And this New Year, on this beautiful sunny warm day, I let myself go free, I did it. I did it before, but this time is for real, and the page I opened up this morning proves it…..

– Excerpt from Women Who Run With The Wolves (Clarissa Pinkola Estes)

Trying to take shoes off, too late

When the wildest nature has been nearly exterminated, in the most extreme cases, it is possible that a schizoid deterioration and or psychosis may overwhelm the woman. She may just suddenly stay in bed, refuse to rise, or wander around in her bathrobe, absently leave cigarettes burning three to an ashtray, or cry and not be able to stop, wander in the streets with her hair disheveled, abruptly leave her family to wander. She may feel suicidal, she may kill herself either accidentally or with purpose. But far more commonly, the woman just goes dead. She does not feel good or bad, she just does not feel.

 So what happens to women when their vibrant psychic colors are mushed all together? What happens when you mix Scarlett, sapphire, and topaz all together? Artists know. When you stir vibrant colors together, you get a color called mud. Not mud that is fertile, but mud that is sterile, colorless, strangely dead, that does not emit light.

When painters make mud on the canvas, they must begin all over again.

 This is the heard part, this is where the shoes have to be cut off. It hurts to cut away from addiction to destruction, Nobody knows why.

 You would think people would be relieved. You would think they would feel saved in the nick of time. You would think they would rejoice. But , no, they go into a funk, they hear teeth gnashing, and discover they are the once making that noise. They feel they are bleeding somehow, even though there is no blood. Yet it is this pain, this severing, this “not having a foot to stand on,” so to speak, this no home to go back to the handmade life, the one careful and mindfully crafted by us every day.

Yes there is pain in being severed from the red shoes. But it is our only hope. It is a severing that is filled with absolute blessing. The feet will grow back, we will find our way, we will recover, we will run and jump and skip again some day. By then our handmade life will be ready. We will skip into it and marvel that we could be so lucky to have another chance.