“Whatever we live through becomes real to us as we turn raw experience into the story of what’s happening.” –  Christina Baldwin,  The Power of Personal Writing

“By loving and caring for our natural seasons we protect our lives from being dragged into someone else’s rhythm, someone else’s dance, someone else’s hunger.”  –Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves

Last week we completed our summer study of ‘Sealskin, Soulskin,’ the retelling of the selkie myth by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her probing and revelatory Women Who Run with the Wolves. The story reminds women of the need to return to the wildish nature from time to time as part of the cycle of health and well-being. Themes of home, seasons, solitude,  nurture and body memory emerged in the week’s writing from the reading, epigraphs, and discussion.

We completed the study by coloring images from Deborah Koff-Chapin’s wonderful new Soul Touch Coloring Journals. In many cases the drawings linked thematically to the writings. 

Below, a few excerpts and accompanying artwork as a way of sharing our writing experience at summer’s end:

HEAT WITHIN
I get heated within my own body, my own skin. It gets me boiling deep inside. It feels as though my body is on fire, that I’m burning from the inside out. As we turn a raw experience into the story of what’s happening, my entire body begins to tremble and shake. Shaking so fast it becomes uncontrollable to stop…  – AS

SOLITUDE
We as people start out alone, all one. We can choose to stay that way – intentional solitude. Creating conversation between our mind and soul. To me it comes natural, for I have accomplished this for so long. Sometimes I live in my head, going about the life I’m living. Many years of practice helped me through trauma; what was in my head never came to light. Days now when my mind and soul are conversing, I hear God speaking to my soul. I feel Him in my heart. I ask what I need, He listens and I hear. I love this natural, intentional solitude. – CMP

YOUR LOVE
Reading these poems and dreaming of you … the warmth your love brings me. If only I could embrace the joy that you bring me and fill my soul to the brim somehow. Like a lost child without direction, I often felt – until we met and our worlds collided. Whenever I feel the weight of all the world’s pressure drowning me … sinking deeper and deeper into this sea of emotions, I try to swim. But it’s no use. Your love is the only thing that can save me …  – MEG