From: WAND_M@gold.colorado.edu
Subject: The worst wounds need the best medicine
Followup-To: amend2-discuss@cs.colorado.edu
Originator: doherty@ucsu.Colorado.EDU
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Distribution: usa
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 21:01:15 GMT

By Clarissa Pinkola Estes
>From The Denver Post, December 7, 1992

Sometimes after losing a bttle, it seems all that is left is a pile of bones.  
Colorado's recent vote on Amendment 2, which calls for striking down various 
cities' equal-protection laws for gay and lesbian people, has given rise to 
outraged calls for a cultural boycott of the state.

Outrage is certainly the fitting emotion.  A boycott is not.  As head of 
Colorado Authors for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, along with my colleague 
Joanne Greenberg (author of "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden"), it is our 
mission to invite you, authors and artists alike, to help us raise, rather than 
silence, the voices most needed to be heard--yours, ours, those of our cultural 
centers and bookstores.

People here are forming coalitions and filing lawsuits to challenge the new 
law's constitutionality and attempt to overturn it.  Colorado Legal Initiatives 
Project is working to put the issue back on the ballot.  So, for now, instead 
of analyzing Colorado's Sad Tuesday, I would rather tell you a cuento fuerte, a 
strengthing story for troubled times.  This is a a story about a spirit who 
stands at the center of all new hope and hard work.

Anywhere there is a desert, there is La Huesera, the Bone Woman.  She is 
sometimes called La Loba.  In the high-country deserts of Colorado and the 
southwest, there are many legends about her.  You cannot find her if you look 
for her.  But she appears when something has become lost, stolen, destroyed or 
forgotten.  Her sole work is to collect the bones of that which has died.  She 
specializes in collecting the bones of crows, deer, wolves and other soulful 
criaturas, creatures.  She searches the desert until she has found all the 
pieces, then sits by the fire at night, fortifies herself, and plans the 
creation song she will sing over the skeleton.

When she has decided, she puts out her hands over the bones.  The desert echoes 
with the timbre of her voice.  She sings high, she sings low, she sings out 
thunder, she sings down to the thinnest raggedy whisper.  Every kind of voice 
she has is needed for this song.  As she sings, sinew begins to weave in and 
out of the bones.  Stripped meat and muscle appear.  Over this, a lush pelt 
spreads, and the criatura begins to breathe.  And still La Loba sings, for she 
knows it is not enough simply to make the criatura breathe.  So she sings until 
it awakens.

And still she sings, striking the earth with her foot to emphasize her song, 
for she knows it is not enough simply to awaken the creature.  On and on she 
sings until the criatura jumps to is feet and runs, runs and runs toward the 
rising sun.  Now La Loba smiles.  Now her work is complete, for she has not 
only sung the criatura back to life but also into its truest freedom.

Here in Colorado, we are gathering the bones.  But rather than a cultural 
boycott, we need more singers.  Today the bones just happened to be about gay 
and lesbian persons.  Four years ago, the bones of the "English Only" amendment 
were left on our doorstep.  When the current set of issues is won--and they 
will be--other bones, new concerns, different outrages will surface and need 
attention, not only here, but as the case right now, in many cities across the 
nation.

Before the Colorado election, as I began a 24-plus city book tour, I struggled 
with the boycott concept myself.  Should I not go to Alabama?  The Ku Klux Klan 
there calls we Latinas "mud-women," a hate-filled name.  I think it is 
*critical* to go to Alabama.  Should I not go to Utah because they have the 
most oppressive law against a woman's right to abortion of any state in the 
nation?  I think it is *essential* to go to Utah.  My work is distributed in 
South Africa.  Should I have withheld it?  No, because La Loba teaches that the 
best medicine we possess must be placed on the worst of the wounds.  The best 
medicines we have are our voices.

So, we invite you to bring your special talents and to join us as we sing over 
the bones here.  Help us to educate those who are uninformed, and to nourish 
those who are doing the hardest work..finding the right pathways, the fiercest 
words for the creation song.  Bringing people alive, awake.  Setting them free. 
 Stand with us, and then when and if it is your state, your city, your street 
that has gone to bones, we will sing with you.  We will pour our best medicine 
into your most wounded places as well.

	Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., is a Jungian psychoanalyst,
	award-winning poet and cantadora, storyteller (keeper of the old 
	stories) in the Hispanic tradition.  She is an artist in residence
	of the state of Colorado.  Her book, "Women Who Run With the Wolves," 
	(Ballantine), on the instinctive nature of women, is a New York Times 
	best-seller.




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