Welcome to Week 4 of the 10 week Wild Woman Art Journaling series where we explore 10 stories in the Wild Woman archetypes from Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes book, Women Who Run With Wolves. It’s 10 Stories, 10 art journaling exercises plus downloads galore for 7.00 a month, or if you choose not to subscribe to Substack, you can also buy the course for a single rate fee. It’s drip method, so every Wednesday for 10 weeks you get a new story and lesson. No art or journaling experience needed.

The downloads are stored in an online course that you will be provided access to when you have paid the monthly substack fee. You will continue to have access to the course unless you do not renew your monthly fee.

Subscribe and get access to the course that includes analysis, stories, creative activities, journal prompts, downloadable and Sonic Medicine for each week.

If you don’t wish to subscribe, here’s the link to enroll in the course.

The Wild Woman Paper Doll Course is up and running as well. Following the stories, more depth and paper doll cut outs, templates, ideas and samples.

Subscribe now

Share

About me:

I was born into a living convergence of lineages that had been moving toward each other for centuries — Pictish royalty and Scottish nobility, Ulster Covenanters and Mayflower Separatists, Quaker Friends, First Nations Peoples and German artists, frontier settlers and earth keepers. Every stream, in its own language and century, was practicing the same essential thing: direct encounter with the sacred. Interior life held fiercely against every pressure to abandon it. Community built around the covenant of something true.

I did not know all of this as a child. I knew what I felt — the pull toward stillness, the sense that the visible world was threaded through with something immeasurably alive, the certainty that grief and passage and threshold moments were not problems to be managed but sacred territory to be entered with care. I knew I was a spiritual intuitive before I had language for it. What I have spent my life discovering is why.

King Nechtan of the Picts abdicated his throne in 724 AD and entered a monastery. He chose the contemplative life over worldly power. My lineage surname — McKnight, Mac Neachdainn in its Gaelic root — means Son of Nechtan. I carry his name forward across 1,300 years.

Alongside this Quaker lineage, my mother’s father carried a different kind of gift into America. A German architect and illustrator, he arrived through Ellis Island in 1923 — one of the last crossings before immigration quotas effectively closed the door. He had read what was coming in Germany before most people allowed themselves to see it. He brought his family out of the shadow of what would become the Holocaust, carrying his architect’s eye and his illustrator’s hand into Kansas City, where he eventually found his professional home at a Jewish family’s fine arts printing company. History, as he lived it, had a grace note.

His artistic gift — the capacity to look at the visible world with precision and render it with beauty — ran through the family line into my mother and into me. It is not separate from my contemplative practice. It is the same capacity: trained attention, willingness to look closely, the ability to hold what you see and translate it into something others can receive. Seeing clearly is a spiritual practice. My grandfather, father, grandmother, mother and a deep connection with spirit taught me that without ever saying so.

The Quaker Meeting, the indigenous circle, practice of silent observation and utilization of the arts and the Celtic hillside service were animated by the same essential impulse — the irreducible sacredness of direct encounter with the divine, and the willingness to lose everything rather than betray it.

Different languages. Different centuries. The same root.

I came to my formal credentials through the long way — through lived experience of suffering and survival, through the accompaniment of others through their thresholds, through the disciplined pursuit of every framework and modality that helped me understand what I was already doing intuitively. I hold a PhD in Transpersonal Counseling where I studied archetypes and aspects of depth psychology, a Licensed Alcohol and Drug Counselor designation, tons of holistic health credentials and a licensed art educator. I am ordained in new thought and have officiated weddings, commitment ceremonies, blessings, and death rites as well as am a registered spiritual companion. If you’re interested in working with me… watch this space.

The greatest thing I have learned in my life is the difference between my chattering mind and my intuitive voice.

One is loud, chaotic and screaming at times.

The other is solid, calm, all knowing, and most of the time quiet. There are times it’s louder but never panicked. It always allows me to be an idiot at times.

I’ve learned to trust it despite my first few decades of being taught by life not to.

My lessons as Vasalisa, came through trauma, finally slowing down to see patterns, to learn to deal with discomfort, urges to avoid and run and to know the feeling of intuitive alignment.

