Those kinds of projects need nurture. They need vital support-from warm people. Little Match Girl is tattered. Like the old folk song, she's been down so long it looks like up to her. No one can thrive at her level. We want to put ourselves in a situation where, like the plants and the trees, we can move toward the sun. But there has to be a sun. To do this we have to move, not just sit there. We have to do something that makes our situation different. Without a move, we are back out on the streets selling matches again.
Friends who love you and have warmth for your creative life are the very best suns in the world. When a woman, like the Little Match Girl, has no friends she becomes frozen by anguish, and sometimes by anger as well. Even if one has friends, those friends may not be suns. They may give comfort instead of informing the woman about her increasingly frozen circumstances. They comfort her-but that is far different from nurture. Nurture moves you from one place to another.
The difference between comfort and nurture is this: if you have a plant that is sick because you keep it in a dark closet, and you say soothing words to it, that is comfort. If you take the plant out of the closet and put it in the sun, give it something to drink, and then talk to it, that is nurture.
When women are disconnected from the nurturing love of the wild mother, they are on the equivalent of a subsistence diet in the outer world. The ego is just eking out a life, just taking the barest of nourishment from without and returning each night from whence she began, over and over. There she sleeps, exhausted.
She cannot awaken to a life with a future because her wretched life is like a hook upon which she hangs daily. In initiations, spending a significant period of time under difficult conditions is part of a dismemberment that severs one from ease and complacency. As an initiatory passage, it will come to a conclusion, and the newly "sanded down" woman will commence a refreshed and enwisened spiritual and creative life. However, women in Match Girl condition could be said to be involved in an initiation that has gone awry. The hostile conditions do not serve to deepen, only to decimate. Another venue, another environ, with different supports and guides, must be chosen.
The Match Girl lights more matches. Each fantasy burns out, and again the child is in the snow and freezing. When the psyche freezes, a woman is turned toward herself and no one else. She lights a third match. This is the fairy-tale three, the magic number, the point at which something new should happen. But in this case, because fantasy overwhelms action, nothing new occurs.
And that is the blessedness of everyone's psyche. Even in the event of such a painful ending as the Match Girl's, there is a ray of light. When enough time, discontent, and pressure have been brought to bear, the Wild Woman of the psyche will hurl new life into a woman's mind, giving her opportunity to act in her own behalf once more. As we can see from the suffering involved, it is far better to heal one's addiction to fantasy than wait around wishing and hoping to be raised from the dead.
-Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Woman Who Run With the Wolves
Friends who love you and have warmth for your creative life are the very best suns in the world. When a woman, like the Little Match Girl, has no friends she becomes frozen by anguish, and sometimes by anger as well. Even if one has friends, those friends may not be suns. They may give comfort instead of informing the woman about her increasingly frozen circumstances. They comfort her-but that is far different from nurture. Nurture moves you from one place to another.
The difference between comfort and nurture is this: if you have a plant that is sick because you keep it in a dark closet, and you say soothing words to it, that is comfort. If you take the plant out of the closet and put it in the sun, give it something to drink, and then talk to it, that is nurture.
When women are disconnected from the nurturing love of the wild mother, they are on the equivalent of a subsistence diet in the outer world. The ego is just eking out a life, just taking the barest of nourishment from without and returning each night from whence she began, over and over. There she sleeps, exhausted.
She cannot awaken to a life with a future because her wretched life is like a hook upon which she hangs daily. In initiations, spending a significant period of time under difficult conditions is part of a dismemberment that severs one from ease and complacency. As an initiatory passage, it will come to a conclusion, and the newly "sanded down" woman will commence a refreshed and enwisened spiritual and creative life. However, women in Match Girl condition could be said to be involved in an initiation that has gone awry. The hostile conditions do not serve to deepen, only to decimate. Another venue, another environ, with different supports and guides, must be chosen.
The Match Girl lights more matches. Each fantasy burns out, and again the child is in the snow and freezing. When the psyche freezes, a woman is turned toward herself and no one else. She lights a third match. This is the fairy-tale three, the magic number, the point at which something new should happen. But in this case, because fantasy overwhelms action, nothing new occurs.
And that is the blessedness of everyone's psyche. Even in the event of such a painful ending as the Match Girl's, there is a ray of light. When enough time, discontent, and pressure have been brought to bear, the Wild Woman of the psyche will hurl new life into a woman's mind, giving her opportunity to act in her own behalf once more. As we can see from the suffering involved, it is far better to heal one's addiction to fantasy than wait around wishing and hoping to be raised from the dead.
-Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Woman Who Run With the Wolves
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