Power to
Transform
“How
could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of
all races—the myths about dragons that at the last moment are
transformed into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are
only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and
courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest
essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
Rainer
Maria Rilke
Do you have a favorite
myth or fairy tale ? One of my favorites is La Loba as told by
Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves. La
Loba (the Wolf) is an old lady, a hag really, who daily goes out into
mountains and valleys to collect the scattered bones of creatures
that are about to be lost to the world. She is especially fond of
wolf bones. She takes them back to her cave high above a river
valley, and painstakingly lays them out on the floor before the fire.
When she has collected and laid out every single wolf bone so that
she has a complete skeleton, she begins to sing over them. As she
sings, the wolf bones come together with sinew and muscles. Organs
form inside and skin covers. Fur grows upon the creature. La Loba
sings and the wolf begins to breathe, and suddenly, it jumps up, and
runs from the cave and down the river valley. Somewhere in its
running, either by sunlight, or by moonlight, or by splashing into
the river, the wolf is transformed into a laughing woman, wild and
free.
Stories of bones called
back to life can be found in many cultures. Remember the Old
Testament story about the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel (37:1-14) in
which Yahweh instructs Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, to call to
the four winds, and the bones come together and rise up into a vast
army. Not surprising, I suppose, that an old woman would sing bones
into an earthy creature that becomes a laughing woman, and a male
prophet would raise up an army of men; nonetheless, both are stories
of transformation. Something dead—or something dead in us—is
called back to robust life through the vehicle of love—La Loba's
love for the wolves, and Yahweh's love for his people. The
dragon-into-princess stories are the same—they tell of the power of
love to transform even a monster into something beautiful.
We would do well, in
these time of toxic hate, to remember that the power that calls us
back to life, and life in abundance, is love.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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