Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Diamonds in the Dark

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You are listening toInsights at the Edge Today I speak with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, an internationally recognized scholar, award-winning poet, diplomat, senior Jungian psychoanalyst, and contadora, keeper of the old stories in the Latina tradition. In addition to her international bestseller, Women Who Run With the Wolves, Dr. Estes is deputy managing editor and columnist, writing on politics, spirituality, and culture, at the news blog themoderatevoice.com and a columnist at The National Catholic Reporter online. She is currently teaching a new series of online events through Sounds True on Mother Night: Learning to See in the Dark. Here is a conversation, a kind of preview, about this new series, a conversation I would like to call “Diamonds in the Dark,” with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Hi, Tami.

Tami Simon: Hi, Clarissa, and welcome to Insights at the Edge.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Hi, thank you.

Tami Simon: Now, I was thinking, previous to this conversation, the first time that you and I were on the radio together.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Oh my.

Tami Simon: Was actually more than two decades ago.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: That is true.

Tami Simon: Twenty-two years ago.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: That is true. [laughs]

Tami Simon: Anyway, wonderful to once again be talking to you, interviewing you, and hearing what you have to say.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Thank you, Tami.

Tami Simon: What a long period of time, twenty-two years.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: I know, I know. You were a young little kid, and I remember. I remember your headphones were bigger than you were, actually. Nowadays headphones are little teeny-tiny things.

Tami Simon: Now on this occasion, we are talking about Mother Night, which is a new online event series with Sounds True. Mother Night: Learning to See in the Dark. And to begin, I am wondering if you can tell our listeners what you mean by “Mother Night.”

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Well actually it is an idea that you and I have talked about for almost twenty years, this concept of an idea that many things that bring creative life and healing and ideas, innovations, inventions, and solutions, to real down-to-earth issues and challenges. And they actually come out of the dark, they come out of nowhere, seemingly, they come from over your shoulder. They come from just out of the corner of your eye. They come from the unconscious; they come from the part of the psyche that stores not just quirks and oddities and forgotten shreds of memory and so forth, but also stores of great gifts, of insight, intuition, knowledge, that some people would call uncanny only because it doesn’t appear to come right from the forefront of the mind. And the concept of Mother Night is a metaphor for the intuitive psyche, for the phenomenal power that each person is born with to know without exactly knowing literally how to proceed, where to go next, by hook or by crook, by hunches, by being guided by dreams at night, by listening to stories in which mystical components are buried that give direction to the hero or the heroine that can be brought down to earth in day-to-day life and followed as well, for all of us.

Tami Simon: How does listening to a story help somebody access what is in their unconscious, what is in the darkness?

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Well, the concept of the collective unconscious is that we all have a similar grid within the psyche that is a storyline. And it has been proposed by many people, aboriginal people in particular long before Freud and Jung and Adler and other people proposed it. That we all have a heroic myth or some sort of heroic storyline that we are born with and we gradually live it out and we meet people and see signposts and listen to dreams in order to be able to understand, at a deeper level, the meaning of different crooks and turns in our lives, different things that appear before us without us necessarily knowing right away how to deal with them, handle them, exploit them, create from them. And that the collective unconscious, a pattern of story, is within each of us, so that when we listen to stories, mythologies, legends, folk tales, any kind of story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, including a crisis of some sort, in which the hero or the heroine then does some grand thing, usually at great cost or often by losing first and then later being able to win back the treasured thing, whatever it was that was lost, that when we listen to stories that part of our psyche that is the story, myth-making part of our lives listens very closely. That the ego, which is more concerned with factual things and desires and so forth, literally is bypassed when story is told. And that the soul is listening, and the soul is who, you might say, is the progenitor and the broadcasting station and the transmission station within the psyche that can see, feel, hear, and interpret the lines of story as they are heard and apply them to one’s own life, one’s personal life, in a down to earth way.

You will hear me say “down to earth” quite a bit in my work because there is a lot of fatuous ideas about what mythical things mean but my sense is and my experience clinically but personally as well is that until you can bring it down to earth it is just a pretty thing or a scary thing. But once you bring it down to earth it becomes something that you can turn one way or the other and find its usefulness for your life, to enrich your life, deepen your life, understand more about your life, penetrate the meaning of the thing in your life, and so on.

