Wild Heart

"Before Zen, mountains were mountais and trees were trees.
During Zen, mountains were thrones of the spirits and trees were the voices of wisdom.
After Zen, mountains were mountains and trees were trees."

From Women Who Run with the Wolves

Last night I picked up this old favourite and read the story of the Crescent Moon Bear. I will just summarise Clarissa Pinkola Estes telling of the story here. Its the story of a good wife whose husband has returned from war angry and inconsolable. He goes to live in the woods and she brings him carefully prepared food but he turns over the tray and refuses to eat. So the good wife goes to a healer to ask for help. The wise woman says that to make a cure she needs one hair from the crescent on the Crescent Moon Bear. To get to the bear the good wife must climb a mountain. As she climbs she acknowledges the illusions she meets on the way. When she gets to the top, she finds the bear's cave and she places the food she has prepared for him on the ground. The bear smells the food and comes out to eat it. This continues for many nights until one night the good wife is brave enough to place the food close to the mouth of the cave. When the bear comes out he smells the food and sees two, small human feet. The bear roars so loudly that the wive's bones hum, but she stands her ground. The bear rears up on his hind legs, opens his jaw wide and roars again, but the wife still stands her ground and asks the bear for help. The bear drops back down onto all fours and the wife looks right into his old, old eyes and for a moment sees entire mountain ranges, villages, valleys and rivers and as she does she stops trembling and feels calm and the bear lifts himself up so that she can see his throat and the strong pulse of his heart and she takes a hair from the crescent there.

The wife then travels back down the mountain again thanking the illusions around her. When she gets back to the healer, ragged and soiled, she shows her the hair. The healer takes it and throws it on the fire. The wife is horrified! The healer asks her if she remembers each step she took climbing the mountain, if she remembered each step she took to capture the trust of the bear, what she saw, felt, heard and she replied "Yes". So the healer tells her to go home and proceed in the same way with her husband.


I feel as though recently I have made a journey on my own magic mountain. Feeling wounded and facing great change, my own inner wounded soldier seeks the familiar. She carries on with old, familiar patterns of punishment and refusal to accept help. Like the soldier in the story who wants to stay sleeping on stones, without food or love, that wounded self is hurting, their story is that life is painful and dark and to keep being right about that or to maintain the illusion of that reality means refusing love and kindness from the nurturing self. So this time I took my nurturing self and stepped away from that wounded soldier to look for a new and healing path. And that's when magic started to happen! To step onto a healing path where everything is an illusion, everything can be interpreted from a million perspectives. In the story the wife says thank you to the branches for lifting their hair so that she can pass underneath, to the mountain for letting her climb onto its body. Obstacles become her allies and from this place of gentle persistance, the kind heart climbs the mountain and meets only kindness.

At the top of the mountain, this kindness and compassion lets her meet her own wild heart nature. And as she looks this wild hearted creature right in the eyes and stands to face it, she sees her true nature reflected back at her. Her true, wise and eternal nature. As she faces this nature, all her fears dissolve and in an instant she is calmed. This is absolutely the most powerful part of the story for me. She goes back to her world changed and with the final lesson that all the solutions are part of her and her journey.

This has been my most powerful lesson this year. It all came together with Jessie's the Be Brave project, upheaval and change at work and my decision to resign and move back to Spain. This time I faced my fears by tending my heart, giving it what it needed and listening to what it wanted. It responded by turning from battle scarred and grey into a juicy, beating joyful thing that started to pound again in my chest. I kept doing whatever I needed to do to take care of myself and chose the best path for me. I found my core, the inner sense of security that no external event can overthrow because I am always able to take my kind heart and climb the mountain to face my biggest fears.

Wishing you magic on your own tender hearted journies.