I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés retells the Inuit tale of “Skeleton Woman,” a haunting story about a woman cast into the sea, then caught, her bones tangled in a fisherman’s line. What begins as a terrifying encounter unfolds into a profound metaphor for real love—love that requires us to face death, not only of the body but of illusion, control, and ego. This myth has stayed with me as I navigate midlife intimacy: the idea that to truly love and be loved, we must stay with the bones, the mess, the inevitable beginnings and endings we face in relationship.
Estés writes:
I see a phenomenon time and again in lovers regardless of gender. It goes something like this: two people begin a dance to see if they would care to love one another. Suddenly, Skeleton Woman is accidentally hooked. Something in the relationship begins diminishing and slides into entropy. Often the painful pleasure of sexual excitement is abating, or one sees the other’s frail, injured underside, or sees the other as “not quite trophy material,” and that’s when the bald and yellow-toothed old girl rises to the surface.
It seems so gruesome, yet this is the premier time when there is a real opportunity to show courage and to know love. To love means to stay with. It means to emerge from a fantasy world into a world where sustainable love is possible, face to face, bones to bones, a love of devotion. To love means to stay when every cell says “run!”
When lovers are able to tolerate the Life/Death/Life nature, when they are able to understand it as a continuum—as a night between two days—and as the force that creates a love that endures a lifetime, they are able to face the Skeleton Woman in the relationship. Then together they are strengthened, and both are called to deeper understanding of the two worlds they live in, one the mundane world, the other, the world of spirit.
I sense Skeleton Woman chasing me this week as I spend intensive time with my family instead of with Ray, my new partner. My middle child is in town for her 25th birthday, and we’ve had multiple dinners in and out to celebrate. More to come: Friday I’m taking my daughters to the Cirque du Soleil show Echo at Ball Arena and Saturday night we’re going to an Italian restaurant near my mom’s senior living place for yet another family dinner.
It would be so easy to decide that this woman—this mother of three who surrenders her self for her children, this daughter who plans events she may not want to attend and drives everyone everywhere—this woman is who I am. I am not that woman I pretended to be last week, who spent every night at Ray’s house or at mine, sharing dinner together. I am not that woman who writes blog posts so that Ray might read them and know her heart.1 I am not a woman who plots her ski season plans in July, discussing Keystone parking lots and how to get to the backside of the backside, apparently planning to do nothing but ski for the whole winter.
Yesterday I started to feel like running away. Estés has seen that: “the faster he chases, the more she picks up speed. When one or the other lover attempts to run from the relationship, the relationship is paradoxically invested with more life.”
What is happening? What am I running from? I’m running from the inevitable death that happens in relationships that progress beyond the “wow you are amazingly cool!” phase:
The running-and-hiding phase is the time during which lovers try to rationalize their fear of the Life/Death/Life cycles of love. They say, “I can do better with someone else,” or “I don’t want to give up my (fill in the blank)____,” or “I don’t want to change my life,” or “I don’t want to face my wounds or anyone else’s,” or “I’m not ready yet,” or “I don’t want to be transformed without knowing in absolute detail what I will look like/feel like afterward.”…
Some make the mistake of thinking they are running away from a relationship with the lover. They are not. They are not running away from love, or the pressures of the relationship. They are trying to outrun the mysterious Life/Death/Life force.
The solution? Let Skeleton Woman catch me. Live through a kind of death, so that I may live again. “The work of learning the Life/Death/Life nature has to be done.” You must embrace the Skeleton Woman, not throw her back into the waves.
It feels like a kind of death to give up some of the beliefs I’ve held so close to my heart for so long. It feels like a kind of death to say, “now it is time for me to let my children live their lives and I get to live mine, the way I want.” No, not the way I want, but the way I am called to.
I bought the Kindle version of Women who Run with the Wolves this morning after discussing with ChatGPT what I might write about for the daily blog. I told the chatbot, “I’m in the middle of questioning who I am as I move from being centered in my family (my parents, my kids, my sisters) at age 57 to centered in a new relationship (with Ray).”
I’m so glad Clarissa Pinkola Estés was one of the thinkers that ChatGPT suggested, when I mentioned I might like to write about some Jungian ideas.
I have so much more to explore with this new book in my library.
What happens when Skeleton Woman catches you? You have to attend to the Death nature:
If it is love we are making, even though we are apprehensive or frightened, we are willing to untangle the bones of the Death nature. We are willing to see how it all goes together. We are willing to touch the not-beautiful in another, and in ourselves….
What is the not-beautiful? Our own secret hunger to be loved is the not-beautiful. Our disuse and misuse of love is the not-beautiful. Our dereliction in loyalty and devotion is unlovely, our sense of soul-separateness is homely, our psychological warts, inadequacies, misunderstandings, and infantile fantasies are the not-beautiful….
To untangle Skeleton Woman is to understand that conceptual error and to set it aright. To untangle Skeleton Woman is to understand that love does not mean all glimmering candles and increase. To untangle Skeleton Woman means that one finds heartening rather than fear in the darkness of regeneration. It means balm for old wounds. It means changing our ways of seeing and being to reflect the health rather than dearth of soul.
I realize that my past relationship failed, in part, because I ran away from Skeleton Woman when she chased me. This time, maybe I’ll let her catch me. Maybe I’m ready to untangle her bones.
- Apparently, I am that woman. ↩︎