She is in a deep search to discover herself, to determine her life in her own eyes instead of the eyes of others. She is in deep conflict with her inner spirit, which often leaves her not as herself, but as someone she's fooled herself into believing she is. With the realization of this, will come her freedom from the fabrication that had become her life. As she comes closer and closer to this insight, her home becomes more and more La Selva Subterránea, "The Underground Forest", the underworld of all female knowing. It is a wild world that lives under this one. While there, any female is infused with an instinctive language and knowledge. It is from this vantage point she learns to understand what cannot be so easily
understood from the eyes of someone on the topside world.
She has mastered several descents with much grace and compassion because of her knowledge, and she continues to grow with every new downfall she meets. As she completes one round of descent and transformation, she plunges into yet another. These alchemical rounds are complete, each with nigredo, loss,rubedo, sacrifice, and albedo, coming of light, following one upon another. All this descending and loss and finding and strengthening, portrays women's lifelong initiation into the renewal of the wild.
Serenity's initiation to La Selva Subterránea was through the rite of endurance. The word endurance sounds as though is should mean "to continue without cessation," and while this is an occasional part of the tasks underlying of her life, the word endurance also means "to harden, to make sturdy, to make robust, to strengthen," and this is the principal thrust of the generative feature of a woman's long psychic life. It doesn't just go on to go on. Endurance means she is making something. The teaching of endurance occurs all throughout nature. The pads of a wolf's pups' paws are soft as clay when the pups are born. It is only the ranging, the roaming, and then treks on which their parents take them that toughen them up. Then they can climb and bound over sharp gravel, over stinging nettle, even over broken glass without being hurt. Mother wolves plunge their pups into the coldest streams aginable, run until a pup is splay-legged and can hardly keep up and then run some more. They are strengthening the sweet little spirit, investing it with resilience. The teaching of endurance is one of the rites of the Great Wild Mother, the Wild Woman Archetype, the keeper of La Selva Subterránea.
With endurance comes deep respect for everything around oneself. And Serenity's realizing that her respect is for those whom stood in her way just as much as it is for those who stood behind her, if not more so. Without resistance there is no strength to be gained, without strength there is no endurance. Endurance is the core of every woman's spirit, every bit as much as the Wild Woman Archetype is.