There is an old story most men and women
have never been told.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes spent years inside it.
She said it holds the precise architecture of
what love requires of a man.

An Inuit girl was thrown into the sea by her father
long ago.

The fish ate her flesh and she became
bones at the bottom of the ocean.

She has been there ever since.
Waiting.

A fisherman dropped his line into a haunted bay.

His hook caught her ribcage.
She tangled further and further in his line.

He could not escape her.
She was attached.

He brought her into his shelter.
He laid her bones out carefully.
One by one.
He stayed beside her.
And slept.

In his sleep he wept.
The tears of a man finally
still enough to feel.

Skeleton Woman drank his tears.

She took his beating heart
and used it as a drum.
She sang herself back into flesh.

What Estes saw in this story was the
precise architecture of what love requires
of a man.

The willingness to face what he pulled
from the deep.

To lay it out carefully.
To stay.
To give his heart as a drum.

Most men never learn to stay.

They reach for the bloom without sitting
through the winter.

They want the woman without facing what
they pulled from the deep.

She carries the gravity of a man who
cannot yet see what she sees.

The true belief in his greatness.

The present pain of his inability to own it.

She has been holding the vision of
who he could be for years with a
faith that costs her something every
day he does not step into it.

She moves in cycles most men were
never thaught to read.

She carries the seasons in her body.
Fall. Winter. Spring. Summer.
In a single month.

When he reaches for her in her
winter he has not understood what
she is moving through.

And she learns to hide the winter
from him.

When a man gives his heart as a
drum something in her recognize it
before he speaks.

The part of her that has been braced
for years begins to open.

She exhales into him.
Because finally there is somewhere
safe to land.

The fisherman who stays is the man
who has been through his own
haunted water.

Who has faced his own Skeleton
Woman.

Who has wept his own tears and
given his own heart as a drum.

The uninitiated man fades.
A thousand ordinary days of almost.

The man who crosses offers
something the world is starving for.

Raw. Real. Unmanaged.
Heart opened.

He stopped shrinking himself to fit
the room.

He discovered what the mystics
Always knew.

She was never outside him.
She was the life force he had been
running from his entire life.

He found the miracle.

The sacred he had been searching
for in every wrong place recognized
at last as his own breath.

asacredking