Returning to the Wild
“She is the one we leave home to look for. She is the one we come home to.” — Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Lately, I’ve been listening for the drumbeat of the Wild Woman, that ancient, instinctive force within who I’ve silenced and softened for far too long. These reflections are born from reading the first chapter of Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, and they mark the beginning of a return, not to someone new, but to someone I once was and still am beneath it all.
She feels like a quiet revolution, a steady, ancient pulse. With my children grown and the house finally still, she stirs in the silence and whispers, Now it’s your turn. She is barefoot in the garden, dirt warm beneath her feet, paint on her fingers, sunlight caught in her hair. She is the one calling me to renovate my home, not just as shelter, but as a sanctuary. She is yoga, she is sweat, she is breath and mantra and ocean song. She is unapologetically me, and I’m finally ready to let her lead.
I silenced her in love, in relationships where my chest tightened like a fist and dreams came tangled like vines in the night, whispering truths I didn’t yet want to hear. I told myself I was too sensitive, too much, not grateful enough. My creativity withered. My harmonium gathered dust. My guitar waited quietly in a corner I no longer visited. I stopped writing. I stopped listening. I disappeared into the needs of others, until the reflection in the mirror felt like someone else’s life.
Estés writes of exile, and I know it well. The slow greying of the soul, the turning away from our own fire. But I also know the return. I cried in the bush, where the trees held my sorrow with soft silence. I cried at the beach, where salt and waves carried my grief out to sea. I cried in the comfort of my bed, curled like a question mark, not knowing who I was becoming. Then, one day, I picked up my pen again; tentative, trembling, like a compass pointing home.
The howl came soon after. Not rage, but remembering. Clarissa Pinkola Estés describes it as the soul’s cry for return. A sound that rises when a woman realises how far she has strayed from her instincts, her voice, her wildness. For me, it came not as a scream, but as a quiet, aching hum in my bones. The voice of longing rising after too much silence. The crack in the chest where truth escapes.
It’s my desire to live more creatively, more boldly. To grow vegetables, to nourish, to share whole meals as offerings of love. It’s the dream of love that doesn’t cost me myself. The howl carries grief too; for the woman I silenced in order to be chosen, for the parts of me I abandoned to survive. But it also carries strength, the sound of me saying, I am still here.
Letting the Wild Woman guide my healing means surrendering to a kind of knowing that isn’t taught; it’s remembered. Her medicine doesn’t come in neat prescriptions. It comes in ritual, in the breath between movements on the mat, in the warmth of a candlelit bath on an ordinary afternoon, in the sound of birdsong just before sunrise. It’s found in firelight, in dirt beneath fingernails, in the stillness after a deep exhale. She calls me to write, to rest, to reclaim the sacredness of slow living. Even the termites in my walls feel like her message… begin again, from the bones up.
I’ve been too tame in love, in creativity, in how I care for myself. I’ve hidden my truth behind politeness. I’ve softened to stay small. Reclaiming my wildness looks like lifting weights and seeing what my body can do. It looks like dancing barefoot while dinner cooks, turning up music just for me. It looks like saying no when I mean no, and yes when I mean yes; even if no one claps.
It looks like trusting the body’s whispers, like the way I feel a leech on my skin before it latches. It looks like walking the bush trails with my dogs, strong and grounded, or picking up the harmonium to sing without an audience. It means writing with a steady voice, knowing that this, too, is healing.
The image of the Wild Woman as a collector of bones struck something deep. I see myself in her, gathering forgotten fragments, piecing together the parts I left behind. The girl who surfed salt-soaked and fearless. The woman with soil-stained hands. The seeker who knelt in ashram silence and found herself reflected in sacred chants. The mother, the healer, the one who wept and stayed soft. All of them are me.
And when I think of when I felt most wild and free, I return to the sea. I’m a child again; sun-warmed skin, wind-tangled hair, board under arm, wave-drenched and laughing. No self-consciousness. No roles. Just salt, sunlight, and the knowing that I belonged.
That wildness never left. It rises now in my yoga practice, in the stillness after my children have left home, in the warm caress of the sun on my skin, in the wisdom I offer and the learning I still seek. It rises in every breath, every choice, every word I write.
This is a season of remembering, of rebuilding, of returning to the wild; one instinct, one breath, one barefoot step at a time.
Photos of some of my adventures in nature…
Beautiful piece. Your writing hits my soul x