So the storylines of heroes and heroines, there is always a conflict. People might start out all happy go lucky or they might start out miserable–they are orphaned, parents have been killed, house has burned down, nothing is left except a little child on the road by themselves. Or they can be born in a castle and they can have all the finest of everything, but eventually in the storyline something occurs, usually something magical, something mysterious, something very much out of the ordinary. So that you have the talking fish that shows up in “The Fisherman’s Wife” story, for instance, who promises the old man who is living in poverty with his wife that he can wish for anything he wants. And so the magic begins by something that is symbolic of something in the unconscious. And when we listen to stories like that, at the very moment that the fish shows up and talks and promises that if you let me go I will grant you a wish, we realize that in our own lives there has been not just one moment but probably many moments like that, where we are asked to make a bargain, we are asked to give up something in order to gain something. And maybe we will or maybe we won’t or maybe we will do it as the fisherman does. He says, “oh no, it is alright.” He is a very kindly person. He says, “No, no, it is alright. I will let you go. You don’t have to give me anything.”

But when he goes home and he tells his wife that he has met a talking fish who promised him a wish, the wife goes crazy. And she says, “How could you? How dare you? Look how we live. We live hand to mouth. We have nothing.” And when the person, when all of us, listen to a story like that there is something in us that knows exactly how that wife is feeling because some place in the unconscious, in our selves, in our own story, in our own myth of our own lives, there is something in us too that says “I should have it better. How dare you pass up any opportunity? People should give me things. I mean, look at how I have to live. This is horrible.”

In analytical psychology and in the kind of psychology that I follow, there is an idea that if you would take the wife and the husband in “The Fisherman’s Wife” story and the fish also, that they all represent a part of the psyche, the part that is mystical, magical, really can help bring things to fruition. That would be the fish, but it lives at great depth and is rarely seen. And also that there is a person who is good hearted, who wants to be a good person and tries very hard to be in the world but is not quite made for the world of competition and argumentation and debate, who would rather just live easier and more calmly. And then there is another part of the psyche that is crabby all the time, that feels like it is unhonored and that it is also without power. And so there you have the conflict of many, many people’s life stories.

The one who is probably most valuable of all is the treasure, which lives just out of sight. There is the one who isn’t lazy but sort of passes it off, doesn’t recognize that having relationship with that treasure and whatever would be engendering of something greater would create a third thing, would make something happen that would be useful and good. And then there is always the eternally crabby one, which, well, some days I think I was just born in a bad mood because it is so pervasive, but the fact of the matter is that that is the least developed in the psyche and that is what sets up the whole conflict.

Tami Simon: So in listening to a story like that, Clarissa, I mean I totally see what you mean in terms of the ego part of the listener being lulled to sleep and this other part of me starts listening that sees images, etc. What I am curious about is for you, as really one of the world’s most respected story tellers, what happens for you when a story is coming through you? What is that like?

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: That is a good question, and it is one I have never been asked before. I think that in that moment I do not feel that I am visible, only the story is visible. I cannot say that I am thinking about what the next line of the story is because that is not how it happens. I can’t say that I planned out what the story…how it will unfold other than its basic bones beforehand. And during I have the same sensation that a lot of people have or describe in meditation or in deep prayer, that I often don’t realize how much time has passed during the telling of the story. And I am often surprised that it is either a short amount of time or much, much longer than I had perceived.

So I would say that I belong to a tradition of storytellers who tell from, hopefully, the deepest sense of telling, which is not an ego presentation, like “listen to this wonderful story, isn’t it charming and it isn’t it interesting?” it has more to do with my soul speaking to the souls of others. And in those moments I would say that it is like a story to go invisible by, that the teller is no longer visible. You might be able to see them and hear them, of course, but they are not present in the way that they are if you are going to, you know, go look up the phone number of the pizza parlor and order pizza with pineapple on it. You know?

Tami Simon: And as we talk about this new online series Mother Night: Learning to See in the Dark, I mean, in a sense what you are saying about the way you approach telling a story…it is a kind of seeing in the dark. What I am curious about is, how can you teach other people to do this? Can you teach other people to see in the dark?