It’s still a work in process after nearly 6 decades.

Finding my ancestral lineage and story…. changed everything that created doubt.

This 10 week course is more than an art course. It’s a depth work course.

Some will know that now is the time, even in the midst of what’s going on. Those will know why it’s the time to engage in this work and you’ll learn, through your own experience and soul kindling, what gifts it has for you developing yourself as you move forward in life.

Vasalisa the Wise — The Archetype of Intuition & The Blessed Doll

Estés draws from the Russian fairy tale of Vasalisa the Beautiful — a young girl whose dying mother presses a small wooden doll into her hands with a whispered instruction: feed her when you are hungry, and she will guide you. This doll is the first and most important gift of the story. She is the inherited intuition — the mother-line wisdom passed down through generations of women who knew things in their bodies before they knew them in their minds.

When Vasalisa’s cruel stepmother sends her into the dark forest to fetch fire from Baba Yaga — essentially sending her to her death — Vasalisa goes. Not because she is foolish. Because the doll in her pocket grows warm, and she trusts it.

Baba Yaga herself is a wild and terrifying figure — the ancient, ambiguous feminine who is neither good nor evil but true.She is the force that does not coddle. She sets impossible tasks. She rides in a mortar and pestle. She lives in a house on chicken legs surrounded by skulls whose eyes glow in the dark. She is, Estés tells us, the Wild Grandmother — the instinctual feminine in her most untamed, most instructive form.

Vasalisa completes every task Baba Yaga sets before her — not through cleverness or strategy, but because she listens to the doll. She feeds her intuition and her intuition feeds her back. When Baba Yaga finally asks how she has managed it all, Vasalisa answers simply: by my mother’s blessing.

Baba Yaga sends her away — that answer is too holy for her house — and presses into Vasalisa’s hands a skull with burning eyes. It is the fire she was sent to fetch. And when Vasalisa carries it home, those burning eyes reduce the cruel stepmother and stepsisters to ash.

What the archetype carries:

• The small doll as the voice of deep intuition — the inner knowing that is inherited, that lives in the body, that must be fed with attention and trust in order to function

• The understanding that intuition is not magic — it is relationship. You must tend it. You must listen to it even when the world calls it foolish or dangerous

• Baba Yaga as initiator — the wild, unboundaried feminine wisdom that does not teach gently but teaches completely. Not every teacher is comfortable. The most important ones rarely are

• The darkness of the forest as necessary passage — Vasalisa could not have come into her power without being sent into the terrifying unknown

• That the mother-line carries medicine — what our grandmothers and great-grandmothers knew in their hands and their bones and their instincts is not gone. It is waiting to be listened to

• The burning eyes as discernment — the fire of true intuition does not illuminate everything equally. It burns away what is false, what is cruel, what has no business living in your house any longer

Estés returns to Vasalisa throughout the book as the primary image of a woman who is fully, fiercely in relationship with her own inner knowing. Not perfect. Not unafraid. But listening. Always listening to the small warm thing in her pocket that knows the way through the dark.

copyright J Waters 2026

Beyond this wall is the rest of goodness. The access to the pdf, the journal prompts, the creative ritual, the creative activity, a sound medicine and vocal alchemy meditation and access to the online class repository (that is the container for everything).

We are also engaged in a weekly Wild Woman Paper Doll making course with these archetypes encouraging your creativity and deeper Talisman making and embodiment into the process of knowing your wild woman and how the archetypes work within you. Come join us.

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Google has been fucking artists and content creators for over a year (and probably longer than that). As an independent musician, composer, singer songwriter, and intermediate artist, I am urging all artists who have their distribution include youTube, to become aware of the current legislation and the practices of Google (which get the heck off google if you’re still on it people). Here’s the low down from LowDown, May 10, 2026 (yes I’m a little behind) in a story from PRABHANU KUMAR DAS of Medianama.

“A group of independent musicians has sued Google in a US federal court, alleging that the company used copyrighted music without permission to train its generative AI systems. The complaint claims Google copied large volumes of audio from millions of internet music videos, including music distributed on YouTube, to develop models such as MusicLM and the Lyria family of tools, AI music systems capable of generating songs with vocals and lyrics.

