The Late Bloomer

 "It is that holy poetry and singing we are after. We want powerful words and songs that can be heard Underwater and over land. It is the wild singing we are after, our chance to use the wild language we are learning by heart under the sea. {...} To live this way is a cycle in itself, one meant to go on, go on, go on."  - Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
 As if I needed another reason to love, adore and be completely smitten with Dr. Estes. I have been listening to The Late Bloomer audio series this past month...I have it playing every single chance I get and the wealth of stories, healing and connection she offers is breathtaking. Life changing...truly.I can't even begin to go into the layer upon layer of psychic magic she works...where would I start?? 
For so much of my early life I thought that if you hadn't come into blossom + bloom by the time you were of a certain age...then all was lost. So many people around me had figured out (or so it seemed) what they wanted to do in life while I floundered around lost and searching...sometime drowning + gasping...very very broken. What I didn't know at the time was that all of this breaking open had deep meaning; it was soul medicine. In the losing of mySELF was the finding of mySELF. And sure...my path was definitely not linear...more of a zigzag kind of thing; one step forward, two steps back. But deep within all of this healing lay the seeds of strength, tenacity and beauty; the makings of an invincible heart.

"To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves." - Dr.  Clarissa Pinkola Estes
  In this series one of the things  Dr. Estes talks about is how, when we "lie in a bed not of our own making" ie. live our lives according to the proscriptions of others (society, culture, whatever else) ...we simply cannot thrive. It is only when we look deep within our hearts and define, for ourSELVES, how we want to live our lives...that is what leads to blooming. Taking the power away from the "overculture" (as Dr. Estes puts it) and placing it where it belongs; within our deepest selves is the key to doing our life's work. Work that is not always easy, approved of or successful but work that has deep meaning and feeds our soul.

"La Loba sings over the bones she has gathered. To sing means to use the soul-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 or in need of restoration. This is done by descending into the deepest mood of great love and feeling, till one's desire for relationship with the wildish Self overflows, then to speak one's soul from that frame of mind. That is singing over the bones."
                                                                                                  -Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes