Flying in El Rio Debajo El Rio: The river beneath the river, part 8 (The Final installment)

taken from Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés' Battlescars: women’s souls cannot be killed

This is the final installment. Here is the reference information:

Published on National Catholic Reporter Conversation Cafe (http://ncrcafe.org)
"Battlescars: Women’s Souls Cannot Be Killed," ©2008, and "The Lost Stories of Women Who Were Not Lost," a poem from La Pasionaria, ©1986, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, All Rights Reserved. Permissions: projectscreener@aol.com

I would like to leave you now with this, offered in what I hope will be solace and also nourishment for our road now and for our road ahead. We may each be carrying diverse ideas, but we are all walking along together.

The Lost Stories of Women Who Were Not Lost

If we were donkeys and
could read holy scripture,
we would look for all
the stories of donkeys
so we would know how to behave
like proper donkeys
in the presence of God.
If we were doves,
and we could read holy scripture,
we would look for
all the stories about doves,
so we would know
the braveness of doves.
If we were men, we would
look for each of the 1000 manly stories
in the Holy Book, and
for how many ancestors
were heroes of record,
and how we could be like them.
If we were women,
we would look for each of the 1000
heroic women stories
in the Bible and we, uh, we...
well, we are women,
... and we have been looking hard
for the 1000 stories of heroic women
in the Bible.
Do you know where
The other 987 are being stored?
It took twenty years, but I found
that the not 1000, but the millions
of women’s heroic stories are kept
in a stronghold
whose lock
is an oceanic human heart
and whose keys
are unbearable
desire
and perfect
longing.
Though most of the pages have been wiped out,
having, they say, been accidentally
dropped down wells,
burnt as tinder,
used to wipe babies’ behinds,
well, that is all alright,
because women
fish the dream fields every night
and it is there that
the lost stories of women are held in nets.
And I tell you this without equivocation:
If all the woman of the world
recorded their dreams for even a single night,
and then laid them all end to end in the morning,
we would recover the last million years
of women’s lost songs, stories, arts, and theories,
inventions, discoveries and ideas.
... Nothing that can be dreamt
can ever be lost for good.

Can you just see all of those dreams side by side going all around the world? I love the final line Nothing that can be dreamt can ever be lost for good. What have you dreamt that you have forgotten about or were too afraid to try? If nothing else, start a dream journal. Then, when you are ready, start living your dream.