According to the lawsuit, artists were neither compensated nor given a way to consent or opt out of this training. Furthermore, the plaintiffs are seeking damages, an injunction to halt the alleged infringement, and the disgorgement of profits from these AI systems.

Key Claims From The Complaint

• Training Data Taken Without Permission: Google allegedly trained its music AI on large datasets of copyrighted recordings. The company’s research reportedly collected around 50 million internet music videos, extracting 30-second clips and retaining roughly 44 million for training. Plaintiffs claim this copying occurred without licensing the works, compensating artists, or offering creators any mechanism to consent or opt out. Additionally, the lawsuit alleges that Google trained on this data first and reached out to rightsholders afterwards.

• Google “Dismantled” Music Recordings: The company did not merely analyse music but allegedly dismantled recordings during processing. According to the complaint, Google extracted audio, segmented recordings into clips, converted them into machine-readable formats, and generated tokenised representations for training In doing so, plaintiffs claim Google systematically broke down recordings to reuse their content across AI models.

• Copyright Metadata Was Removed: The complaint alleges that Google stripped copyright management information from recordings during ingestion. Plaintiffs say the pipeline removed identifiers such as artist names, track titles, copyright notices, and ISRC codes (International Standard Recording Codes used to identify music recordings) that connect recordings to their owners, allegedly discarding information needed for attribution and licensing.

• YouTube’s Central Role In Pipeline: Google owns YouTube, one of the world’s largest music platforms. Plaintiffs argue that artists upload recordings to YouTube to distribute and monetise their work, yet Google allegedly repurposed similar recordings as training data for its AI systems. Consequently, the lawsuit claims Google moved from hosting music to competing with it.

• Content ID Database And Rights Data: YouTube’s Content ID system stores millions of reference recordings and ownership metadata provided by rights holders. Plaintiffs claim this infrastructure gives Google detailed knowledge of copyrighted works and their owners. Despite this, they allege Google trained its AI systems on copyrighted music without securing licences.

• Google Controls Multiple Parts of the Music Market: Google occupies a structural position across the music ecosystem. It runs YouTube for distribution, Content ID for rights management, and now AI systems that generate music. Plaintiffs claim this allows the company to host artists’ catalogues while simultaneously developing AI tools that compete with them. Lyria and MusicLM can directly compete with human artists in the background music market, a significant source of revenue for independent musicians.

• Google Allegedly Ignored Legal Risks: The complaint claims Google recognised the copyright risks of generative music models early on. The filing notes that the company initially withheld the MusicLM model from public release while acknowledging the risks of misappropriating creative works. However, plaintiffs say the company later released the model and continued developing more advanced systems.

• Voiceprints And Artist Identity Issues: Finally, the complaint raises concerns about the use of human voices. Plaintiffs allege Google’s systems can generate realistic vocals by modelling vocal characteristics from training recordings. They argue this process may involve extracting biometric voiceprints from singers’ performances, raising additional claims under biometric privacy and publicity laws.

According to the complaint, the following is the chronological order in which Google released its AI-generated music models:

• 2016: Google launches the Magenta project, a research initiative focused on applying machine learning to music generation and creative tools.

• 2021: Google researchers publish SoundStream, a neural audio codec that converts recordings into numerical tokens. The complaint says this technology enables the large-scale ingestion of recorded music into machine-learning pipelines.

• August 2022: Google develops MuLan, a model linking music audio with natural-language descriptions. Researchers reportedly compile a dataset of around 50 million internet music videos, extracting roughly 44 million audio clips totalling about 370,000 hours of music.

• October 2022: Google publishes AudioLM, demonstrating how tokenised audio can be generated using language-model techniques similar to those used for text.

• January 2023: Google introduces MusicLM, a text-to-music generator trained on millions of audio clips. Initially, Google withheld the model from public release due to concerns about misuse and the misappropriation of creative content.

• May 2023: However, Google later released MusicLM through its AI Test Kitchen, allowing users to generate music from prompts and provide feedback to refine the model.

• November 2023: Google DeepMind subsequently announces Lyria, a new generative music model developed with YouTube to create music with vocals and instruments.

