Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

There is a saying in my family: the gatekeeper of stories will exact their due from you, that is, force you to live a certain kind of life, a daily discipline, bend you to many years of study—not idle study as ego finds it convenient, but one built upon exacting patterns and requirements. I cannot emphasize this enough.

parts inside themselves and at depth ... they have had a long mentorship, a long spiritual “discipleship,” and a long time perfecting their disciplines. Persons such as these are immediately recognizable by their presence alone.

Some are called to this healing art, and the best, by my lights, are those who have genuinely lain with the story, and found all its matching

It is believed that talent in healing derives from the reading of this faint writing upon the soul and the development of what is found there. Story, as one part of a five-part healing discipline, is considered the destiny of one who carries such inscribing. Not all carry such, but those who do have their own futures written upon them. They are cal

that constitute the body of healing knowledge, according to its requirements—not theirs—according to its initiations, according to its prescribed forms.

The lucky ones will, with much difficulty, discomfort, and inconvenience, enter a rigorous and many-years-long course of work that will teach them to carry on the tradition as they learned it, with all the proper preparations, blessings, percussions, essential insights, ethics, and attitudes

In my “farthest-back” culture, although we bridge the modern world, there is at the root a timeless storyteller legacy, wherein one teller hands down his or her stories and the knowledge of the medicine in them to one or more las semillas “seed” persons. “Seeds” are people “who have the gift from birth onward.” They are the future story-keeps whom

Whenever a fairy tale is told, it becomes night. No matter where the dwelling, no matter the time, no matter the season, the telling of tales causes a starry sky and a white moon to creep from the eaves and hover over the heads of the listeners. Sometimes, by the end of the tale, the chamber is filled with daybreak, other times a star shard is left

Stories are medicine.