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Yes, of course. Because everyone is born with that innate sensitivity of perception. It is an uncanny kind of perception. It knows sometimes what people are going to say before they say it. It knows when someone has the intention of kissing you before they even make the move toward kissing you. They know by looking at their children what mood their children are in when they come through the door at the end of the day. They have a sense of which way to go, left or right, on a road, literally, that is going to lead them toward instead of away from wherever they are meant to go. This intuitional sense is born into everyone, and it has many different layers to it. Some of it has to do with what to do to heal yourself, what to create that will have reach to it, what to say to people that will calm them and help them and heal them, how to touch people—physically touch them—in ways that will awaken them and cause them to feel sheltered and cherished, and so on and so forth.

And there are a lot of people in our world who have injured instinct. Injured intuition. There is no doubt. Because particularly our culture is a highly competitive culture and is very interested in making people into competitors. And there are lots of cultural reasons for that, that have to do with making money and being the best of whatever—the high jumpers, the long distance runners, or whatever it is. However, soul is not particularly interested in those things. Soul is interested in having a relationship with all the aspects of a person’s life and being present to it and being consulted about it. And that is usually what lies in the dark.

That fish in that story is the one who knows, is the La Que Sabe, the one who knows, about which way to go next, about what to do next, about what to offer next. And when that is injured in a person, as later, because the fish is asked by the fisherman’s wife to keep giving bigger and bigger things. She makes the husband go back out onto the open sea, call up the fish again, and tell him that progressively she wants to be king. He resists asking, but she forces him. She says she won’t love him anymore. And so he goes back onto the sea and calls to the fish. The fish says, “Go home. It is already granted.” He goes home and there is a palace, courtiers, jesters, there are the soldiers, and there is his wife with her great big crown on and she is king. But the wife isn’t happy. And she sends him back again. She says, “Go tell that fish that I want to be pope.” He tries to talk her out of it but there is no use. She is the ego, she says, “I must be important. I must be big. I must be competitive. I must be better than others, etc.” And of course she is going down the wrong path. No one, no soul, can exist with an ego like that. It will run away from you. It will have what we call, and what we will talk about in Mother Night, a condition in curandismo that means the soul is literally shocked out of the person or is repulsed by the person’s actions and so moves off to the side a bit, sometimes too far away, and has to be called back again in order for the soul to be reunited with the rest of the psyche so that it can see through the eyes of the soul, feel through the feelings of the soul, think through the soul’s thoughts, that enrich a person’s life instead of just making it a shallow, egotistical thing.

So in the story the fisherman’s wife eventually sends the husband out onto the open sea again, telling him he has to tell the fish that she wants to be god. And the old man is beside himself. “You can’t be god.” “Yes I can.” “The fish said it could grant any wish. I want to be god.” And so the fisherman rides out in a huge storm that comes up the sides of the boat, into the boat, and is washing him practically out of the boat, and he calls up this fish in the middle of the storm. “Flounder, flounder in the sea, my wife would have me speak with thee.” And the fish comes up on the tip of its fin, on a dark green wave, but it is bleeding. It is bleeding bright red blood all the way down the green wave in the middle of the storm. And the fish says, “What now?” And the old man says, “My wife wants to be god.” And the fish says, “Tell her she has asked too much.” And the fish slides down the green wave all bloody and falls down under the water. And the old man rows home and the storm calms and there is his old wife. And she is back in the hovel again, and everything is just as it was at the beginning of the tale.

The concept of the soul being torn or hurt or bleeding when the ego demands too much, too much, over and over again, going in the wrong direction, going toward self-importance, self-aggrandization, caring too much about what others think, is what is the symptom of broken intuition, of this fabulous gift that is given whole at birth, into every soul, into every being on earth. And somehow usually because the culture, the schooling, etc, has cut it out of them or broken it or shamed it or said that it is absurd and not substantive enough, that it now goes up on the wave bleeding and says, “You can ask no more of me. You can ask no more. It is over.” And the person returns to their previous impoverished state of thinking.

Jung’s idea was that a deflation, a serious deflation, will follow a grotesque inflation in a person’s ideas that are beyond the reach of the soul in once sense and not funded by the soul, not rooted in the soul. So seeing in the dark means in one way that you would always see that the roots of anything that are worth doing, the roots of anything that are worth protesting, resisting, creating, making, forging, the roots are always in the waters of the soul. Always. The minute that they are only in the layer of the ego, people are incredibly unoriginal, uncreative, and in many ways turn into automatons who are striving only to look like something rather than actually to be something in depth.