• 2024–2025: During this period, the complaint alleges that Google continued developing its music AI systems while negotiating with industry players about licensing arrangements for AI-generated music.

• February 2026: Google launched Lyria 3 within the Gemini app and introduced ProducerAI, enabling users to generate and share full songs.”

Chris Cooke, writing for completemusicupdate stated, “Google has responded to a copyright infringement claim from a group of independent artists over its music AI model Lyria. It claims the artists basically gave Google permission to use their music in AI training when they uploaded content to YouTube, and therefore their lawsuit should be dismissed”

That’s right. Google claims that when you click on a distributor’s right deal and it gets sent to YouTube for YouTube music, that all your owner’s right as an artist go away and they can strip your metadata and content for ai training using your voice, your sound, stems, melody, etc.

According to Chris Cooke’s article,

The first thing I did last night when reading this, was go to CD Baby and go through every release and revoke privileges for Youtube, Facebook, and TikTok. The thing is, they probably already have absorbed my released into their matrix of ai slop anyway and further, it takes at least 30 days to get a distributed release pulled from the current rotation of these sites.

So where are you to go when you distribute your music and videos?

Vimeo.

No, I don’t work for them nor do I get a kick back. I do host my film shorts on the site however, which seems to be a Godsend. Here’s their policy.

Vimeo’s AI policy can be read here.

But video isn’t music distribution like YouTube has. What other sites can strip my original song lyrics, song writing, vocals and music?

Guess I’m pulling my music from there tonight too.

If you actually WANT ai to train on your music, you can look at licensing agreements that offer creator compensation, licensing revenue and transparency and control over your originals.

Soundverse.ai says,

Does any of this keep the ai bots from scraping your work when it plays on Apple or Spotify?

Who knows.

And well, here are some recommendation from magneticmag.com about 6 companies that are integrating ai tools in for artists and doing it ethically, which is a bigger conversation now.

Suno, just released more ownership to your stems for original creators, but, Suno's "Voices" feature lets you upload your own voice to generate songs, but their help page does not state whether uploaded voices are used for AI training. Separately, Suno has faced lawsuits for using copyrighted music in training without disclosure.

Makebestmusic.com, states in an article dated today (6/12/26),

Suno has publicly stated that none of the millions of tracks generated on its platform contain anything like a sample of existing music, positioning its outputs as original creations rather than reproductions.

Critics are pushing back.

Suno is also used by songwriters and artists to upload their original wav stems and create chorus, and arrangements and to tweak in remixes. This means you can upload your own voice and your own original acoustic or electronic composition, midi etc, your song, into Suno and edit it generating different types of additions and outputs. THIS is one of the really cool things about Suno, and yes I have used it. The question is always, but are they training off what I upload. I just figure they are regardless of what they say.

Do I have full copyright to what I create in Suno if I just add a chorus or a drumline? That is the really complicated question.

For me, an electro-acoustic singer-songwriter and ambient soundtrack composer of over 20 years, I have to liken some of this to when samples came out on GarageBand for the first time, or in sample bundles to use with DAWS in electronic music production in the early years. Acoustic artists screamed and sometimes still disregard electronic music creation, just like fine artists disregard digital art. Yet… electronic music is a billion dollar industry. Artists still get about a quarter of cent a spin.

Is any original music safe from being scraped by AI online?

My guess is probably not until there are ethical integrations that are upheld.

Is original music with AI generated parts unethical?

I don’t think so. Are samples unethical? No.

Is hiding the fact that at major site like YouTube Music is scraping your original work for training ai and outright telling the courts that as an artist you have no rights to your work when it’s on their site, ignoring copyright?

Yes. Period.

