Osa

I closed my eyes and there I was, in the Mother Bear's close earthy den, in the middle of the harsh winter, my fingers gripping her coarse fur. I asked her how she does it. How she eats and eats an eats and then disappears into her den for the winter, and then gives birth to sightless, tiny cubs, and then uses her fat reserves to nurse them, to make them grow bigger. And then when her body is depleted, takes her growing cubs into the spare Spring days and nibbles on the green shoots and tries to find enough food to replenish herself while making sure her cubs survive. How she faces down the male bears who have a propensity to kill young they didn't sire. How she finds the strength to bare her claws when she's given so much to her cubs already.

She said:

I don't question the how. Surely not the why. I focus wholly on what I must do in the present, on giving birth, on nursing, on surviving. There is no other consideration during such a time, when I am nurturing new life. It's not a job. It's who I am in the present.

And when another bear grins a horrible grimace and advances, shoulders hunched and claws sharpened, I do not question the how or the why. Self-doubt is death.

Baba Yaga

There's the old Russian story about Vasalisa visiting Baba Yaga in her house in the forest. I read a version of this story in "Women Who Run With the Wolves," by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. I highly recommend this book to any woman who knows there is something better out there but has no clue how to find it.

Baba Yaga is the old hag, the wild witch who makes Vasalisa cook and clean and do impossible tasks, and screams at her and tells her she will eat her. The underlying tasks:

Being able to stand the face of the fearsome Wild Goddess without wavering.

Familiarizing oneself with the arcane, the odd, the "otherness" of the wild.

Taking some of her values into our lives, thereby becoming ourselves a little odd.

Learning to face great power-in others, and subsequently one's own power.

Letting the frail and too-sweet child die back even further.

-p. 91 Women Who Run With the Wolves

I wish I wanted more to search for La Que Sabe, the One Who Knows, the seed of powerful intuition buried in every woman. Or La Loba, the Wild Woman, the matriarch of the wolf pack. In fact, I would want someday to look around and say with perfect honesty, I am Osa Madre, Mother Bear. I "can be reticent and valuable....protect [my] territory, make [my] boundaries clear, shake the sky if need be, yet be available, accessible, engendering all at the same time."p. 358.

But for right now, I'm searching for Baba Yaga.