Tami Simon: Clarissa, I can imagine someone listening saying, well, you know, I fall somewhere in the middle. I feel part of my soul in tact. But part of my soul having left. And I know that from my own competitiveness and ego drivenness, etc. So I am someplace in-between. What would…you mentioned curanderismo, how could curanderismo, first of all explain to our listeners what that is, but how could it help me? How would it approach my situation?

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Well, one of our sessions during the Mother Night web event is going to be on curanderismo. Curanderismo simply means this; it is one of the ancient healing arts that come from the Latino people. It appears that it may actually have its origins partly in Sephardic Judaism that was carried from old Spain into the so-called new world, in Mexico. And that it also was melded with healing traditions from the African slaves that were brought to the East coast of Yucatan, of Mexico. And also melded together with the indigenous practices of the over five hundred tribal groups that were in Mexico prior to the conquest of which there were less than two hundred left after the conquest.

But the healing principles revolve around the idea that each person is born with a convener, a knowledgeable being, a La Que Sabe, one who knows, that the center of the psyche or of their whole life. And that this is partly divine and partly human. And it corresponds certainly also with various religious views, that there is something in each person that is spark of god or creator as we call it. And that there is also a part that is most definitely human. And that the human part is not supposed to eclipse the divine part. The contrary: the divine leads and the human follows. Like that.

So curanderismo is a set of symptoms and diagnoses that have to do with the condition of the soul and have to do with how the soul can be tied up, blindfolded, set aside, wander off. For instance, one of the conditions is called “mal ojo.” Two words. Mal, bad. Ojo, eye. A bad eye means that you look at life with cynicism, that you are a disappointed idealist and you have decided to take cynicism on as your protective armor. And that because you do this it literally blinds the soul. It puts like a blindfold over the eyes of the soul so that you cannot see anymore, so that it cannot speak to you about what it sees because the cynicism of the ego, which means people are not what they say they are, healing cannot be achieved, usefulness cannot be gotten, meaning is meaningless, etc. That is a form of cynicism. There are many aspects of cynicisms. But essentially what it means to have lost your belief in the goodness of humans and of the soul and the creator all together in one place.

And curanderismo suggests cures for that, suggests healings for that. And just like in Buddhism, just like in Catholicism and Judaism and Muslimism, there are practices that a person undertakes daily in order to recenter themselves in the greater self, in the amma, in the soul, rather than letting the ego, the monkey, run off with everything every day. And that practice is the most important thing that a person can do because the ego is as you know attracted in all of us to the bright shiny things in life. Sort of like a pack rat or even like a raven is attracted to whatever shines. And lots of things don’t shine, because they are in the dark, but they are treasure nonetheless. And so the practices are meant to always remind that you are born as treasure. A treasure hunt is a lot of what healing is about, going after the basic treasure and bringing it to the surface once again and wrapping oneself around with it and using all of its attributes to create, to make friendships and alliances, to heal earth and self and friends and family and so on. And without it, without the soul in the lead, it is essentially like going forward with your ankles hobbled together and a blindfold on and earplugs in, and the only thing you can hear is the cacophony of the culture and all the things that it says are most important.

One of the reasons I was attracted many, many years ago to Carl Jung’s work is one of the first things I read was a book that is not very popular, that was written by him. It is called Civilization in Transition. It is Volume Ten, and I read it in the library when I was a teenager. And I saw that it was about alienation and I felt that I was surrounded by it as well as having it. You know, if you could say it is an illness, alienation. I also had alienation myself. And I thought it was the most brilliant thing he had ever written because he said that in order to return to the great Self, capital “S” as he put it, and I understand him to mean that as creator, that spark of divine life inside each of us, that one had to leave the collective. In other words, one had to, in some way, for some time, turn their back on the popular culture or the subculture that one was raised in and to examine it from the outside and to cut the ties that are not…how would I put it? That don’t feed the root lines of the soul, that only feed the ego. So it gets bigger and bigger until, you know, it explodes, just from being too big. That is the inflation going back down into a deflation again.

