Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Jungian analyst, cantador and downright badass Old Crone (in the best sense of the word!) tells the gorgeous story of The Stolen Mother Moon. It is the story of losing ones way and getting lost in the darkness only to find your way again by the light of the moon.
Whenever I get to a difficult fork in the road and just can't see far enough ahead to know what happens next, I tell myself that story. And soon enough, the way is made clear.
Here is just a snippet of it right now to help you find your own way: As with most fairy tales, it starts out in joy.
So there was this village.
And it was a wonderful village because everything happened just the way it was supposed to happen. All the mothers and fathers loved each other, and all the children were terrific.
But all is not as it should be and perfection is marred by the touch of darkeness:
Except—as there always must be in the psyche and in fairy tales—except there was this one thing that was very, very adverse. And that was that this beautiful, harmonious village was surrounded by a moat of black, murky bogs. And it was dark there always, and it stank because everything was rotting.
And so it was for that reason, for the darkness of the quagmires and the quicksand, that the people depended on the light of the moon to guide them at night.
Ahhh. Don't we all have those moments in our lives? Everything is perfect so long as you don't stray from the marked path. The light shines, the birds sing and life is predictable if not exactly blissful. But invariably, the light gives out. And then, well then all seems lost:
Some nights, she did not come. And on those nights the bogs were filled with treachery because there were evil things that lived there. Things that live in the darkest corners of humans minds would come out at night and lead the poor struggling travelers—with no light—into the quagmires and drowned them.
Learning of the pain and suffering that goes on in her absence, the Mother Moon descends to earth to investigate.
Well, it turned out that several people died in the course of a very short period of time. When the Moon Mother learned of this, she was filled with sorrow for she cared for humans. In fact she was so concerned she decided she would come to earth and she would see for herself. So when the dark of the month came, she stepped onto a slow shooting star and landed at the edge of the marshes.
What happens next is the stuff of epic and legend. I'll have to save that for later!
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