely, quickly and painfully. It called me to inspire others if I could. A part of me was invested with feminine powers of intuition, I began to leave the ethos and value system of the masculine world, it seemed lifeless and cold to me. I embraced – and lived – the Life/Death/Life nature – perhaps hospice taught me that – and my head has been spinning ever since with ideas and plots and situations and colors and images without end.
I saw Maria come to life, and so I came to life as well, and together. It was-is-an amazing phenomenon.
In Estes story, the Skeletal Woman take’s the fisherman’s heart and turns it into a drum. Thus, the heart is a drum. A drum made of heart will call up the spirits that are the essence of human life.