An open letter to Wild Women everywhere, but especially to my wimmin':
October, 2019
In high school, my best friend and I were known as the Bobbsie Twins: blonde, inseparable, and interchangeable. We shared cheerleading, an unhealthy obsession with straight A's, intense body image issues, and even a boyfriend. Our mutual appreciation of witty wordplay and hyperbole regularly resulted in snorting milk out of our noses during lunch period. Alikeness was the measurement of our friendship.
But when our circumstances changed-- college, marriage, careers—so did the friendship. Another bestie from that new environment replaced the previous bestie in a natural attrition process, or a kind of benign neglect like a forgotten houseplant. Out of sight, out of mind, each bestie moved along the conveyor belt of my life into the past, remembered fondly, but no longer as relevant to, or simply not present in, the current stage of life.
Those early childhood friendships were driven by my desperate avoidance of going it alone, of needing to know that some other human being not only understood my deepest feelings but validated them by blowing on the embers of myself until I could maintain my own fire--right or wrong. Decades later, I have to admit that hadn't changed much.
Until the Wild Women came along. Born out of participation in self-development seminars, our assortment of backgrounds, ages, experiences, faiths, and sexualities orbited around a single conversation that was both transcendent and inclusive of our individual selves. The topics could range from productivity to sex to money to intimacy to authenticity, but in every case, it was a conversation not dependent on the alikeness of our circumstances and environments. It was something bigger.
Now, every time the Wild Women get together, I drag in with my hairball of failures (i.e. unmet writing goals, Swiss cheese memory, dimply thighs, measly career aspirations); in short, a cocktail of jealousy and covetousness and despair waiting to be gulped down.
I hover on the surface, testing the emotional waters for the right moment to jump all the way in. I alternately resist and succumb to the urge to control the conversation for my own purposes, which torturously include talking about me exclusively while simultaneously making sure the spotlight never, ever rests on my naked soul. It's exhausting for a while.
A few hours in, however, one of us breaks. Sometimes that looks like a really ugly cry with lots of snot. Other times, a torrent of make-wrong. But eventually, the egg of personal truth is cracked open and there's no going back for anyone. One by one we become as one, like piglets nursing on the life-giving milk of truth. Witnessing truth, deeply listening to another's heart, I begin to see through her eyes, feel into her experience, and open into a realm that is beyond my personality or circumstances. Thanks to the alchemy of the Wild Women, the small world of my ego and insecurities, of my thinking, gives way to the expansive, infinite world of the heart.
By the visit's end, I am rooted in rich soil lifting up my face to the heavens with the protection of the forest around me. I know that all I want is possible because I've seen the infinite expanse of possibilities present in all of our hearts—each of us unique expressions of Divine Nature.
We don't need the alikeness of circumstances and environment anymore to maintain the friendships, but we do need intention and structure. Over two decades ago, we wrote this credo:
“We are the the Wild Women. Wild about friendship. Wild about love. Wildly wise and wildly free. Wildly standing for our sisters to be and do the same.”
Those words are as strong an intention as I have ever known. Every word calls me to be. But I need the discipline to return to it, to read it, to take it on in being and action. If left on my own, drifting in separateness, I forget this connection to women as a higher power and I shrink back to my familiar, small personality with its rigid, safe thoughts of comparison and self-preservation.
Our Wild Women gatherings are the structure that holds up the intention of that credo. May we always create a sacred space for that credo to manifest in each of us. May we always honor the many incarnations of “wild” in each other and in ourselves. For then, we will know we have arrived at something bigger than us individually: the heart of the Wild Women.
Love always,
Cindy