Clarissa Pinkola Estes is the author of Women Who Run With Wolves, a text about wild women and how we may embrace this archetype.
This article offers seven ways to love deeply meditation from the Skeleton Woman tale as read by Clara Roberts-Oss. It also gives Clarissa’s and Clara’s interpretation of the story with personal examples.
“In wise stories, love is seldom a romantic tryst between two lovers. For instance, some stories from the circumpolar regions describe love as a union of two beings whose strength together enables one or both to enter into communication with the soul- world and to participate in fate as a dance with life and death.”
Excerpt from Women Who Run With Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
In the story of the Skeleton Woman, Lady Death must visit the lovers for the relationship to take root and be revealed.
One of their gifts of Estes is her ability to illuminate the underlying symbols, metaphors, and subconscious metaphors in very simple tales.
It makes her work relatable and allows readers to understand the importance of specific events, items, and words.
When we are unaware of our wounds, we are very likely to repeat the same process within ourselves and with others who express similar pain.
It also shows us that we don’t know what we are getting ourselves into when we go ‘fishing.’ We can never know the full extent of where our ventures will take us or what will come with them when we invite another person inside.
Hello, and welcome to the reading interpretation of Skeleton Woman from Clarissa Pinkola Este’s book, Women Who Run With Wolves.
If you can, I’d love for you to find a comfortable position where you can sit or lie down. If you can, I’d love you to close your eyes or a soft gaze, allowing yourself to shift from focusing on the external world to coming into what I like to call the internal landscape. Either listening to or reading stories allows us to tap into our imagination, which, to me, is the same place of our dreams,
The Tale of Skeleton Woman
She had done something that her father disapproved of. Although no one any longer remembered what it was, her father had dragged her to the cliffs and thrown her over and into the sea. There, the fish ate her flesh away and plucked out her eyes. As she lay under the sea, her skeleton turned over and over in the currents.
One day, a fisherman came fishing. Well, in truth, many came to this bay once. But this fisherman had drifted off far from his home place and did not know that the local fisherman stayed away, saying that this inlet was haunted. The fisherman’s hook drifted down through the water and caught, of all places, in the bones of Skeleton Woman’s ribcage.
The fisherman thought, Oh, now I’ve really got a big one. Now I really have one. And his mind was thinking of how many people this great fish would feed, how long it would last, how long he would be free from the chore of hunting. And as he struggled with this great weight on the end of the hook, The sea was stirred to a thrashing froth, and his kayak bucked and shook, for she who was beneath struggled to disentangle herself.
But the more she struggled, the more tangled in the line she became. And no matter what she did, she was exonerated, dragged upward, tugged up by the bones of her own ribs. The hunter had to scoop up his net so he could not see her bald head rise above the waves. He did not see the little coral creatures glinting in the orbs of her skull.
He could not see the crustaceans on her old ivory teeth. When he turned back with his net, her entire body, such as it was, had come to the surface and was hanging from the tip of his kayak by her long front teeth. Ah! Cried the man. His heart fell into his knees, his eyes hid in terror on the back of his head, and his ears blazed bright red.
Ah! He screamed and knocked her down off the prow with his oar and began paddling like a demon toward the shoreline. Not realizing she was tangled in his line, he was frightened all the more, for she appeared to stand upon her toes while chasing him all the way to shore. No matter which way he zigzagged his kayak, she stayed right behind. Her breath rolled over the water in clouds of steam, and her arms flailed out as though to snatch him down into the depths.
Ah! He wailed as he ran around. Or as he ran aground. In one leap, he was out of his kayak, clutching his fishing stick and running, and the coral white corpse of Skeleton Woman still snagged in the fishing line, bumpity bumped right behind him. Over the rocks he ran and she followed. Over the frozen tundra he ran and she kept right up.
Over the meat laid out to dry he ran, cracking into pieces as his mollux bore down. Throughout it all she kept right up. In fact, grabbed some of the frozen fish as she was dragged behind. This she began to eat for she had not gorged in a long, long time. And finally, the man reached a snow house and dove right into the tunnel and on hands and knees, scrabbled his way into the interior.
Panting and sobbing, he lay there in the dark, his heart a drum, a mighty drum. Safe at last. Oh, so safe. Yes, safe. Thank the gods. Raven. Yes. Thank Raven. Yes. All bountiful. Sedna. Safe at last. Imagine when he lit his whale oil lamp, there she, it, lay in a tumble upon his floor. One heel over her shoulder, one knee inside her ribcage, one foot over the elbow.
He could not say later what it was. Perhaps the firelight softened her features, or the fact that he was a lonely man. But a feeling of some kindness came into his breathing. And slowly he reached out his grimy hands and using words softly like mother to child began to untangle her from the fishing line.
Oh, na, na, na, na. First, he untangled the toes, then the ankles. Oh, na, na, na, na, na. On and on, he worked into the night until dressing her in furs to keep her warm. Skeleton woman’s bones were all in order as a human’s should be. He felt into his leather cuffs for his flint and used some of his hair to light a little more fire.
He gazed at her from time to time as he oiled the precious wood of his fishing stick and rewound the gut line. And she in the furs uttered not a word. She did not dare. Least this hunter take her out and throw her down on the rocks and break her bones to pieces.
The man became drowsy. Slid under his sleeping skins and soon was dreaming. And sometimes as humans sleep, you know, a tear escaped from the dreamer’s eye. We never know what sort of dream causes this, but we know it’s either a dream of sadness or longing. And this is what happened to the man. The skeleton woman saw the tear glisten in the firelight and she became suddenly so thirsty.
She tinkled and clinked, crawled over to the sleeping man, and put her mouth to his tear. The single tear was like a river and she drank and drank and drank until her many years long thirst was slacked. While lying beside him, she reached inside the sleeping man and took out his heart to the mighty drum.