Sources:

https://www.medianama.com/2026/03/223-musicians-sue-google-ai-music-training/

Complaint: https://www.medianama.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Kogon-v.-Google.-Complaint-Filed-1.pdf

https://completemusicupdate.com/google-says-any-music-uploaded-to-youtube-is-fair-game-for-ai-training-and-theres-nothing-musicians-can-do/

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/19/google-youtube-ai-training-veo-3.html

https://www.techspot.com/news/108391-youtube-creators-unaware-google-uses-their-videos-train.html

https://techweez.com/2025/06/23/google-using-youtube-videos-to-train-ai/

https://www.side-line.com/bandcamp-bans-ai-music-new-generative-ai-policy/

https://www.soundverse.ai/blog/article/what-artists-receive-from-ai-training-licensing-deals-0825

https://makebestmusic.com/blog/does-suno-ai-steal-music

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Welcome to Week 3 of the 10 week Wild Woman Art Journaling series where we explore 10 stories in the Wild Woman archetypes from Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes book, Women Who Run With Wolves. It’s 10 Stories, 10 art journaling exercises plus downloads galore for 7.00 a month, or if you choose not to subscribe to Substack, you can also buy the course for a single rate fee. It’s drip method, so every Wednesday for 10 weeks you get a new story and lesson. No art or journaling experience needed.

The downloads are stored in an online course that you will be provided access to when you have paid the monthly substack fee. You will continue to have access to the course unless you do not renew your monthly fee.

Subscribe and get access to the course that includes analysis, stories, creative activities, journal prompts, downloadable and Sonic Medicine for each week.

If you don’t wish to subscribe, here’s the link to enroll in the course.

The Wild Woman Paper Doll Course is up and running as well. Following the stories, more depth and paper doll cut outs, templates, ideas and samples.

Subscribe now

Share

About me:

I was born into a living convergence of lineages that had been moving toward each other for centuries — Pictish royalty and Scottish nobility, Ulster Covenanters and Mayflower Separatists, Quaker Friends, First Nations Peoples and German artists, frontier settlers and earth keepers. Every stream, in its own language and century, was practicing the same essential thing: direct encounter with the sacred. Interior life held fiercely against every pressure to abandon it. Community built around the covenant of something true.

I did not know all of this as a child. I knew what I felt — the pull toward stillness, the sense that the visible world was threaded through with something immeasurably alive, the certainty that grief and passage and threshold moments were not problems to be managed but sacred territory to be entered with care. I knew I was a spiritual intuitive before I had language for it. What I have spent my life discovering is why.

King Nechtan of the Picts abdicated his throne in 724 AD and entered a monastery. He chose the contemplative life over worldly power. My lineage surname — McKnight, Mac Neachdainn in its Gaelic root — means Son of Nechtan. I carry his name forward across 1,300 years.

Alongside this Quaker lineage, my mother’s father carried a different kind of gift into America. A German architect and illustrator, he arrived through Ellis Island in 1923 — one of the last crossings before immigration quotas effectively closed the door. He had read what was coming in Germany before most people allowed themselves to see it. He brought his family out of the shadow of what would become the Holocaust, carrying his architect’s eye and his illustrator’s hand into Kansas City, where he eventually found his professional home at a Jewish family’s fine arts printing company. History, as he lived it, had a grace note.

His artistic gift — the capacity to look at the visible world with precision and render it with beauty — ran through the family line into my mother and into me. It is not separate from my contemplative practice. It is the same capacity: trained attention, willingness to look closely, the ability to hold what you see and translate it into something others can receive. Seeing clearly is a spiritual practice. My grandfather taught me that without ever saying so.

The Quaker Meeting and the Celtic hillside service were animated by the same essential impulse — the irreducible sacredness of direct encounter with the divine, and the willingness to lose everything rather than betray it. Different languages. Different centuries. The same root.

I came to my formal credentials through the long way — through lived experience of suffering and survival, through the accompaniment of others through their thresholds, through the disciplined pursuit of every framework and modality that helped me understand what I was already doing intuitively. I hold a PhD in Transpersonal Counseling where I studied archetypes and aspects of depth psychology, a Licensed Alcohol and Drug Counselor designation, and licensure as a Licensed Clinical Addiction Counselor. I am ordained and have officiated weddings, commitment ceremonies, blessings, and death rites.

And it’s true…everything has a life/death/life cycle. Relationships. Lifetimes. Plants. Even the cycles of the moon and seasons.

It’s the nature of all things.

The Skeleton Woman — The Archetype of the Life/Death/Life Mother

Estés names the archetype here as the Life/Death/Life Mother — and she is careful to distinguish this from a morbid or nihilistic force. This is not death as ending. This is death as the necessary turn in the cycle — the fallow, the dissolution, the going-under that makes genuine renewal possible.

