Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Clarissa Pinkola Estésis an American poet, Jungian pscyhoanalyst, post-trauma recovery specialist, author and spoken word artist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth27 January 1945
CountryUnited States of America
solitude forests needs
For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need.
memories names culture
When women hear those words, an old, old memory is stirred and brought back to life. The memory is of our absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild feminine, a relationship which may have become ghostly from neglect, buried by over-domestication, outlawed by the surrounding culture, or no longer understood anymore. We may have forgotten her names, we may not answer when she calls ours, but in our bones we know her, we yearn toward her, we know she belongs to us and we to her.
despair discouraged plates
There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too, have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.
rocks ideas focus
If you've lost focus, just sit down and be still. Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away, and it will renew itself. You need do no more.
creativity creative solitude
The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life.
dog magician universe
Dogs are the magicians of the universe.
fashion cutting clothes
Freud's translator accidentally omitted 'fashion' in the psychoanalytic list of primary instinctual drives; along with the drive to sexuality there is the drive to wear odd garments that may cut off circulation, occlude vision, make toes grow sideways, cause riots.
understanding wilderness disappear
It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades.
medicine needs stories
Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.
tree tables caves
Rather than chairs and tables, I preferred the ground, trees, and caves, for in those places I felt I could lean against the cheek of God.
giving-up justice doe
It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What's needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take 'everyone on Earth' to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.
soul flesh remember
So, let us push on now, and remember ourselves back to the wild soul. Let us sing her flesh back onto our bones.
art stupid block
Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.
prayer fall heart
A Prayer Refuse to fall down If you cannot refuse to fall down, refuse to stay down. If you cannot refuse to stay down, lift your heart toward heaven, and like a hungry beggar, ask that it be filled. You may be pushed down. You may be kept from rising. But no one can keep you from lifting your heart toward heaven only you. It is in the middle of misery that so much becomes clear. The one who says nothing good came of this, is not yet listening.