Looking through the wolf's eyelash

In her absolutely fantastic prose poem The Wolf's Eyelash, Clarissa Pinkola Estés tells the tale of a woman who went out in the woods - against people's warning - met the wolf, just as she had been told she would, took her chance to save it, expected to be killed, but was instead given a wolf's eyelash to 'use and be wise'. From then on

"She saw all things
with her lash of wolf
all things true,
and all things false,
all things turning against life
and all things turning toward life,
all things seen only
through the eyes of that
which weighs the heart with heart,
and not with mind alone."

And she was able to hear, in the wolf's howling,

"the most important question
in order to see into and behind,
to weigh the value of all that lives,
wooooooooor
aieeeee th’
soooooooool?”
wooooooooor
aieeeee th’
soooooooool?”
Where is the soul?"

I, too, went into the woods, came out with a wolf's eyelash, and found - from looking through it (into myself, mostly) - that sometimes:

in the name of responsibility and helpfulness...

lurk a desire to subjugate, a need for codependency, or a lack of courage and consciousness to engage in one’s own work deeply

in the name of devotion...

opportunities to exercise control and claim ownership

in the name of compassion and empathy...

a desire to fix what one conceives - through projection - as other people’s issues, distracting one from confronting one’s own very same problems

in the name of sacrifice...

realities of living at the margins of one’s own life, or of claiming others’ lives as one’s own, thus burdening theirs

in the name of resilience and adaptability (please beware)...

risks of spirit-suicide

Where is the soul?

Photo: self-portrait