The story follows a fisherman who hooks what he thinks is a great catch, only to find he has pulled a skeleton woman up from the depths — a woman who was thrown into the sea by her own father long ago and has been tangled in the underwater dark ever since. He is terrified. He runs. And she, tangled in his line, is dragged helplessly behind him.

But then something shifts. He looks at her, truly looks, and begins the slow work of untangling her bones. He lays her out. He falls asleep, and a tear falls from his eye — and she drinks it, and finds his heart, and drums on it, and begins to sing herself flesh. By morning, they are woven together in a different way entirely.

What the archetype carries:

• The truth that love which cannot face death cannot go deep — genuine intimacy requires the willingness to sit with dissolution, loss, and the unknown

• That the Life/Death/Life force is not our enemy but the very engine of all growth, creativity, and renewal — in relationships, in creative work, in the soul’s seasons

• The image of untangling as a profound act of love — patience with what has been knotted by neglect or fear

• That tears are medicine — grief, honestly felt, feeds what has been starving in the dark

• The drum of the heart as the instrument of resurrection — it is the heartbeat, the primal rhythm, that calls the flesh back

This archetype lives beneath every creative cycle, every relationship that has weathered real loss, every person who has descended and wondered if they would find their way back up. Estés is insistent: the Life/Death/Life Mother is not something to be feared and fled. She is something to be befriended. And that befriending changes everything.

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A 10-Week Journey into the Depths of the Feminine Soul

There is a voice inside you that has never been fully silenced.

It speaks in symbols, in longing, in the ache of things left unlived. It stirs when you stand in a wild place, when a story moves you to tears you can’t explain, when you feel — beneath the noise of ordinary life — that something ancient and knowing is waiting to be remembered.

That voice belongs to the Wild Woman. And she has been waiting for you.

Subscribe to get all the perks and an online, on demand course container holding all of it (7.00 a month). Access ends when the subscription ends. Or, you can purchase the course and not subscribe.

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The downloads are stored in an online course that you will be provided access to when you have paid the monthly substack fee. You will continue to have access to the course unless you do not renew your monthly fee. The first article and download drop Wednesday, May 20, 2026 on Substack and the Contemplative Arts Institute site.

I encourage you to explore with media and automatic writing, writing without editing and see what is revealed in the process. The Wild Woman Paper Doll course is an accompaniment to this course and available at the CAI store for an additional fee that will be opening this weekend (May 30th). Each doll will correspond with the weeks story. It is on a drop method to be posted with each week’s story as well. There are downloads and ideas for creating the paper doll.

We will have a monthly Zoom share that will be announced with the access link.

About me:

I was born into a living convergence of lineages that had been moving toward each other for centuries — Pictish royalty and Scottish nobility, Ulster Covenanters and Mayflower Separatists, Quaker Friends, First Nations Peoples and German artists, frontier settlers and earth keepers. Every stream, in its own language and century, was practicing the same essential thing: direct encounter with the sacred. Interior life held fiercely against every pressure to abandon it. Community built around the covenant of something true.

I did not know all of this as a child. I knew what I felt — the pull toward stillness, the sense that the visible world was threaded through with something immeasurably alive, the certainty that grief and passage and threshold moments were not problems to be managed but sacred territory to be entered with care. I knew I was a spiritual intuitive before I had language for it. What I have spent my life discovering is why.

King Nechtan of the Picts abdicated his throne in 724 AD and entered a monastery. He chose the contemplative life over worldly power. My lineage surname — McKnight, Mac Neachdainn in its Gaelic root — means Son of Nechtan. I carry his name forward across 1,300 years.

Alongside this Quaker lineage, my mother’s father carried a different kind of gift into America. A German architect and illustrator, he arrived through Ellis Island in 1923 — one of the last crossings before immigration quotas effectively closed the door. He had read what was coming in Germany before most people allowed themselves to see it. He brought his family out of the shadow of what would become the Holocaust, carrying his architect’s eye and his illustrator’s hand into Kansas City, where he eventually found his professional home at a Jewish family’s fine arts printing company. History, as he lived it, had a grace note.

