2. Joy

Joy...

. . .We can see that the child’s making of the red shoes accomplishes a major feat: she takes life from shoeless/slave status- just going on one’s way, nose to the road, looking neither left nor right- to a consciousness that pauses to create, that notices beauty and feels joy, that has passion and registers satiation... and all the things that make up the integral nature we call wild. 

The fact that the shoes are red indicates that the process is going to be one of vibrant life, which includes sacrifice. This is right and proper. The fact that these shoes are handmade and pieced from scraps points to the child symbolizing the creative spirit, who, being motherless and untaught for whatever reasons, has pieced this all together for herself using native perception. And brava! what a fine and soulful accomplishment.

If well enough could only be left alone, this situation would progress nicely for the creative self. In the tale, the child is delighted by her handiwork; the fact that she could manage it, the fact that she had the patience to search and gather, to design, to piece and fit, to make her ideas manifest. No matter that at the first the product is crude; many of the creation Gods through all cultures and through all time did not create perfectly the first time. The first try can always stand improvement, and the second, and often the third and fourth as well. That has nothing to do with one’s goodness and skill. It is just life, evocative, and evolving. 

But if the child is left alone, she will make another pair of red shoes, and another and another, until they are not so crude. She will progress. But even beyond her wondrous display of ingenuity and thriving is difficult circumstances, the shining fact for her is that these shoes she has made cause her enormous joy, and joy is her life’s blood, spirit-food and soul-life all in one. 

Joy is the kind of feeling a woman has when she lays the words down on the paper just so, or hits the notes al punto, right on the head, the first time. Whew. Unbelievable. It is the kind of feeling a woman has when she finds she is pregnant and wants to be. It is the kind of joy a woman feels when she looks at people she loves enjoying themselves. It is the kind of joy a woman feels when she has done something that she feels dogger about, that she feels intense about, something that took risk, something that made her stretch, best herself, and succeed- maybe gracefully, maybe not, but she did it, created the something, the someone, the art, the battle, the moment; her life. That is a woman’s natural and instinctive state of being. Wild Woman emanates up through theat kind of joy. That sort of soulful situation summons her by name.