She sat up and banged on both sides of it. Boom, boom, boom, boom. As she drummed, she began to sing out flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh. And the more she sang, the more her body filled out with flesh. She sang for hair, good eyes, and nice fat hands. She sang the divide between her legs and breasts long enough to wrap for warmth and all the things a woman needs.
And when she was all done, she also sang the sleeping man’s clothes off and crept into his bed with him, skin against skin. She returned the great drum, his heart to his body, and that is how they awakened. Wrapped, one around the other, tangled from their night, in another way now, a good and lasting way.
The people who cannot remember how she came to her first ill fortune say she and the fishermen went away and were consistently well-fed by the creatures she had known in her life underwater. The people say that it is true. And that is all that they know.
Skeleton Woman is a part of ourselves. It starts with her father disapproving of her and throwing her into the water.
So, when we were young, at some point, we started to recognize some aspects of ourselves that we did not like or want to see. And so we buried it deep inside us, down in the ocean of ourselves, to be forgotten.
But one day, when we left our village compound, meaning the things we know and understand, we left our home place. We fished and started digging up something exciting: that part of ourselves we had buried. But as we brought it to the surface, we started to see that it was not exciting. That was a part of us that we had put down and buried deep inside ourselves, and now it is in front of us. But guess what? Once it’s uncovered, it can’t be covered up again.
So it’ll chase us until we decide to work with it and give it space and an opportunity to share its own experience. And that’s when the skeleton woman sings herself back into life.
And then, at some point, hopefully, it rejoins us, rejoining the living world or the world that can be seen, the tangible world. Hopefully, we don’t even remember what happened before, which means how or why we buried it in the first place.
And so I’ll share this. When I was young, I buried an aspect of myself quite deeply. And that was of anger. And there wasn’t a place for me to be angry. And so it came up in different ways like it didn’t, it never fully, it was never fully gone.
But then, as I started moving through the practice, it startbeganurface. And wherever I went, there it was.
As I sat in meditation more than the asana practice, I started reading books on meditation. The one that I’m thinking about is Chogyam Trungpa’s The Myth of Freedom.
It taught me how that piece of myself, this rage specifically, is an important component, and I had to learn how to work with it because anger and rage are pure; they are pure energy. It comes from a very integral place. However, how we navigate, dance with, or work with it is the part that can be destructive.
And when I was younger, I buried the. It was unsettling not only for myself but also for the people around me.
I was with a friend, and we lived together. For whatever reason, living together brought up a lot of anger inside of me. I remember being so angry one night that I closed my eyes and breathed into it. I was like, okay, let’s fully hear it. And there was Kali.
In all her glory, Kali is the fierce goddess, the ruthless mother, and the fiercest aspect of Durga. She’s bloodthirsty and angry because she protects the people of earth or the gods and goddesses, and that’s her.
Her job is to destroy. So I breathed with her, and I let her dance. And I asked her what it was that she needed. And she told me she was angry because I hadn’t put myself first. I was out of integrity. And so, because of that, she showed up. And I needed to listen and vocalize from within. Sometimes, that’s hard for me because I have a part of myself that is a caretaker, and that’s why I do the job that I do.
Sometimes, when things are out of balance, I stop caring for myself. Now I realize that when she shows up, she’s saying, ‘Hey, take care of yourself.’
And so because of that evening of working with her, when I woke up that next morning, I had that same imagery of her being entangled in me again in a positive way.
But it took a while—I think I was 32—before I was finally able to dance with her productively.
Inability to face and untangle the skeleton woman is what causes many love relationships to fail. To love, one must not only be strong but wise. Strength comes from the spirit. Wisdom comes from skeleton women. As we see in this tale, if one wishes to be fed for life, one must face and develop a relationship with the life/death/life nature.
When we have that, we are no longer bumbling along, fishing for fantasies, but we are made wise about the necessary deaths and startling births that create true relationships. When we face Skeleton Woman, we learn that passion is not something to go get but rather something generated in cycles and given out.
It is Skeleton Woman who demonstrates that a shared living together through all increase and decrease through all endings and beginnings is what creates an unparalleled love of devotion. The story is an apt metaphor for the problem of modern love. The fear of life, death, and nature. The death aspect, in particular.
In much of Western culture, the original character of the dead nature has dogmas and doctrines until it is split off from the other half, life. We have erroneously been trained to accept a broken form of one of the most profound and basic aspects of wild nature. We have been taught that death is always followed by more death.
And it is simply not so. Death is always in the process of incubating new life, even when one’s existence has been cut down to the bones. Rather than seeing the archetypes of death and life as opposites, they must be held together as the left and right sides of a single thought. It is true that within a single love relationship, there are many endings, yet somehow and somewhere in the delicate layers of the being that is created when two people love one another, there is both a heart and breath.
While one side of the heart empties, the other fills. When one breath runs out, another begins. If one believes that life death life forces, the life death life force has no stanza beyond death, it is no wonder so many humans are frightened of commitment. They are terrified to go through even one ending.
They cannot bear to pass from the veranda into the inner rooms. They are fearful, for they sense that they’re in the breakfast room, I like these metaphors she’s using, that there in the breakfast room of the house of love sits Lady Death, tapping her toe, folding and refolding her gloves. Before her is a work list, and on one side, what is living, and on the other side, what is dying.
And she means to carry through. She means to maintain balance. And so all of that, that she, that Clarissa also wrote, can not only be a love relationship in terms of with another, but with ourselves. Right? We always turn it back to ourselves and reflect on the love or the relationships in our lives.
Remembering life, death, and life. I love this idea that Death is always in the process of incubating new life, even when one’s existence has been cut down to the bones.
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