May 10, 2023
One winter day, I find myself on the back of a four-wheeler behind Tony, the head out-fitter for the Top Hat Ranch. I am performing an inspection for an appraisal. Truthfully, I would rather be on foot within the quiet woods. We head south towards the Beartooth Wilderness, which lies just north of Yellowstone National Park. Initially, we take off across a low meadow and then climb a steep timbered hillside. We slide through a gate and across a high meadow. Both of us are looking for sign, any indication of wildlife visiting the area. The snow is deep, about six to twelve inches. Depending on the drift size, tracks are easy to spot. I yell out that there have been elk all over the meadow, as I see dozens of elk tracks. We move into an area that is covered with trees. As we stop in the trees to discuss a good vantage point, we both look down to our left. There on the ground are the tiny cloven hoof prints of mule deer. Commingled with the deer tracks are the huge tracks of a wolf. Tony points out how wide the wolf’s stride is as we look at his trail running down the hillside. The magic of the visible yet not visible is present. She is hunting her prey. The notion runs through my head; could she be shadowing us? She is like a complex, shadowing, hiding in the shadows. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes Reyes writes: “Shadowing means to have such a light touch, such a light tread, that one can move freely through the forest, observing without being observed. A Wolf shadows anyone or anything that passes through her territory. It is her way of gathering information. It is the equivalent of manifesting and then becoming like smoke, and then manifesting again” (1992, p. 456). It is as if I am in a dream. I feel the wolf’s presence, I see evidence that she has been here, hunting. Some nights I lie down and go hunting. I ask psyche to show me “signs” of demons, wounds, and complexes. Show me my suffering, please give me a sign, an image. At times the plots are deep and varied, they are shadowing me. But I want to be the wolf: backtracking, shadowing, and popping up behind the complex or neurosis to capture an image to steal into the waking world. An image I can hold and dialogue with so I might rest the fear of it within my body’s cells, within psyche. We can all go hunting in the lacunae of soul to reveal our hiddenness. Depth psychologists honor what is hidden, how it was hidden and why it was hidden. They ask the questions and listen to the hidden words bubbling out, hunting for a knowing that would bring peace and value to a human’s existence. When I go hunting psyche gives me gifts from the depths. Dream images, Soul’s language. Once I see the image I know it. I can work with it and hold it close to my heart or send it off to the asylum where it will stay until there is a new way to dialogue with it. At times it is visceral, like digging around in an infected wound to find the intruding splinter and remove it. At other times it is a calling out of the hidden which will either come forcefully or stealthily into view. For instance in a night of dream hunting, a night I had asked psyche to let me see the “thing” that was causing me so much grief, I was given the following dream:
I am with Mariel and Anna. We are at a ranch along a river. There is a barn and I am sitting on a black horse outside the barn. We are going for a ride to a place that Anna knows the way to. Anna and Mariel come out of the barn on their horses and Anna leads the way. As we ride away towards our destination we are along the river which is to our right. I see something moving in the bushes there. It is being quite loud and yet it is hidden. I know it is distinctly human and see it going back and forth in the willows and reeds. I say to Anna, “ What is that?” And she says she doesn’t know and the girls get a little scared and begin to gallop off. As I follow them I say out loud, “Maybe it is a big cat, like a mountain lion.” I don’t want to admit it is human. . . (Personal journal)
I woke knowing this was a very significant dream. This thing that lived in my solar plexus had shown itself, sort of. It was hidden in the willows and reeds. I decided to do yoga and then in savasana I closed my eyes, breathed deep, and asked to see the creature. Active imagination is an incredible tool. As I worked with the dream I stopped my horse in front of the bushes. The thing was being very loud yet it wouldn’t come out. I finally asked it to show itself and it did. It was about four feet tall. It was pure white and thin with large black, sad eyes. It would not come all the way out so I helped it. I realized at that moment that it is the part of me that wants to be seen and heard. Some part of me that had been so long in the dark that it is pale white and sad. I held the creature in my arms and carried it around with me for the next week. I showed it around the world in the open daylight. It was scampering around in the bushes loudly so it no longer wanted to be secret or quiet. It was scared. It actually looked like a nerve, a piece of my nervous system that needed to heal. The girls in the dream were eleven and thirteen at the time, about the age that many girls loose their voice. I realized that at that time in my life I had lost a piece of myself that needed to be seen and heard. When I was eleven my parents drifted into their own marital despair and they were constantly fighting. I knew the feeling in my gut was old and that a current circumstance had triggered an old physical reaction. That is why I went hunting. I wanted to know what the “old” wound was. If we cannot see the old wound we are unable see what is “real” and “not real” in this very moment. The dream image was hunted, caught, heard and seen at last. The image is real, the old wound has been seen and nurtured. It won’t have to come disguised as something in the present anymore. I can see it coming and hold it for what it is, something from the past. I can console it and ask it to go sit down at my inner table, calmly sit, while it waits to be transformed into something more healthy or take on a new job, the one intended for it when it arrived here along with me.