His artistic gift — the capacity to look at the visible world with precision and render it with beauty — ran through the family line into my mother and into me. It is not separate from my contemplative practice. It is the same capacity: trained attention, willingness to look closely, the ability to hold what you see and translate it into something others can receive. Seeing clearly is a spiritual practice. My grandfather taught me that without ever saying so.

The Quaker Meeting and the Celtic hillside service were animated by the same essential impulse — the irreducible sacredness of direct encounter with the divine, and the willingness to lose everything rather than betray it. Different languages. Different centuries. The same root.

I came to my formal credentials through the long way — through lived experience of suffering and survival, through the accompaniment of others through their thresholds, through the disciplined pursuit of every framework and modality that helped me understand what I was already doing intuitively. I hold a PhD, a Licensed Alcohol and Drug Counselor designation, and licensure as a Licensed Clinical Addiction Counselor. I am ordained and have officiated weddings, commitment ceremonies, blessings, and death rites. I hold training in hospice chaplaincy and certification as an End of Life Doula.

But the deepest truth is simpler: I am someone who has always lived at the threshold. Between the ordinary and the sacred. Between the speakable and the unspeakable. Between the living and the dying. That threshold is not a problem to solve. It is the ground I was born to stand on.

Last week, we began our journey with La Loba, The Bone Collector.

Each week includes excerpts of the story, a creative activity, journal prompts and a short meditation, along with templates, mark making ideas, video guidance on how to set Sacred Space, how to engage in the intuitive art making process, and the weekly pdf. There’s more to download too for ideas and art making guidance.

This week we move to the second story and archetype, Bluebeard.

This is a hard archetype to look at within ourselves. I encourage you to open mind and attempt to move without shame into this archetype. Looking at how we operate from all angles helps us understand ourselves and those around us much clearer.

There’s more of course, but the rest is for subscribers only.

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The Quaker line had settled Kansas during the Kansas Suffrage Movement in 1867, helping fight for equity and women’s rights as the civil war ended. They inhabited the areas in Lyon county, around Emporia, along with others in their faith.

All of them, either Gaelic Scot, Celtic, German, Quaker fought for the rights of all men and women to be free.

How does that reconcile with the Native roots. Owning land was foreign. The land owns you. It still does. We just have forgotten and ignore it.

Here’s to the melting pot of America…. don’t forget the land that has provided everything to us…. Vote. Fight for it.

We the People (Tribal Rap) by Jes Wen’de

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Each week you will receive a new story, prompt and exploration as well as a download of the weeks activity process. The downloads are stored in an online course that you will be provided access to when you have paid the monthly substack fee. You will continue to have access to the course unless you do not renew your monthly fee. The first article and download drop Wednesday, May 20, 2026 on Substack and the Contemplative Arts Institute site.

I encourage you to explore with media and automatic writing, writing without editing and see what is revealed in the process. The Wild Woman Paper Doll course is an accompaniment to this course and available at the CAI store for an additional fee. Each doll will correspond with the weeks story. It is on a drop method to be posted with each week’s story as well. There are downloads and ideas for creating the paper doll.

We will have a monthly Zoom share that will be announced with the access link.

About me:

I was born into a living convergence of lineages that had been moving toward each other for centuries — Pictish royalty and Scottish nobility, Ulster Covenanters and Mayflower Separatists, Quaker Friends, First Nations Peoples and German artists, frontier settlers and earth keepers. Every stream, in its own language and century, was practicing the same essential thing: direct encounter with the sacred. Interior life held fiercely against every pressure to abandon it. Community built around the covenant of something true.

I did not know all of this as a child. I knew what I felt — the pull toward stillness, the sense that the visible world was threaded through with something immeasurably alive, the certainty that grief and passage and threshold moments were not problems to be managed but sacred territory to be entered with care. I knew I was a spiritual intuitive before I had language for it. What I have spent my life discovering is why.

King Nechtan of the Picts abdicated his throne in 724 AD and entered a monastery. He chose the contemplative life over worldly power. My lineage surname — McKnight, Mac Neachdainn in its Gaelic root — means Son of Nechtan. I carry his name forward across 1,300 years.

