Nightbitch, the Wildness Archetype, and Rewriting the Doom Stories

In 1989, Clarissa Pinkola Estes gave us Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. In 2021, Rachel Yoder gave us Nightbitch, a novel about one woman’s personal transformation into wholeness through her instinctual nature. I’m compelled to write this blog post because of a brief description of Marielle Heller’s film version of Rachel Yoder’s novel. The reviewer said only that the film Nightbitch is about how motherhood turns a woman into a dog.

As true as it is on the surface, to leave potential viewers and readers with this reductionist assessment is failing to understand both the novel’s and the film’s value. It is too easy to look away from Amy Adams as she morphs into this strange creature because the enchantment glamour creating our attraction to artificial beauty robs us of our experience of wildness. This glamour – more active in our culture since the spread of TV and all the screens to follow – also creates the illusion that we have no need for wildness, that it is gross and unnecessary.

Yet our loss of wildness is no small thing. It is the reason behind our undeniable climate crises. Lost wildness has also made our election of authoritarian strong men propped up by human fear possible all over our shared Earth Home. These murderous bullies have no relationship with the greater-than-human world beyond the intention to dominate it, to extract whatever they value, and to leave the rest, thinking they can rocket to Mars or the Moon and begin their exploitive, extractive ruthlessness once again. Some are creating schemes to replace wildness with a technological killing machine composed of so many seemingly unrelated parts it makes the Hydra of ancient times nothing but a silly creature easily outsmarted by Hercules and his nephew. Hercules is another strong-man-saviour myth popularized first by Greeks, who called him Heracles, and Romans, and then by North American culture’s cartoons and films.

When I first began this post, I explored my understanding of the human wildness archetypes as they manifest in human life. I began with scholarly examples because the defensive part of me needed to prove the absolute necessity of wildness in our lives. I’ve worked through that urge. This blog post is for people who already know how our relationships within the greater-than-human web are indispensable to our humanness, to our true nature. We cannot simply watch the world burn, and flood, and freeze, and bake when we have had our own experiences of wildness. Climate crises are personal to us; we know we – humans – have brought these climate crises on through our collective actions and our collusion with the corporations who have been saying since their inception “Hey, we’re here to make your lives better, more convenient, more . . . glamorous.”

When I was young and living in Windsor, teaching and doing what I could to make sense of an increasingly fractured world, a friend gave me a cartoon from the Detroit Free Press. I can’t remember the name of the cartoon, but in my memory, the sequence of pictures goes like this. First the character is sitting outside feeling beyond solace. Then she lies down and looks up at the sky. Then she rolls over and rests her cheek against the grass. Then she “tickles” the ground. When a flower springs up, her face radiates joy. The last panel says “You’re never lonely when Mother Nature loves you.” Now, looking back, I think I knew even then that was only a half truth. The corollary is also true: “You’re never lonely when you love Mother/Father Nature.”

Because of early circumstances that placed me in the greater-than-human world as a distressed toddler, I learned very early that Nature – a being I sensed even then to be all genders, species, and elements – loved and soothed me as the humans in my life could not. As a young adult feeling more and more enraged at the industrialized world’s destruction of the harmonies I’d been loving and being loved by for decades, I was surprised to learn many others didn’t share this experience. In fact, they thought my preoccupations with, value of, and respect for the world of dirt and water, growth and decay, weird.

It is weird, but only because the tech companies have all the media outlets through which to spread their authoritarian, strong-man, saviour myths. The only antidote I know for this endlessly cresting wave of false information is to build a raft of stories that remind us of the value of the wildness in the world, that power beyond human domination, stories like Nightbitch that remind us of the wildness in us, even when we smother it with cultural expectations and fear.

Read or see Nightbitch and draw your own conclusions about how motherhood became a catalyst for the artist-hero’s return to authenticity, to full flowering and fruit bearing, to wholeness. Yes, it’s story about a woman turning into a dog. And it’s a story about how our mammalian instinctive nature returns us to the night air that is the remedy for technology, to the fields of loam and possibility that are growing wildness all the time, to the forests of terror and joy beyond any device a human dreamed up and wants in our hands.

And if you need more stories about wildness and the value of the greater-than-human world, read Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, and all the current writers of fiction who are creating a path through the horrors of technological industrializing strong-man domination to roots literal and figurative pulsing with life. Walk in a forest or wood and feel the truth. Nature does not belong to us. We belong to and within the great web of life that is defeating technology and its worshipers through the raging storms unbridled technological manufacturing creates. Let us align with this massive power, let us take action. Let us feel the anguish of loss. Let our losses galvanize us to action to protect the world’s wildness and our own.

Until next time,

Jane

Mary Oliver’s Many Gifts to Us


Visit www.winterblooms.net,  www.aamet.org and www.neftti.com to learn more about how the use of Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) supports the resolution of inner and outer conflicts, informs more loving and respectful relationships, and empowers its users to contribute to the changes we want to see in the world.

Mary Jane Oliver, American poet, died on January 17, 2019. Although she will be greatly missed, her poetry remains to remind us of her gift for deep connection with the natural world. Arguments about her literary value may feed the appetite for constant critical analysis in the academy, but no one who has suffered childhood trauma and read Oliver’s work as an adult doubts her ability to see and express the human ability to heal through our connection with nature. Whether she intended to be or not, Mary Oliver is a poet especially relevant to those who suffer trauma at the hands of the humans in our lives.

