"...The second awakening involved a much older woman. Her hips were, according to common standard, too pear-shaped, her bosom very tiny in comparison, and she had thin purpley little veins all over her thighs, a long scar from a serious surgery going around her body from rib cage to spine in the manner in which apples are peeled. Her waist was perhaps four hands wide.
It was a mystery then why the men buzzed about her as though she were honeycomb. They wanted to take a bite out of her pear thighs, they wanted to lick that scar, hold that chest, lay their cheeks upon their spidery veins. Her smile was dazzling, her gait so beautiful, and when her eyes looked, they truly took in what they were looking at. I saw again what I had been taught to ignore, the power IN the body, The cultural power OF the body is its beauty, but power IN the body is rare, for most have chased it away with their torture or embarrassment by the flesh.
It is in this light that the wildish woman can inquire into the numinosity of her own body and understand it not as a dumbbell that we are sentenced to carry for life, not as a beast of burden, pampered or otherwise, who carries us around for life, but as a series of DOORS AND DREAMS AND POEMS through which we can learn and know all manner of things. In the wild psyche, body is understood as a being in its own right, one who loves us, depends on us, one to whom we are sometimes mother, and who sometimes is mother to us."

from Clarissa Pinkola Estes' 'Women who run with the Wolves'