On instinct, belonging, and the parts of ourselves we reclaim.

Fifteen years ago, Women Who Run With the Wolves came into my hands.

At the time, I was involved with Feminine Power, the women’s movement created by Claire Zammit and Katherine Woodward Thomas. I attended gatherings and conferences, including one at Kripalu, somewhere in that season someone recommended Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s book to me.

I don’t remember whether I knew exactly what I was reaching for then. I only knew that something in me was shifting.

I had been going through significant changes…some chosen, some imposed, many long overdue. I was beginning to recognize pieces of myself I had ignored, accommodated away, explained around, or simply did not yet have the language to understand.

Looking back now, I can see I was already circling many of the questions that still interest me today: instinct, identity, becoming, and belonging, and the subtle ways we lose pieces of ourselves to fit the circumstances around us. What drew me there was less self-improvement than self-retrieval. I was searching, however inarticulately, for the instinctual part of myself that had gone quiet beneath expectation, roles, adaptation, and the practice habit of being who I thought I needed to be.

Then I began reading Estés.

Suddenly, there were words for things I had felt but could not name. Instinct, the inner knowing we override. The danger of abandoning ourselves to belong. The necessity of periodically shedding an old life, an old identity, and an old understanding of who we thought we were supposed to be. And perhaps most importantly, the idea that what we are looking for is not always something we need to acquire. Sometimes it is something we need to recover.

That book opened a door.

It led me into Jungian psychology, into archetypes and the unconscious, and into a fascination with why we become who we are and why certain patterns repeat until we are willing to see them. My curiosity became serious enough that I applied to the PsyD program at California Lutheran University and was accepted.

And then I chose not to go.

At another point in my life, I might have viewed that as the road not taken.

I don’t anymore.

My sons were young. Tim and I already had a full life—children, work, home, the ranch, and all the beautiful yet relentless demands of building a family. I knew what pursuing the degree would require of me, and I also knew something else: I did not want my intellectual hunger to come at the expense of my presence as a mother.

So I stayed curious without earning the degree. I studied independently. I volunteered with Hospice and other local organizations. I listened to my inner voice as I read and researched on my own. I watched people navigate illness, marriage, motherhood, grief, ambition, disappointment, reinvention, and loss.

And eventually, almost without realizing it, I began building something of my own.

A community of women called Living Legacies grew from my simple belief: women possess extraordinary knowledge that too often remains private. I began gathering women in my home, much like the salons of centuries past, not to perform for one another but to learn from one another. Women telling women what life had taught them. Women listening across generations.

What surfaced in those salon settings rarely appeared in résumés or biographies: what broke them, what saved them, what they tolerated too long, what they finally understood, and what they wished someone had told them sooner.  It became a safe space for sharing and being seen.

In retrospect, perhaps that was my classroom. Perhaps they were my professors, and life itself became the doctorate I never pursued.

Over the years, Women Who Run With the Wolves would occasionally resurface. A woman I interviewed would mention it. A conversation would circle back to it. Its title would appear unexpectedly, like someone from your past you haven’t thought about in years but recognize immediately. And today, somehow, it appeared again.

I’m not entirely sure why, but I’ve lived long enough to notice when something keeps returning. I am not the same woman who first read that book fifteen years ago.

Since then, I have mothered, loved, and lost. I have watched relationships shapeshift. I have had to confront the difference between loyalty and self-abandonment. I have learned that understanding someone doesn’t obligate you to stay available for everything they bring into your life. I have discovered that boundaries are sometimes less about closing a door than about finally believing what you see on the other side.

I have traveled the world and discovered that distance has a way of bringing you closer to yourself. I have sat with the dying and carried grief that began when I was eleven, learning that grief does not disappear simply because decades pass. It changes its posture. It becomes less of an open wound and more something woven quietly into who you are.

I have been a wife long enough to understand that love is not merely finding the right person but repeatedly deciding how two imperfect people will continue growing alongside one another.

I have watched my sons become men and learned one of motherhood’s hardest lessons: eventually, the job is not to direct their lives but to trust what you have placed inside them.

And I have written… more than anything, I have been rather prolific. Not because I believed I had answers, but because I kept asking questions and my curiosity has not waned.

Along the way, the questions became the work.

What do we inherit? What do we unconsciously repeat?

When does loyalty turn into self-erasure?

What happens when recognition finally outpaces hope?

What does it mean to exercise agency over a life shaped by forces we never chose?

And how much of becoming is actually remembering?

Those questions feel remarkably close to the ones Estés placed before me fifteen years ago.

Which makes me wonder whether books change—or whether we do. I believe we return to certain books because there are sentences we were too young, too busy, too frightened, or simply too unfinished to grasp the first time. Back then, I thought the Wild Woman was someone I needed to find. Today, I understand her differently.

She is not some untamed version of ourselves, waiting dramatically in the wilderness. She is much quieter than that. She is the part that knows. The part that notices before the mind begins negotiating, recognizing what nourishes us and what diminishes us. She is also the part that survives disappointment without letting it define the rest of the story. And most enduring, the part that can love deeply without disappearing.

Perhaps maturity isn’t becoming more certain but becoming less willing to betray what we already know.

I will never know the exact reason why Women Who Run With the Wolves wandered back into my life today. Maybe coincidence is enough of an explanation. Or maybe books occasionally return like old friends—not to teach us something new, but to show us how far we have traveled since we first met them.

Fifteen years ago, this book gave me language for a woman I was only beginning to know. Today, perhaps it has returned to remind me: She was there all along.