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How Do We Know?
“Like the wolf, intuition has claws that pry things open and pin things down, it has eyes that can see through the shields of persona, it has ears that hear beyond the range of mundane human hearing. With these formidable psychic tools, a woman takes on a shrewd and even precognitive animal consciousness, one that deepens her femininity and sharpens her ability to move confidently in the outer world.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés
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“My grandmother always said that she and my mother, and I, her daughter, survived the severe blockade and hunger only thanks to our cat Vaska. If it were not for this red-headed bully, my daughter and I would have died of hunger like many others.
Every day Vaska went hunting and my grandmother made stew from what he dragged back.
At the same time, the cat always sat nearby and waited for food, and at night all three of us lay under one blanket and he warmed us.
He felt the bombing much earlier than the air raid was announced, began to spin and meow plaintively, my grandmother managed to collect things, water, mother, cat and run out of the house. When they fled to the shelter, as a family member, they dragged him with them and watched him not to be taken away and eaten.
The hunger was terrible. Vaska was hungry as everyone else and skinny. All winter until spring, my grandmother collected crumbs for the birds, and from spring they went…