So originally when you and I talked about doing this series, Tami, I told you I was interested in teaching other people to help take care of people who are sensitive, that is my word for what some people call empathic people, who some people call highly intuitive people, because I think that the highly intuitive nature, born into everybody, is completely misunderstood. And I think that it begins possibly in the family. But for sure it begins in school.

Tami Simon: Can you explain how you see it being misunderstood? What is the misunderstanding?

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: The misunderstanding, I think…if I could just give the example of Kindergarten or grade school. You are not allowed to sleep when you are tired; you are not allowed to go toward the things you want to learn. You are not allowed to stand up and yawn or sing or whatever when you feel the spirit moves you. And you have to think basically that little children have reason for doing what they are doing, for their singing, for their sleepiness, or their wanting to eat. And in school we enter into an almost like a shoot for cattle, I think. Montessori and Waldorf being the exceptions, most certainly. But the majority of our culture goes through a process whereby they literally sit for twelve years of being utterly bored and being supposed to behave themselves.

There are some open windows and especially if there is a gifted teacher from time to time, that makes all the difference in the world during those twelve years. But essentially, little free spirits, sweet little children, are being taught to behave and not to use intuition, not to see what they see, not to comfort their little playmates because they see that they are hurt but now it the time to sit down and do math. Now it not the time is a very popular saying at school. Now is not the time for that. Now is the time for memorizing how a sentence is structured. And let’s just say all that is good. Math, learning how to do a sentence, all that is good. But, unfortunately, what is cut out is a child’s imagination, a child’s intuition, a child’s impulse, to think, see, inquire about and to give to other people in other parts of the world. Because it is all preplanned. You get there and you do this and after you do this you do that.

As adults it has been stunningly beautiful to me to see that as soon as people get out of school, whether it is high school or college, they never live that way ever again. They try very hard not to live in some kind of monochromatic way that makes their life seem like there is a metronome playing all the time, but instead they begin to feel again the need to create. They often feel it in high school and some kids drop out of high school because there is no avenue whatsoever for them to create at the level that they want to. And same with college. Lots of people cannot find what they need there, because what they need is so soulful, so intuitive, so highly of the psyche at its depths, that it doesn’t exist in that school system. So that is what I mean.

And today I was at the bookstore and I saw two little children who had apparently gone to a fair and had their faces painted, and the one little child was bringing a little book up to the cash register, and she was singing all the way up. A little song. You know, one of those little nonsense songs that we all sang when we were little. And her mother said to her, “Stop that. Don’t run. Stop jumping. Walk.” And you know, there was no reason for that child to stop jumping. It wasn’t unsafe. There weren’t other people she was bumping into. That little child stopped, immediately stopped, stopped singing, stopped jumping. And still had her little book in her hand, which was very sweet. I hope her mother buys her lots and lots of books.

But you see if you look around, you see people saying stop when there is no reason to stop. And they think that that is just idle play, when in fact, who knows why that child is singing. Maybe she is going to be a poet and she is starting to make up rhymes. Maybe she is singing to comfort herself. Maybe she is singing because she is gonna be a mother someday and she is gonna sing lullabies and feel confident of her voice, because nobody ever told her not to. We don’t know what gifts she is bringing by doing that.

So just at those very basic levels is where I would say many people were cut off. And I am sure some people would like to slough that off and say, “oh well, it is not important, I mean look, people need discipline.” Yes, they do. People need to be socialized. Yes, they do. But not be broken. There is no point in breaking people. You can teach people without breaking them. And so Mother Night is a six-part series, geared toward helping people remember what the elementals are that they were born with, the divine ones that they were born with, the gifted ones that they were born with, ways of looking at what they have lost if anything, but certainly also looking at other people so they can help other people, too. And understand other people who may have lost a great deal or who may still be in tact and they kind of seem odd because they are still in tact. And that really is true, that the more in tact person is intuitively the more odd they may look in our culture because our culture doesn’t hold that in esteem particularly.