Estes writes of the swift nature of the Wolf similar to the swift nature of our neuroses, sometimes, if unaware, they double back on us. “First they [the wolves] fall back and shadow the creature they’re curious about. Then, all of a sudden, they appear ahead of the creature, peeking half-face with one golden eye from behind a tree. Abruptly, Wolf turns and vanishes in a blur of white ruff and plumed tail, only to backtrack and pop up behind the stranger again. That is shadowing” (1992, p. 456). The old wound, the neurosis, had doubled back on me and was chewing at my body, shadowing me. I had to hunt it down in order to stop the pain. What a relief to have the skills of hunting in the underworld. I have been working my dreams for twenty three years now. Prior to that, this incident would have caused me to cycle into some place of low self esteem. Now I feel like Inanna, able to descend and return, having retrieved a piece of myself long hidden. As Perera, in Descent to the Goddess, writes about Inanna, the relationship to my underworld journey has become clearer to me over time. “Inanna’s descent. . .may be viewed as the incarnation of cosmic, uncontained powers into timebound, corrupting flesh, but it is also a descent for the purpose of retrieving values long repressed, and of uniting above and below into a new pattern” (1981, p. 14). The white creature in the dream was timebound, caught in the bushes, not seen or heard for decades. It was the tired, white flesh of my nervous system. I retrieved this long repressed part of myself and brought it forth from the underworld and dialogued with it to create a new pattern of call and response, of being seen and heard in a healthy way.
Now, I am chose consciously to be the underworld huntress. Instead of literally hunting unconsciously and identifying with the huntress, Artemis, I can consciously choose to be in my Artemis energy in the underworld. I can go into the deep dark woods of psyche and hunt. Ginette Paris speaks to the qualities of Artemis in her book Pagan Meditations: “Artemis, who is very beautiful, some say as beautiful as Aphrodite, thus comes to sanctify solitude, natural and primitive living to which we may all return whenever we find it necessary to belong only to ourselves. An Amazon and infallible archer, Artemis guarantees our resistance to a domestication that would be too complete” (1986, p. 110). We belong only to ourselves in the depths of the soul world. We do not have to be domesticated in the underworld. We can explore and hunt, with whatever wild nature and instinct we have, to find the prey and bring it home.
Tony and I move on and stop on top of the open hillside to over look Frying Pan Flats, a wide open valley that stretches up to the base of the Beartooth Wilderness, both sides covered in conifer trees and rock outcroppings. A small creek runs through the bottom. We stop for several minutes and just observe. I get off the machine and stand facing south. It lies right before me, the wilderness. Looking back at me the same way it would have one hundred years ago. It is mirroring soul back to me. I imagine the hidden creatures and places of this wilderness. It is the depths, the wilderness of our World Soul, the mirror of our own inner landscape. In his book, A Blue Fire, James Hillman speaks to his psychological view of our relationship to the inner landscape through a metaphor related to how we are asked by the National park system to treat our public lands. He says, “We could come to a more psychological notion of wilderness following the definition inherent in the rules governing wilderness areas: enter and enjoy but make no mark. Disturb nothing, pollute nothing leave no trace – if possible, not even a footprint. This definition psychologically implies that wherever we tread with that attitude we are creating the experience of wilderness” (Hillman & Moore, 1989, p.p. 103-104). Hillman continues with a description of how we might move in this psychological wilderness and it reminds me of how the wolf moves through her underworld, the forest. Hillman explains, “When we move with senses acute, listening, watching, breathing in tune with the world about us, recognizing its priority and ourselves as guests, witnessing its “God-giveness,” then we have made a wilderness area or moment. The restoration of the pristine starts in a fresh attitude toward what is, whatever and wherever it is” (1989, p. 104). The ability to listen, observe, and breathe in the underworld, allows us to witness our own inner nature, our own topography, the inner landscape. It allows us to identify the areas where things that need attending may be hidden. We can scan the wilderness with psyche and acutely take in the images necessary for the restoration of our pristine nature, the restoration of a fresh attitude toward our neurosis, our complexes, toward whatever they might be. It allows compassion for the suffering Self to come from our very own hearts. We can tread carefully within ourselves, make no mark, then return from the depths with the treasures of the hunt.
