Hello and welcome to the reading of La Loba, a story from Clarissa Pincola Este’s book, The Women Who Run With Wolves. I will read it and a bit of her interpretation, and then I’ll go into mine.

I’d love you to find a comfortable position and close your eyes if you can. Take a couple of deep breaths if that’s comfortable, and allow yourself to sink into yourself, allowing everything that came before to fade into the background slowly.

One of the gifts of listening to stories as well as reading them is that they open our connection to our imagination, cultivating and creating our own imagery. I’d love you to observe the images that come to your mind’s eye through this story and what stands out for you in it.

And then, before I read the interpretation, I’d love you to write down your own images, interpretations, or the pieces that really spoke to you again. Pause this recording. 

Okay, let’s begin. La Loba

An old woman lives in a hidden place everyone knows but few have ever seen. As in fairy tales of Eastern Europe, she seems to wait for lost or wandering people and seekers to come to her place. She is circumspect, often hairy, always fat, and especially wishes to evade most company. 

They say she lives among the rotten granite slopes in Tarahumara, the Indian territory. They say she’s buried outside Phoenix near a well. She is said to have been traveling south in a burnt-out car with the back window shot out.

She is said to stand by the highway near El Paso or ride shotgun with truckers to Morello, or Morella, Mexico, or that she’s been cited walking to market above Oaxaca with strangely formed bows of firewood on her back. She is called by many names: La Jueresa, Bone Woman, La Trapera, The Gatherer, and La Loba.

The sole work of La Loba, is collecting bones. She’s known to collect and preserve bones, especially those in danger of being lost to the world. Her cave is filled with the bones of all manner of desert creatures: deer, rattlesnake, crow. But her specialty is said to be wolves.

It’s the best. She creeps and crawls and sifts through la matenas, the mountains, and the arroyos, arroyos, dry riverbeds, looking for wolf bones. When she’s assembled an entire skeleton, the last bone is placed, and the beautiful white sculpture of the creature is laid out before her. She sits by the fire and thinks about what song she will sing.

When she’s sure she stands over the creature, she raises her arms over it and begins to sing. That is when the wolf’s rib and leg bones begin to flush out, and the creature becomes furred.

La Loba sings more and sings some more. And as that happens, the creature comes into being. Its tail curls upward, shaggy and strong. And La Loba sings more. And the wolf creature begins to breathe. And still, La Loba sings so deeply that the floor of the desert shakes. And as she sings, the wolf opens its eyes, leaps up, and runs away down the canyon.

Somewhere in its running, whether by the speed of its running, or by splashing its way into a river, or by way of a ray of sunlight or moonlight hitting it right in the side, the wolf is suddenly transformed into a laughing woman, and who runs free toward the horizon. And so it is said that if you wander the desert, and it is near sundown, you are lost and certainly tired.

You are lucky, for La Loba may take a liking to you and show you something of the soul. 

Clara Robert-Oss interpretation of La Loba:

One of my favorite parts about reading this book, Women Who Run With Wolves, is the idea of the crone that lives in each and every one of us, that is, the elder who is often hairy and fat and kind of an introvert and lives on the outskirts of society.

To me, that is our shadow. The shadow is always a bit feral. It doesn’t conform to society. It’s an important component to us.

There are moments and times when we suppress this aspect of ourselves. Specifically, I’m thinking about my daughter entering kindergarten next year and really playing with other kids.

Right, that feralness of being a child starts to change because we have to conform by being with other people, and there are rules for how we act with each other. And as we grow up, sometimes we don’t give space for that part of ourselves.

This story is a reminder. It is a resurrection of that aspect of ourselves. So, the wolf woman collects the bones, which are the structure, the tangible part, the foundation of who we are. She collects those pieces of ourselves. And once she has enough of that, she begins to sing it back to life.

And that is the aspect of the spiritual awakening. It usually happens, depending upon your trajectory, after you’ve moved through either something that’s very, very intense, like a catastrophe, or when you started some mindful practice. 

I’ll think about that or reflect on that in my own life. I started practicing yoga, really started practicing, seriously started practicing yoga when I was about 20, doing it a couple, you know, four days a week, and learning how to work with the feral parts of myself.

And how to dance with them. And so the singing, the singing, the vibration, the, the calling out to our foundation to bring it back in, to make it whole again. That’s what she’s doing: she’s resurrecting it from the dead but also bringing it, making it whole. And once it’s whole, and once she’s sung long enough, the wolf runs up and away.

And it is free. It is free to be itself.

Keeping an aspect of ourselves feral is essential, meaning it doesn’t conform. We want that feral aspect of ourselves because it lives on the outskirts of society. It can look over and see the bigger picture. And that, Alan Watts would say, is like the bird’ s-eye view.

That’s what meditation, mindful practices, or any other practices that bring us home give us a broader view.

And so I leave you with what animal are you collecting?

Be curious to sit with that as a meditation. What, what animal am I collecting?

The last part is, where are you in the resurrection? Because we’re constantly resurrecting. It doesn’t just happen once or twice. It happens anytime that we forget ourselves or parts of ourselves are dispersed, and we’re bringing them back together.

And then lastly, what song would you sing or what song do you sing? Over your bones.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s interpretation of La Loba:

We all begin as a bundle of bones lost somewhere in a desert—a dismantled skeleton lying under the sand. It is our work to recover the parts. It is a painstaking process best done when the shadows are just right, for it takes much looking. La Loba indicates what we are to look for: the indestructible life force, the bones.

This cuenta milagro or milagro, the miracle story, La Loba, shows us what can go right for the soul. It is a resurrection story about the underworld connection to the wild woman. It promises that if we sing the song, we can call upon the psychic remains of the wild woman’s soul and sing her into vital shape again.

In the tale, La Loba sings over the bones she has gathered. To sing means to use the soul’s voice. It means to say on the breath the truth of one’s power and one’s need. To breathe soul over the thing that is ailing and needing restoration. This is done by descending into the most profound mood of great love and feeling until one’s desire for a relationship with the wildish self overflows, then speaking one’s soul from that frame of mind.

That is singing over the bones. We must attempt to elicit this incredible feeling of love from a lover, for this woman’s labor of finding and singing the creation myth is a solitary work carried out in the desert of the psyche.

May you walk in beauty as a forest would close. May you walk in beauty.

Excerpt from the Women Who Run With Wolves.