Singing Over the Bones

In her best-selling book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes about La Loba, the old, wild Wolf Woman, whose sole work is to collect the bones in the desert of our Soul. Once piecing the bones together, she then must find the song to sing that will bring them back to life. She is also known as the old La Que Sabe, The One Who Knows, and is within us.

In archetypal symbology, bones represent the indestructible force, the indestuctible soul-spirit. "You can dent the soul and bend it. You can hurt it and scar it. You can leave the marks of illness upon it, and the scorch marks of fear. But it does not die, for it is protected by La Loba in the underworld. She is both the finder and the incubator of the bones."

"Within us is the potential to be fleshed out again as the creature we once were. Within us are the bones to change ourselves and our world. Within us is the breath and our truths and our longings--together they are the song, the creation hymn we have been yearning to sing...."

"....We must sit at the fire and think about which song we will use to sing over the bones, which creation hymn, which re-creation hymn. And the truths we tell will make the song."