Within the tree covered hills are the animals that I dream of, Wolf, Black Bear, Grizzly Bear, Elk, Snake, and Wild Turkey. Within this wilderness are the caverns, underground tunnels, rotted tree trunks, and burrows that contain the mystery of animals hibernating in winter. What is hibernating in soul? How full of the unknown creatures are the caverns, the rotten places, and burrows in soul’s wilderness. We have to be hunters to see them. Dr. David Bona states that: “If we are to enter the wilderness we must come with four things: 1)the desire to go hunting, 2) the desire to seek a prey or quarry; not knowing where we will find it; 3)the hunter cannot start out with preconceived notions of what the prey will be. There must be a complete openness to the game that will present itself; and 4) wild animals come as new ideas that threaten the preconceived thoughts and ideas of the hunter” (Bona, 2005). In the underworld wild creatures can come from all sorts of hidden places. In the following dream I am, not surprisingly, shown once again by psyche that what is beautiful can be born of destruction:
“I am standing on the front porch of my Big Timber house. Gabrielle, a friend, is standing there with me talking to me. It is a fine day with sunshine and no wind. She looks at a cross member on the frame of the porch and says, “Oh, you have cutter beetles eating at your house, see the holes.” I look closely and see small holes in the wood on the pole and rafters. I ask her how to get rid of them as she seems concerned that they will damage the structure of the house. She says I could fumigate the whole house. I ask if I would have to do the whole cover the house thing and she says likely. I don’t actually see the beetles just the holes. As we talk I look up at the holes and tiny beautiful light blue butterflies are coming out of the holes. They are flying around our heads. I am perplexed. From the holes where cutter beetles are suppose to be eating and destroying my house, beautiful butterflies emerge. . .I admire it then go under the carport area and there is Gabrielle again. I have a can of bug killer and I begin to spray it around and I stop and look at her and we both know it is not the right thing to do. . .I keep thinking about the beautiful light blue butterflies. They have wings that are almost padded they are so fluffy. I go back to the house and am going inside to water the flowers.” (Personal journal)
The cutter beetles are hidden in the structure (bones) of my house, my container. They are eating away at it, destroying it, and I fear it may collapse, but in truth they are making room for the gestation of butterflies, the gestation of soul. The Greeks believe that butterflies are representative of the soul. Soul is emanating from the bones of my container, the structure of my house. Soul is in my bones. It is that deep in my body. As I became free of my identifications, the introjected creatures I had been living with had actually done me good service. They made room for soul to gestate, be born, and then fly free. A psychic metamorphosis took place.
The wilderness lives in my bones. I take one last look at the wide open plain that runs up the valley then, in stride, I get back on the four-wheeler. I feel bound to this place in the same way Robert Sardello in his book Love and the Soul, speaks of the relationship of the individual soul to the World Soul. “Previously I have spoken of the binding of the individual soul with the World Soul. The nature of this binding concerns perhaps the highest and deepest form of love, that of friendship, and this form of love more than any other strengthens the connection between individual soul and World Soul” (1995, p. 202). I love the land, it is one of my dearest friends. It endlessly provides me with metaphor of soul and the beauty of source that it holds brings me great joy daily.
