A couple of weeks back, I had a meeting with Luna, one of my best friends from our college days. She was carrying a fruit box full of books. It was what she calls her “feminist library”. In the past, I saw her all the time reading that kind of angry-looking books and I used to wonder what was the whole point behind them, what new, thrilling, brilliant and undiscovered idea could be found in that kind of literature… But at our last meeting, one of those books caught my attention for some inexplicable reason. It was named “Women Who Run with the Wolves” and on the cover there was a bluish Picasso painting. I decided to borrow it. Later that night, I found the same painting was hanging above my head in Luna's apartment. I took it as a signal and I opened the book.
The first fifty pages didn’t let me sleep till 3:00 am. I couldn’t believe how accurate the book’s content was for the life moment I was going through. I was so amazed that for the next five days I didn’t do anything other than read the book as if some sort of revelation or divine light had entered my head. Even though I tried to avoid it, in those days I also had to interact with some human beings, but I couldn’t help telling them about the book, recommend it to them, quote it all the time and link whatever they said to some of the valuable ideas I was finding in the text.
No doubt that book had become The Holy Bible to me, and no doubt my family and friends started to get fed up with it. It was written in the 90s by a totally unknown American author called Clarissa Pinkola Estés, it was actually a collection of tales kind of thing, it was very intense and fat and, of course, it was supposed to be a feminist speech. Nobody but my old friend Luna could understand my fascination with it.
It took me a while to understand that the magic about that book was not accessible to everyone and at any moment. It was a matter of being in an exact point of your life with the exact thirst for certain kinds of answers. So, these days my fever has decreased, but I still keep the book around on my bedside table. I feel thankful to have picked it up from that fruit box in the right moment I needed it and I’ll wait patiently for the right moment for the rest of humankind to read it.
