La Loba

A poem about rewilding

Last week I traveled to Yucca Valley, California with one of my oldest, dearest friends for a tarot reading.

The first thing I noticed as we stepped into the small, adobe home was the large butterfy tatooed across reader’s chest. I asked if I could take a picture after the reading and she said yes.

We sat down on zafu cushions and drank cacao which was meant to open our hearts to receiving the message. I downed mine like a shot just as she had started to say, “You can take your time and sip—-” and we all laughed as I put the empty cup down saying, “Oops.”

My friend’s cards were read first and the beautiful cards and blessings coming to her in her spread made me emotional and I started to cry, because I know my friend deserves these blessings. She is among the strongest women I know, self-made, having overcome a bastion of challenges most people will never know.

Before the reader, Kelly, started my reading I asked for a pen and paper. I was sure I knew exactly which cards she’d pull: The Devil, The Tower, and the 9 of Swords. Not one of those cards appeared in my spread. Instead, she pulled nine Major Arcana cards, which if you know about tarot is significant. When the majority of your spread consists of Major Arcana cards, as both my spread and my friend’s spread, it denotes major life events and themes. At least, this is what I learned last year from the tarot class I took. According to this reader it also denotes that the person she is reading is for is operating at a high vibrational level. Not one of the cards I predicted appeared in my spread. The closest to what I had predicted was The Death Card.

“The Death Card can be beautiful,” she said. She also said she could see I had recently been through a loss or ending. The reader and I have the same rising sign, Scorpio, which is often synonymous with Phoenix energy: death, rebirth, transformation. Over and over and over again. It’s exhausting.

I looked at the Sun card in the center of the of the spread, a card depicting a cherub looking gold haired toddler who looks like my grandson. I burst into tears, but I waited until the after the reading to share this with her. To tell her that between leaving a toxic relationship, I lost access to my grandchildren as a sort of “punishment” for not being around as much.

I told her I thought I was blocked.

“You are NOT blocked,” she told me. In fact, she pulled the High Priestess for me and told me I was highly sensitive and intuitive, psychic, and that she saw me doing the type of work she did in the future.

But she did put her hand around her throat, she did say, “I don’t like to use the word blocked, but something is keeping you from using your voice and speaking your truth.” She encouraged me to speak up, to sing, to free my voice.

Then she said for me to, “get in touch with the most primal” part of me. It’s this part of the reading besides the High Priestess card that has stuck with me most.

“Give your mind a break,” she said and she encouraged me to connect with that more instinctual part of me.

What does it mean to reach inside and find the most primal part of my essence? What would it look like to allow a rewilding, to remember who I am before I felt the need to placate and please, to become more palatable, all just to avoid judgement and chase false acceptance?

“People will get mad when you speak your truth, when you set boundaries. But the right people will respect you even more,” she promised.

You can spend so much time and energy in self judgment, telling your wildest, truest self, “Not yet, not yet, later you’ll have your time,” that you forget it even exists. You’ll forget what it wants. What it believes. Where your very power lies.

I remember moments in my twenties where I was that wilder, more unfiltered version. I practiced tarot, I ranted, and raged. But everyone asked, “Why is she so angry?” “When will she settle down?” And I let that inform my choices on and off for years and years, sometimes letting her out only to once again restrict her because it made me unlikeable, it made me difficult, it made me less acceptable.

This reading and this reader reminded me that without that connection to the primal, to my Wild, I am living someone else’s life. And while there’s a time and place for everything, (I can’t be running around half naked, covered in dirt and howling on an every day basis) there can and should be an ongoing daily connection to that part inside of me. I should be thinking, “I see you, I love you, you exist, and you are the most glorious part of me.”

This morning I remembered a poem I wrote over a decade ago. I dug through my Google docs which I don’t always label accordingly, and eventually found it.

I read it and of course, sensitive witch that I am, I cried. But I also took a deep breath, and apologized to La Loba for second guessing her, for doubting my intuition when it told me something was wrong in my last relationship, or when I pulled away from my spiritual practices because I worried that I would be judged as too “woo-woo,” or when I trusted the opinions of others over my sacred feminine power.

I hope this will reach others who have lost touch with their inner wolf, their wild, their primal truth. I hope we will find one another and howl at the moon, messy and drunk with earth and leaves in our hair.

La Loba

I want to feel the rush of river water
about my ankles, let the silver hair
do as it pleases, the bush
grow beyond the bikini.

I want to simmer topless and fat
on the sand, pearl-esque,
moonstreak skin tracks
where two sons bloomed
like a belt around my waist.

I’ll pile pink shells in rows
on my meaty no-gap-thighs,
I want to turn brown with sun,
let the appetite for approval
grow pale, limp, unfed.

I’m no mannequin, but a razor-clawed
restless creature of the night,
tangled in sheets, soaked in blood,
I bleed every time the moon sighs.

I don’t laugh at your jokes any longer
not because I’m a joyless crone
but because you’re not so funny
and I am not so dull.

Don’t be surprised if when
you come to watch me sleep
you find not an angel or fair maiden
but a she-wolf gnashing her teeth.

I’m not built for polite nods.