Love for the Soul
Hold out. Hold on. Do your work. You will find your own way. At the end of the tale, the swans recognize the duckling as one of their own before [s]he does. That is rather typical of the exiled women. After all that hard wandering, they manage to wander over the frontier into home territory and often don’t realize for a time that people’s looks have ceased to be disparaging and are more often neutral, when they are not admiring and approving.
One would think that now that they are on their own psychic ground they would be deliriously happy. But, no. For a time at least, they are terribly distrustful. Do these people really regard me? Am I really safe here? Will I be chased away? Can I really sleep with both eyes closed now? Is it all right to act like ... a swan? After a time, these suspicions fall away and the next stage of coming back to oneself begins: acceptance of one’s own unique beauty; that is, the wild soul from which we are made.
There is probably no better or more reliable measure of whether a woman has spent time in ugly duckling status at some point or all throughout her life than her inability to digest a sincere compliment. Although it could be a matter of modesty, or could be attributed to shyness—although too many serious wounds are carelessly written off as “nothing but shyness”—more often a compliment is stuttered around about because it sets up an automatic and unpleasant dialogue in the woman’s mind.
If you say how lovely she is, or how beautiful her art is, or compliment anything else her soul took part in, inspired, or suffused, something in her mind says she is undeserving and you, the complimentor, are an idiot for thinking such a thing to begin with. Rather than understand that the beauty of her soul shines through when she is being herself, the woman changes the subject and effectively snatches nourishment away from the soul- self, which thrives on being acknowledged, on being seen.
So that is the final work of the exile who finds her own: to not only accept one’s own individuality, one’s specific identity as a certain kind of person, but also to accept one's beauty ... the shape of one’s soul and the fact that living close to that wild creature transforms us and all that it touches.
When we accept our own wild beauty, it is put into perspective, we are no longer poignantly aware of it anymore, but neither would we forsake it or disclaim it either. Does a wolf know how beautiful she is when she leaps? Does a feline know what beautiful shapes she makes when she sits? Is a bird awed by the sound it hears when it snaps open its wings? Learning from them, we just act in our own true way and do not draw back from or hide our natural beauty. Like the creatures, we just are, and it is right.
For women this searching and finding is based on the mysterious passion that women have for what is wild, what is innately themselves. We have been calling the object of this yearning Wild Woman ... but even when women do not know her by name, even when they do not know where she resides, they strain toward her: they love her with all their hearts. They long for her, and that longing is both motivation and locomotion. It is this yearning that causes us to search for Wild Woman and find her. It is not as hard as one might first imagine, for Wild Woman is searching for us too. We are her young.
Excerpted from "Women Who Run With the Wolves," by C. P. Estés, copyright @ 1992.