Tony and I descend from the top of the hill into the valley where the creek flows, bringing life blood to the Rosebud River. As we descend I am thinking of the wolf and me descending to Hades to hunt our prey. The underworld can be a foreign and dangerous place. Carl Jung in his book Memories, Dreams and Reflections, speaks to his creative illness, his descent and the fear that permeated him. He said, “I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in it seemed difficult and incomprehensible. I was living in a constant state of tension; often I felt as if gigantic blocks of stone were tumbling down upon me. My enduring these storms was a question of brute strength. Others have been shattered by them” (Jung & Jaffé, 1989, p. 177). Jung was in the wilderness of soul. He might just as well have been in the deep valleys I imagine in Hades. Where we must watch for falling rock or we can be crushed. We can be crushed by our own night journey, or our own Nekia. The night Jung’s mother died he had the following dream. “Then there were crashings in the underbrush, and a gigantic Wolfhound with a fearful, gaping maw burst forth. At the sight of it, the blood froze in my veins. It tore past me, and I suddenly knew: the Wild Huntsman had commanded it to carry away a human soul” (Jung & Jaffé, 1989, p. 313). He may have thought it was his mother who was being hunted, but Jung was being hunted by the Wolfhound which made him more aware. The Huntsman was actually bringing his mother home to him to be with him in her passing. He must have felt as though Hades was sleeping with him that night. Hades can bring us the hidden things as he knows where they are. They are hidden in his domain. James Hillman writes about Hades in The Dream and the Underworld, “Hades was of course the God of depths, the God of invisibles. He is himself invisible which could imply that the invisible connection is Hades, and that the essential “what” that holds things in their form is the secret of death. And if, as Heraclitus said, Nature loves to hide, then nature loves Hades” (1979, p. 27). Perhaps the Wolf is the Hades of the upperworld. The wolf has strong calculating intellect for a wild animal. It is her natural intellect and cunning that makes her an invisible hunter. Each hunt taken in the underworld is a victory for soul, a potential shift in a complex or neurotic state. Our wolf nature can see through the disguised Gods who lurk there. Hillman speaks to their ability to conceal themselves within soul’s caverns. He says, “And are not the Gods who cloth themselves in our complexes and speak through them also from the beginning complicated figures of extreme inner tension”(1979, p. 129)? Hades would be one of these Gods. But then is not Sophia one of these Gods as well? Is not Sophia in our bones too, in the shadows of our soul? “Holding questions in an inner way that leads to meditative consciousness refers to the Sophia at the center of the earth, for here it is a matter of waiting as Sophia waits” (Sardello, 1995, p. 197). So we go a hunting in the depths of Sophia and Hades. On the one hand waiting patiently in a mountain park for the wilderness to open and reveal itself, on the other hand aggressively hunting and seeking our hidden complexes, our introjections, and soul food.
In The Discovery of the Unconscious, Ellenberger discusses an article published by Jung in 1916 where “Jung outlined his new concepts of the unconscious, stating that there are several ways of coping with the unconscious. One can try to repress it, or to exhaust it through reductive analysis, but these are impossible attempts because the unconscious can never be reduced to inactivity. . .A preferable solution is to undertake a dangerous but rewarding fight against the contents of the unconscious in order to subdue them.(1970, p. 699) This dangerous but rewarding fight would require the skill of the hunter or huntress. The furtiveness to move in whatever way appropriate to seize the complex or the disguised neurosis and drag it forth form the wilderness of soul to be transformed. Oftentimes, along the way, the amateur huntress is stripped bare of all weapons, she is stripped of her armor, and often stripped of her skin so that only the bare bones are showing. Even then the huntress can be shattered before being transformed into a mature hunter. At the beginning of the descent of my life over 20 years ago I was shattered and I went to nature, to the river and sat for hours. This poem came from the contemplation in my bones:
The River of What Could Not Be I lay at the bottom of the river amongst the rocks, Forever apart, never to be whole again. I yearn in desperation to find the broken pieces of my self. Struggling, aching, calling them to come back. Everything from my head down is shattered to bits. Heart over there, torso over here, arms and legs in shards. I look up and in the sunlight see the swiftness of life washing over me. The water is clear and pure, but it is difficult to focus through the current. My mouth opens, water rushes in, my voice muffled to life. Fish and bugs pass by me as I lay unnoticed and cold. I am now pieces of debris to grow moss and caddis eggs. Repetitiously, human life floats above me, unknowing. I wail for help, “The pieces of me, where are they?”, but no ears hear. Gurgling silence forces me to accept the truth of my fate. I see the rocky shore, trees sway in the wind, roots fixed for life, surging deeper. They can breath the air, speak the wind through their branches. I am mute, my darkness shattered, humbled beyond recognition. A tiny golden head screaming out the last of the life I knew. The water continues its flow, washing me to consciousness. With time I will be worn round like the rocks surrounding me, Completely surrendered to the rise and fall of the seasons. The ebb and flow of life, each sunrise and sunset. For now my pieces bleed deep, wounded, scarred with raw edges. The tattered edges of what could not be. (Personal journal, 2003)
Out of the wilderness of what could not be was resurrected a stronger more conscious being who can appropriately call up Artemis, the huntress, who can move in the underworld and seek out the hidden places that hide the prey.
Tony and I ride down the valley, pass the Rosebud River, and head back to the barn. We stow the four-wheeler and stand in the open surveying the wilderness that had revealed her secrets on this day. There are wolves in these hills, shadowing us, stalking prey. As we stand admiring the beauty I have a warm knowing inside, the warmth of soul knowing, and suddenly a Chinook wind blows fifty degrees into the cold of a seventeen degree day.