I am struggling with my creative brain these days. It seems it has gone on an extended vacation to parts unknown and left no note with the details of its intended return. I blame it on the lengthy course of antibiotics I was on to rid me of evil bacteria, or the results of the US election, or the potential that Canadians may choose to embrace the “me before you” mentality. I dare not blame it on the fractured ability to concentrate on account of my age. But then, as so often happens, I bump into the words of someone who makes me stop and think and restores my brain to itself. This time it was Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, who wrote: “Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.” I will heed her advice and will ignore the laundry and the unswept floor, the dishes in the sink and the long list of chores, and I will pick up my beloved pencil with the attached eraser and get to work.
Dr. Estés is a perfect fit for days like these. She wrote “Women Who Run with The Wolves” in 1989 and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 145 weeks, selling more than two million copies, a collection of stories that urges and guides women to “reclaim their innate wisdom and strength. She also wrote “The Dangerous Old Woman” in 1996. Both of these titles immediately conjure up a sense of power for women. She participated in a musical presentation at Carnegie Hall in 2000 where composer Judith Weir wrote music with lyrics by Dr. Estés and Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, sung by Jessye Norman, that shares the wisdom of a woman’s life in its entirety, through all its stages. I listened to an interview of these three writers, given just before the opening of the Carnegie Hall performance and I couldn’t help but be moved by the energy and joy they put into this creative project and the great respect they held for one another.
Dr. Estés has been a lifelong activist in “service of the voiceless”. She was born in poverty, in 1945 in Indiana to refugee parents from Mexico and at the age of four was adopted by a Hungarian immigrant couple where poverty continued in her life. Her writing has inspired and comforted, having worked as a psychoanalyst, earning her doctorate in “ethno-clinical psychology”, working with veterans suffering with serious limitations, with severely injured children, with prison inmates, and others.
I found comfort in her words and an energy erupted in me that posed the question – “What role will I play” – a question I regularly ask to ensure my participation in change. Estés knows women are “deeply and properly bewildered” in these difficult times that the world faces now, with our rights challenged and our equality in peril. She reminds us that we were made for times like this, and we know it in our soul of souls. We are mighty, mightier than we know. She grew up on the Great Lakes and knows a seaworthy vessel when she sees it. “There have never been more able vessels in the waters than there are right now across the world … all fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind,” she writes.
We are called to do what we can in the service of kindness, to share and offer a hand of support, to speak up for those who can’t. It’s so easy to think we have little power to change anything, but that is a false assumption. Dr. Estés reminds us we can change the world around us with simple gestures, and with small actions. Our power is within us.
Water is a common reference when speaking of the human condition, an analogy that connects with those of us who had the great privilege of growing up near water, like most of us in northwestern Ontario, with its expanse of lakes and rivers. The water we dip our toes into, like the mighty Rainy River, is never the same a breath later, the water always moving forward, as we all must. Estés continues her ship analogy, saying – “When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.”
wendistewart@live.ca