Poetry, like life, gives us what we expect. If we expect erudition, cleverness, and cerebral workouts, Mary Oliver will disappoint. If we expect solace, delight, beauty, and coherence, her words flood us with the comforting sound of a mature voice expressing our deep hunger for, and discovery of, meaning. Because of the deeply rooted sensory nature of her work, it is no surprise that Oliver is one of America’s best selling poets. Many of us experience the pain of broken human relationship when we are young, our youth ensuring we have no words to describe what we are feeling. Bereft, we find love and caring where we can, sometimes with people who do not have our best interests at heart, sometimes with those so broken they forget connection, love, and kindness is the fuel we all require to become the people we were meant to be. And sometimes, we find home in the other-than-human world beyond our doorstep.

Mary Oliver is one of those rare poets whose images remind us we can reclaim our embodiment, even after the most severe trauma sends us deep into dissociation and lost identity. Moving through trauma means recognizing the site of the crime, marking out each violating act, and tenderly befriending whatever we had to do to feel safe. For many of us, safety is palpable when we are lying on the Earth looking up at the clouds, attending to the scents of mint or pine or salt water, or kneeling with reverence at the moment of some birth, death, or discovery we did not expect. The cry of wild geese, the heart-beat of waves, the drumming of woodpeckers, these sounds connect us to the pulsing mystery that sustains our lives. Humans may let us down, Mary Oliver reminds us, but the natural world never will. The natural expressions of life on earth knit us together with sight and sound and rhythm, these sensory foods nourishing body, heart, mind, and spirit.

As a survivor of early trauma, the most challenging aspects of my early life grew out of my inability to be present to the people in my world – family members, friends, teachers, and later, lovers and employers. Dissociation is a coping mechanism – a search for safety – most easily obscured by apparent compliance or its alter ego, rebelliousness. Traumatized children and adolescents are often called daydreamers, under-achievers, and even developmentally challenged. What we truly are is homeless, our sense of safety within the sanctuary of our bodies shattered by the traumas we’ve experienced. Mary Oliver, in her own pursuit of embodiment, has created an alchemy of re-connection, for herself, for those who read her.

Childhood trauma may leave us feeling permanently broken, alienated from others, adrift in a sea of sensation that feels constantly threatening and random.  Mary Oliver’s poetry offers a lifeline out of this sea.  As she looks and listens, as she expresses the joy, the surprise, the shock of life’s unfolding, her words have the power to coax us into our bodies – our personal expressions of sensory life – rhythmically, safely. 

Perhaps more than ever before, human disembodiment is encouraged and even rewarded by the mechanisms we have created to “connect.”  Our children are encouraged to study  STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) subjects, this emphasis covertly teaching generations of children to devalue the arts as frivolous non-essentials that take time, attention, and resources away from research that increasingly preoccupies the minds of our best and brightest, but, sadly, neglects the hearts and souls that make us human.

  “Meanwhile, the world goes on.”  In “Wild Geese,” Mary Oliver reminds us of the “soft animal of our bodies,” of our need for the other-than-human coherence found beyond the failures of our human connections.  Her poetry forges pathways to seeing, hearing, and living this coherence, even after the worst has happened.

As an EFT practitioner, I have come to think of the work I do, personally, on my own traumas, and with clients, as a means of rediscovering the poetry of our lives, the safety of our own bodies, the joy of being in relationship with the forces supporting all of life on our fragile, lovely planet.  Mary Oliver has long been part of this rediscovery.  I mourn her passing.  And I celebrate her ongoing, healing presence in the beauty and healing she continues to foster in so many of us to through her poetry.

Jane

 

Jane is an EFT practitioner, trainer, writer, and educator specializing in neutralizing the long-term effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)  as well as the cultural limitations that interfere with our ability to imagine, create, and live the lives we desire.  To engage Jane for individual or group coaching services, AAMET (EFT International)  Accredited, Certified Mentoring sessions,  and EFT Level One and Two Training for your group, call Jane at  (802) 533-9277 or email jane@winterblooms.net .  Visit www.winterblooms.net to learn more about how Jane supports and inspires individuals, groups, and communities.

Please Note:  This is an educational website only and not meant to replace therapy with certified psychologists, family therapists, or psychiatrists.  Jane Buchan, MA, is an AAMET (EFT International) Master Trainer, long-time teacher at the elementary, secondary, and college levels, and early trauma survivor who works exclusively as a learning coach in the best practices of EFT.  She created this website to support the most effective use of EFT to reduce general and specific stresses and to increase the joy of daily living through self regulation and co-regulation.

To experience the benefits of EFT for in-the-moment, trauma-informed emotional support and to build emotional resilience over the long term, please reach out to Jane by phone at (802) 533-9277 or by email at jane@winterblooms.net.  In her coaching practice, Jane uses EFT and many other techniques to help individuals, groups, and communities resolve inner and outer conflicts and identify and achieve goals that will bring about desired positive changes.  This blog reflects her experience with EFT’s efficacy as a support for personal, community, and cultural transformation.