So the curanderismo as well as other aspects that we are going to look at during that time are all geared toward understanding and reconvening, restituting, those things that are lost. And teaching about them and themselves as well as in others. And I think that the throwing off from overculturation as our first session is incredibly important. We have several ideas of what we are going to do during that time that are going to be talking about walking into the world. And I chose the archetype of the medial woman to start out with because the medial woman is one of the areas that has been written about somewhat in Toni Wolff’s work, who was a Jungian analyst back in the day and who left a wonderful, very short, essay, just a few pages long, that included the idea of the woman who can see in the dark. She didn’t put it that way, but she is talking about women who are highly intuitive who have more in common with Sophia and such, the archetypal beings who carry memory, who are helper/healers, who are seers, who are blessers of others, the bless others into health, bless others into creative life, bless other people into finding their way, and who carry sight that is uncanny. And that belongs to everyone: men, women, children, everyone. And I would add, frankly, dogs, cats, birds, also.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people want to call it animal. That it is just an animal thing when the big tsunami hit in part of Asia three or four years ago and little hundreds and thousands of people’s lives were lost. People reported, who had survived afterwards, reported that the birds all flew inland before the tsunami even happened. There is something that is knowing, even in creatures, and maybe especially in creatures. And there is no reason why those things wouldn’t be in humans as well.

Tami Simon: Now you mention this idea of overculturation and how we have to break free of that to discover our full intuitive selves and our full creativity. And I am wondering if you can give me some examples of where you have seen people stuck or struggling with overculturation and how they got through it and what it looked like.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: You know, this is what I would tell you. Just to try to open up a line of consciousness. Most of us are not aware at all at how overculturated we are. Most of us just take for granted that we live in a house with square walls and wear certain kinds of clothing, such as is available in the stories. And we have certain holidays, national holidays for instance, that we all celebrate and we all go to church or temple or satsang or whatever it is we go to. And that all of those are like, sort of, normal. But there actually are not.

The culture tells us essentially what wee will eat, for many, many years, before a person wakes up somewhere along the line and says, “You know, this might not be the best thing for me.” Tells us what we should laugh at. Tells us what kind of music we should buy. Used to be much more so when music was only introduced to us via radio. And via other schemes people had about suppressing certain musics and playing only certain other kinds of music. The overculture tells us how to behave socially, without consulting us. Just, this is how you behave. This is how far you stand from someone. This is what you, how you sit with someone, how you walk with someone. This is what you say to someone that you know. This is what you never say to someone. This is what you say to strangers. This is what you never say to strangers. And so forth. Laws, the laws of the land, they are given to us. We don’t usually have a great deal to say about the laws that have been written before we were born. But they dominate us, nonetheless, whatever they are. Whether they are about how you should…recently there was an article about very young people who have had sex with one another being identified as sexual predators by the law, when in fact they are two people who are very much like any two people who are young and had sex with each other. But, somehow, because of the laws of the state that they lived in, they were dragged before the court.

There is our ancient dramas that we used to practice. Almost none of them are present any longer. Most all of them have been replaced by national dramas such as Independence Day, such as Halloween, for instance, which is a tatter of the old holy sacrament that it used to be long ago. We have ways that we are supposed to act psychologically, things we are supposed to accept in terms of what other people do or say to us. In employment, for instance. The religion is almost clear cut for us, all written down, and wherever it started it now is elaborated. If Christ is only…I think he has twenty pages or less of dialogue in the new Testament, but the church law that has since been written about what is and what isn’t’, who should and who shouldn’t, is literally volumes and volumes and volumes. So most all of us no longer have the artifacts that our ancestors had that tie us to the soul. I mean, I am looking at the shirt I’ve got on, which I am pretty sure is made of cotton, and I am looking at my socks that I have on, which are probably made of nylon, polyester, something like that. And I am thinking, you know, not even your clothing any longer represents anything sacred for you. You have to stick something on your clothing to remember. Like I wear the talisman of the sacred heart. I wear a little red embroidered sacred heart on my shirt every day. And I’ve pinned on a little angel pin that is carrying a little red heart in her hand. And I have to add that to my clothing. It doesn’t come from my culture. The overculture is not the place where the soul will be fed. It just isn’t. A person has to make additions, has to bring other ideas in.

So the work that you have brought into being, Tami, through Sounds True, like one of the things that you’ve been interested in is work that has meaning for people, what Buddhists call right livelihood. That is an addition to the culture. That is actually a going away from the collective and saying in order for me to be whole I have to follow this other premise that comes out of the soul or out of the deeper sense of self than what the culture tells me, which is that I should probably do just about anything at any price in order to make the most amount of whatever, you know, peanuts I can make. And that doesn’t work for the soul. That only makes the soul, you might say, lethargic and distant. The same thing with language. There are a lot of people who say we can’t use certain language in our culture. We are not supposed to use the language of soul, for instance.

