Letter To A Young Activist During Troubled Times– by Dr. Clarissa Pinkoles Estes

Dr. Clarissa Pinkoles Estes, author of Women Who Run With The Wolves, wrote this in 2003.

I reprint it here as a source of encour­age­ment and remem­brance for us all, recall­ing how it touched me when I first read it seven years ago.  It still res­onates today.

My dear friends:

Do not lose heart. We were made for these times.

I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and prop­erly bewil­dered. They are con­cerned about the state of affairs in our world right now.  It is true, one has to be excep­tion­ally strong to with­stand much of what passes for “good” in our cul­ture today.

Abject dis­re­gard of what the soul finds most pre­cious and irre­place­able and the cor­rup­tion of prin­ci­pled ideals have become, in some large soci­etal are­nas, “the new nor­mal,” the grotes­querie of the week. It is hard to say which one of the cur­rent egre­gious mat­ters has rocked people’s worlds and beliefs more.

Ours is a time of almost daily jaw-dropping aston­ish­ment and often right­eous rage over the lat­est degra­da­tions of what mat­ters most to civ­i­lized, vision­ary peo­ple.  You are right in your assess­ments. The lus­tre and hubris some have aspired to while endors­ing acts so heinous against chil­dren, elders, every­day peo­ple, the poor, the unguarded, the help­less, is breathtaking.

Yet …I urge you, ask you, gen­tle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewail­ing these dif­fi­cult times. Espe­cially do not lose hope. Most par­tic­u­larly because, the fact is — we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learn­ing, prac­tic­ing, been in train­ing for and just wait­ing to meet on this exact plain of engage­ment. I can­not tell you often enough that we are def­i­nitely the lead­ers we have been wait­ing for, and that we have been raised since child­hood for this time precisely.

I grew up on the Great Lakes and rec­og­nize a sea­wor­thy ves­sel when I see one. Regard­ing awak­ened souls, there have never been more able crafts in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully pro­vi­sioned and able to sig­nal one another as never before in the his­tory of humankind. I would like to take your hands for a moment and assure you that you are built well for these times. Despite your stints of doubt, your frus­tra­tions in a right­ing all that needs change right now, or even feel­ing you have lost the map entirely, you are not with­out resource, you are not alone.

Look out over the prow; there are mil­lions of boats of right­eous souls on the waters with you. In your deep­est bones, you have always known this is so. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long tim­bers com­pos­ing your prow and rud­der come from a greater for­est. That long-grained lum­ber is known to with­stand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regard­less.

We have been in train­ing for a dark time such as this, since the day we assented to come to Earth. For many decades, world­wide, souls just like Us have been felled and left for dead in so many ways over and over brought down by naivete, by lack of love, by sud­denly real­iz­ing one deadly thing or another, by not real­iz­ing some­thing else soon enough, by being ambushed and assaulted by var­i­ous cul­tural and per­sonal shocks in the extreme. We have a his­tory of being gut­ted, and yet remem­ber this espe­cially…

We have also, of neces­sity, per­fected the knack of res­ur­rec­tion. Over and over again we have been the liv­ing proof that that which has been exiled, lost, or foundered can be restored to life again. This is as true and sturdy a prog­no­sis for the destroyed worlds around us as it was for our own once mor­tally wounded selves.

Though we are not invul­ner­a­ble, our ris­i­bil­ity sup­ports us to laugh in the face of cyn­ics who say “fat chance,” and “man­age­ment before mercy,” and other evi­dences of com­plete absence of soul sense. This, and our hav­ing been to Hell and back on at least one momen­tous occa­sion, makes us sea­soned ves­sels for certain.

Even if you do not feel that you are, you are. Even if your puny lit­tle ego wants to con­test the enor­mity of your soul, that smaller self can never for long sub­or­di­nate the larger Self. In mat­ters of death and rebirth, you have sur­passed the bench­marks many times.

Believe the evi­dence of any one of your past test­ings and tri­als. Here it is: Are you still stand­ing? The answer is, Yes! (And no adverbs like “barely” are allowed here). If you are still stand­ing, ragged flags or no, you are able. Thus, you have passed the bar. And even raised it. You are sea­wor­thy.

In any dark time, there is a ten­dency to veer toward faint­ing over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make your­self ill with over­whelm. There is a ten­dency too to fall into being weak­ened by per­se­ver­at­ing on what is out­side your reach, by what can­not yet be. Do not focus there. That is spend­ing the wind with­out rais­ing the sails.

We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resis­tance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to lis­ten to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remem­ber that to be in grace means to sub­mit to the voice greater? You have all the resource you need to ride any wave, to sur­face from any trough.

In the lan­guage of avi­a­tors and sailors, ours is to sail for­ward now, all balls out. Under­stand the para­dox: If you study the physics of a water­spout, you will see that the outer vor­tex whirls far more quickly than the inner one. To calm the storm means to quiet the outer layer, to cause it, by what­ever coun­ter­vail­ing means, to swirl much less, to move more evenly match the veloc­ity of the inner, far less volatile core — till what­ever has been lifted into such a vicious fun­nel falls back to Earth, lays down, is peace­able again.

One of the most impor­tant steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow your­self to be taken in flurry of over­wrought emo­tion or des­per­a­tion thereby acci­den­tally con­tribut­ing to the swale and the swirl. Ours is not the task of fix­ing the entire world all at once, but of stretch­ing out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.

Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some por­tion of this poor suf­fer­ing world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the crit­i­cal mass to tip toward an endur­ing good. What is needed for dra­matic change is an accu­mu­la­tion of acts — adding, adding to, adding more, con­tin­u­ing. We know that it does not take “every­one on Earth” to bring jus­tice and peace, but only a small, deter­mined group who will not give up dur­ing the first, sec­ond, or hun­dredth gale.

One of the most calm­ing and pow­er­ful actions you can do to inter­vene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds sig­nal fires … causes proper mat­ters to catch fire.

To dis­play the lantern of soul in shad­owy times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward oth­ers, both, are acts of immense brav­ery and great­est neces­sity. Strug­gling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and will­ing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.
There will always be times in the midst of “suc­cess right around the cor­ner, but as yet still unseen” when you feel dis­cour­aged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not enter­tain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.

The rea­son is this: In my utter­most bones I know some­thing, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remem­ber why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours: They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here.

In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in har­bor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But …that is not what great ships are built for.

This comes with much love and prayer that you remem­ber who you came from, and why you came to this beau­ti­ful, need­ful Earth.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. © 2003 C.P. Estes, All rights reserved.

Dr. Estes’ new series, The Dan­ger­ous Old Woman, is avail­able at Sounds True.

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