My Psychic Desert

I have been in discomfort of how small my above-ground life seems. Wake up, eat, walk, smell, breathe, write, read, play with kitty, make volunteer phone-calls, run, eat, sleep, repeat.

However, I am doing the work of LA LOBA; the woman who pieces together bones of the desert, creates a wolf, skeleton out of them, sings over them to bring them to life, then watches her creation take life and run into the sunset. This is the work soul-digging; of discovering bones of who I once was. I am digging up the soul-bones of the Wild Self; the potential to be fleshed out again as the creature I once was.

The wolf bones in LA LOBA represent the indestructible aspect of the Wild Self, the instinctual nature, that which will never accept the rigors and requirements of a dead and overly civilizing culture.

I am descending into my psychic land, piecing together the bones of the dancer, the writer, the artist, the creator, and singing my imagination to life.

“Many of us have lived desert lives: very small on the surface, and enormous under the ground,” Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes. “Some women don’t want to be in the psychic desert… they hate the sparseness of it. They keep trying to crank a rusty jalopy and bump their way down the road to a fantasized shining city of the psyche.” This is what I imagine I was chasing when I resisted the beautiful gift of the life I have been given. I imagined there was this paradise anorexia would take me to, and I needed to chase it daily in order to get there.

Not anymore, because the lush and the wild was not there. The lush and the wild lives in the life under the surface. It is in this spirit world where fantasized shining exists.

This is the only work I have to do.