Where the Wild Women Roam
By: Jennifer Tarnacki
Tags: Wild Women Writing, Sisterhood, Biophilia, Fiction, Nature Writing

She walks how I feel. She swaggers, her impatience in her hips. She doesn’t have much time for anything but her truth, and if you get in her way, well then just try not to wilt under the glint in her fiery eyes. She’s a walking pendulum towards her own destiny, bones in tune with a road she’s walked before she remembered walking on delicate feet. First it was with paws, stalking the shadows, the night.

Now she wraps herself in leather and sheepskin, staying warm while swaying down dirt paths. She carries instinct through with her; the tiger’s sleek slip into darkness, the instinct of the cat to pounce. In my minds eye I see her beauty in the intensity of her gaze; the way she looks out at the horizon, calculating a decision, her next move. Movement by moment. Feeling her way.

She’s an inner authority. A tidal wave, a tornado, a hurricane that pours into the calmest, sweetest lake.

To show you her love, she’ll grab you tight hold on and spin you until theres not a doubt in your body of her affection. Yet to preserve her dignity she’ll snap her jaws so quick you’d lose a limb. She values the integrity of her mind’s eye above all, the inner seeing, inner knowing. Oh, it’s a lovely knowing.

She sees through you. You can try to hide, but she knows you anyway. She knows you better than yourself. She hears all that is unspoken; the poetry in long pauses.

She’s over it, over and done. Done pretending she’s not powerful, done tripping over society’s structures, institutions, rules. Done living inside a story written in a language she doesn’t speak, never spoke. Her intuition cannot be contained; its cosmic. She knows who she is, she’s dove deep and she feels the history of her ancestry in her bones. She’d rather tread on root-strewn forest paths of her own making, a dog at her heel, and the elder trees whispering to her of her great great great grandmothers footsteps.

She’s in service to one thing- sweet, sweet Mama Earth!

She’s speaking to water, blessing and healing the land. She knows where the mushrooms will grow, where the forest leads to a crystal stream. She feels the water underfoot, and talks to the stars above head. If she ever feared her own magic, she never showed it. She closes her eyes and sees just where the well should be dug, where the water from within will flow out with life. Sleeping on the moss, she’s drumming the trance of the ages, lighting up the sky electric. She lies on a hill and watches the web of creation poking through the fabric of the blue sky. No, you don’t see it, but she can.

She’s a paradox, she belongs only to herself, but her heart is an open shelter for all; a secret garden. She walks in ritual, in a living love letter to Mother Earth, because she has something so rare it’s almost extinct: she never forgot she was animal.

When you find her languidly cat-stretch yawning awake from under an oak tree, acorns in her hair, she’ll lazily smile. And if you ask her why she’s alone she’ll say what do you mean, alone? She wears her belonging to Earth like a shawl.

No it ain’t easy! But she’ll always choose to wake up with sticky toes, covered in ash and resin. She builds her own fires, and has walked down dusk’s roads with sore feet towards a night’s rest in a midnight bog, scratched by gooseberry bushes and laughing at the cold. Her fire of conviction is ignited inside - that keeps her warm. She’d just rather wake up at 3 am and light candles for mother moon, beckoning her out of her cave of stars, listening to the sweet silence and drinking in the potent calm.

If I should have a daughter, I’ll teach her to wake up under her favorite tree as well. To see moss as a mattress, a fire under starry full moon nights as the best show on Earth. And to keep her heart an untouched patch of wild rose, so that a storm may rage about her, but she stays firmly rooted in her garden, reflections of petals in her eyes.

They would misunderstand you, wild one, they would fear your magic, but I know you’re just alive, freedom-heart. You made your drum and I heard it. Now I will learn to make my own drum, too, and dance with you. We shall dance to her rhythm, the goddess. And if they call us mad, we will dance even harder, spinning and glowing on a moonlit shoreline like tiny storms, until our salty tears of laughter go mingling with the sea.