I remembered a post from a couple of years ago today and needed to read it. The scape goat is an active archetypal force in my life and reading such insight from others who are also intimately familiar with such energetics can be very healing. I’m sure many of my readers too will find it helpful and so I post it again. I’m also adding another quote by Clarissa Pinkola Estes that didn’t appear the first time it was posted.
A neighbor’s goat
Exiled scapegoats can, thus, return to serve the collective as agents of its deepest and most difficult needs…. But they are also a community unto themselves.
They form a loose society of nonconformists. It is one devoted to transpersonal processes underlying the individuality and secular collectives.
Those in this society listen for the guidance that comes from the intersection of life and death, joy and pain, love and wounding. They are more or less willing to feel its paradoxical and raw nature. Since they struggle to continually accept that intersection in their own hearts, they can work with inevitable shadow projections, not as a prelude to scapegoating and splitting in order to attack, but as a means of life long personal growth and ethical actions. ~Sylvia Brinton Perera from Scapegoat Complex: Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt
The above quote also made me think of this quote by MLK which I’ve shared a few times on this blog:
This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
And lastly this:
Do not cringe and make yourself small if you are called the black sheep, the maverick, the lone wolf. Those with slow seeing say a nonconformist is a blight on society.
But it has been proven over the centuries, that being different means standing at the edge, means one is practically guaranteed to make an original contribution, a useful and stunning contribution to her culture.
When seeking guidance, don’t ever listen to the tiny-hearted. Be kind to them, heap them with blessings, cajole them, but do not follow their advice.
If you have ever been called defiant, incorrigible, forward, cunning, insurgent, unruly, rebellious, you’re on the right track.
Wild Woman is close by.
If you have never been called these things, there is yet time. Practice your Wild Woman. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I’m going to add one more one-liner that I’ve put on this blog many times before because it can never be said enough:
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
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