So when I sat on the state grievance board and was the chair of that board for several years, I would often talk about the soul with regard to people who are being grieved against and the damage that some of them had done to their patients. And at first the other members of the board who were mostly lawyers look at me as though I had grown flowers out of my ears, but eventually they became used to it. And they sometimes themselves after a couple of years would start talking about “the soul of the matter” might really be this whereas the legal part of the matter is that. In other words, they were learning to not speak only in terms of the collective culture, saying that the collective culture has a final say so. But that there were other considerations too. So those are just a couple of the issues.

I think that diet is another one that certainly often comes up for people, especially if they have been ill and they realize by doing some research of talking to people that literally they have been taking in too much poison. And that the poison has been packaged in happy packaging with lots of colorful pictures on the front and all kinds of crinkly snappy crunchy things inside. Taste really good because they are loaded with salt and sugar. They realized that how they feel physically when they eat food like that also has something to do with the clarity of the soul. It is very hard to see and think and feel deeply when you are lethargic as a result of an overabundance of really rotten, processed food. So these, like I said, there is a part of our culture that pooh-poohs all this, that says oh no, no, nothing is going to hurt anybody. Everybody should eat all the garbage that they want to. What does the soul have to do with anything anyway? And these are the legal precedents that have been set and those are the only ones we are going to follow and that people should work hard because we need more worker bees in this world. No, we don’t. The fact is we don’t. We have to leave those collective ideas and explore other ideas. And that is what the Mother Night series is about. It is about looking for how we shall live in a way that is meaningful to us, whether our culture approves or not.

My dad is from the old country. He is from a very tiny farm village of only forty-five families in the south of Hungary in former Yugoslavia. He was a farmer until he was a very young little boy and then he was sent away to apprentice as a tailor in a village far away from his mother and sisters and brothers. He had a hard life. He had a father who used to come home from his work as a cabinet maker far away because there wasn’t enough work in the village, you know, men went sometimes thousands of miles away to work, leaving the women and the children at home. But anyway, every time his dad would come home for some reason he would take it out on my father and he would beat him up and his mother sent him away to try to preserve him. And so he was sent away at too young an age. So he I think knew a lot about harshness of life and what it is like to be without love, also, and comfort of your own mother, for instance. And yet he had this saying that he said that took him through life pretty well and frankly I don’t believe any of us can live it all the time, including him, but it is a wonderful touchstone to keep returning to. He said, “You might as well be who you are, because half of the world won’t like it anyway.” Meaning that if you do everything just right, the way the culture says, because whoever says…half the world won’t like you. Period. They don’t. Certainly the people who are rooted in meaning are going to pass you by as superficial and shallow. On the other hand, if you be as you are, to the depth that you are, half the world isn’t going to like you either. So you might as well choose to be the odd, unusual, strange people that we are.

A few weeks ago when I was talking to you, you said, and I quote, because I wrote it down…

Tami Simon: You are scaring me now.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: “I have the path of the freak. I am the head freak.” That is what you said to me.

Tami Simon: [laughs]

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: And I thought you couldn’t say a more blessed thing about yourself. And I’m curious. I know that the terminology of “freak” and weirdo and all of those bad words. I used to denigrate people, but actually they mean a person who stands outside the usual. They mean a person who thinks for themselves and had such a vision that is so unique to them that it is not replicated by every other person. It just isn’t. They are not a duplicate; they are an original. And I believe that every soul on this earth was born as an original.

Tami Simon: Now, Clarissa, implicit in what you are saying, I think, and I would just like you to make it more explicit to me, is this idea of if we through off the overculturation, if we fly our freak flag, whatever, using my language, that this will then…

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: I like that.

Tami Simon: That this will open up certain capacities, our instincts will be intact, and this idea of learning to see in the dark or knowing what is happening around the corner, etc., that somehow we will have these capacities. That is the connection you are making?

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Right. Well, I think the sense would be this way: would you like to be able to understand all the unconscious things that keep rising up for you? Quirks of personality. The night dreams. The parts of your psyche that seem to know things without knowing them, even though you say to yourself, no, I must have just imagined that. Do you want to have that kind of richness in your life that is actually your companion and your helper in life? Or do you want to turn away from it and leave this huge bounty of treasures all by itself in your own psyche and never develop it?

That to me is the thing. If I think about the writing that I’ve done, I most often write according to what I am told or hear or sense. In the ether, you might say, in the air, but also in my body and my soul, I don’t believe that I could keep my sense of selfhood as buried as deeply into soul life if I were to take the temptations that sometimes come by to do things that aren’t warranted, aren’t summoned by, and aren’t certified by the soul. And I try very hard to measure and to see which is which. Because it literally costs way too much to be involved with things that aren’t certified by the soul. One of the reasons I don’t drink alcohol and I don’t do recreational drugs, as it is called, is because my soul absolutely will not agree with the condition that those leave me in, which definitely occlude vision, sensitivity, insight, and perception.

You and I have joked and I know…because I grew up in the time when people were taking LSD, for instance, mushrooms, and so on. And people tried very hard to convince me that I should try those, and I would always say to them, no, no you don’t understand. I see all the time the depth of things. And almost unbearable beauty that can be in any given thing all the time. If you told me that I should take a drug so that I can learn to keep my desk clean, I might really consider it. Because that is where my deficit is. Is in living in the very petty, mundane world of finding my house keys and keeping my shoes tied and so on and so forth. And I manage. I’ve learned to manage that. But I personally feel, strongly, that alcohol, drugs, and certain foods should not be ingested by people because it occludes their ability to sensitively receive the messages that are being sent to them in their consciousness from what we might call the unconscious or the dark. That they are not as alive or aware or awake as they can be and as they are gifted to be. Every person I have ever spoken with you is a great creator…I am thinking of Sherman Alexie, the poet, or Annie Leibovitz, or I am thinking about Jessie Norman, the soprano, Maya Angelou, any person I have met who has had profound depth as well as being able in some way to represent it outwardly to others in a way that touches them, helps them, teaches them, heals them, delights them, raises them up in some way, has had a history of wrong turns. Haven’t we all? My god. But also then has had a history of exploration of what does not show above ground. And has started making the turns that literally make them pour out with whatever their gifts are. Toward others. So that others can be lifted and can learn also. I’ve never met a person who has not made wrong turns. I haven’t. IN fact, I would venture that gifted people make bigger, badder wrong turns [laughs] than just the average rubber plant does.

But still, there is a lot to be learned from those wrong turns and what there is to learn about them often stands in the dark as a result of shaming and cultural judgments on whatever it is that they have done and so on and so forth. But there is great learning to be had from those wrong turns. And it is usually in the dark, where has been under great pressure, over long periods of time in the dark. And you know what that makes. From coal it makes diamonds. And a lot of people have rough diamonds as the result of their sufferings in life. Because maybe there was shame or regret of a large degree associated with it. But they have never brought it up and polished it and seen what there is to see about it. And more so, what there is to share with others about it, too. So I think that Mother Night is a program that will help people to mine the mother load, so to speak, to bring the diamonds in formation up out of the dark and to polish those attributes. And there will be different ones for different people. But certainly one of them is creative flow, creative work, and whether that means problem solving with your family or figuring out how to live until tomorrow or making a great project of some sort or a small project that has great meaning. Those will be decided by the individuals, but the most important thing is to free the soul from any of its bindings and any of its wanderings and to reseat it properly in the psyche. I believe that cannot be done on the surface. You have to go down underneath to do that.

Tami Simon: Diamonds from the darkness. Thank you, Clarissa.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Thank you, Tami. Thank you for having me again. It is really good to be with you. We’ve got to do this more often than every twenty-two years.

Tami Simon: Yes. I think we will increase the frequency.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Alright. Well, I welcome all the people who are interested to come be with me and with Mother Night for a six-session series. And I have some wonderful stories to tell. Like about Earl King, about a spirit who is actually following a father and his child and their horse through the forest at night and what happens there. And we will be talking about many, many things that are stories from the dark that are illuminating.

Tami Simon: Wonderful. Thank you.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Thank you, Tami.

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