Alongside this Quaker lineage, my mother’s father carried a different kind of gift into America. A German architect and illustrator, he arrived through Ellis Island in 1923 — one of the last crossings before immigration quotas effectively closed the door. He had read what was coming in Germany before most people allowed themselves to see it. He brought his family out of the shadow of what would become the Holocaust, carrying his architect’s eye and his illustrator’s hand into Kansas City, where he eventually found his professional home at a Jewish family’s fine arts printing company. History, as he lived it, had a grace note.

His artistic gift — the capacity to look at the visible world with precision and render it with beauty — ran through the family line into my mother and into me. It is not separate from my contemplative practice. It is the same capacity: trained attention, willingness to look closely, the ability to hold what you see and translate it into something others can receive. Seeing clearly is a spiritual practice. My grandfather taught me that without ever saying so.

The Quaker Meeting and the Celtic hillside service were animated by the same essential impulse — the irreducible sacredness of direct encounter with the divine, and the willingness to lose everything rather than betray it. Different languages. Different centuries. The same root.

I came to my formal credentials through the long way — through lived experience of suffering and survival, through the accompaniment of others through their thresholds, through the disciplined pursuit of every framework and modality that helped me understand what I was already doing intuitively. I hold a PhD, a Licensed Alcohol and Drug Counselor designation, and licensure as a Licensed Clinical Addiction Counselor. I am ordained and have officiated weddings, commitment ceremonies, blessings, and death rites. I hold training in hospice chaplaincy and certification as an End of Life Doula.

But the deepest truth is simpler: I am someone who has always lived at the threshold. Between the ordinary and the sacred. Between the speakable and the unspeakable. Between the living and the dying. That threshold is not a problem to solve. It is the ground I was born to stand on.

The content and access to the first Wild Woman Art Journaling Week is for paid subscribers only. This first series, 10 Stories from Women Who Run With Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, 10 Archetypes. One per week with a full multipage download that contains highlights from the text, a ritual, a creative prompt and journal reflection questions with writing space (if you are into old school handwriting) and sketch space. All stored in an online course repository that I send you the link to. once you have paid the monthly subscription rate. Access is available as long as you are a subscriber.

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One by Jes Wen’de

I am a licensed mental health professional no longer practicing and former art teacher who is an Interdisciplinary Media Artist and Recording Artist. My work is based in Cognitive Processing with visual and sound, to alter neural pathways, retraining our brain, to reclaim your attention span, creative wellness, spirit, and awareness, so we can develop better relationships and social structures with each other. It’s also a deeply spiritual process that I am born into by ancient lineage spanning 17 generations.

I am Jes Wen’de. This is my work.

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Yesterday, an EO was sent out that proclaimed an attack on “ideology”. Charging that American’s, who still are protected by the first amendment of the Constitution that still exists, at least at this writing, were labeled domestic “t’s” (bad guys) if they didn’t agree with the ideology of the present leader.

I’m a licensed mental health professional. I’ve worked with people who are very mentally ill. They do really irrational things for a variety of reasons. Yesterday, see thing words on this EO made me shut everything down that I have going on, on the internet, pretty much. Music was pulled that referenced disruption, my website was changed and revamped, just edits everywhere.

I was concerned not for me.

I was concerned for my family.

The last thing I want is for harm to come to anyone because of things I have created—art, music, video, etc.

I was overwhelmed that this is what we are right now and that it’s being allowed to go on by people in high places. But I am no longer surprised at any of it. In fact, after I took a nap and had some nutrition and water, and a good walk outside, I started revamping a new site and discerning what I was uncomfortable but necessary with and what I was not comfortable with at all.

The way through this prior has been with power anthems and raps of rage and history. In my album ReVoL:U: tiOn, that I am pulling from streaming and have pulled from Bandcamp, the songs are no hold’s barred cathartic expressions of empowerment, historical reminders and rage filled catharsis. The work will live, somewhere, at sometime. Maybe after the first challenge to the EO is won by the ACLU.

But for now, it will wait.

My portfolio that has gotten me banned, along with my support for all people, on major social media sites, including LinkedIn, even after providing ID verification and saying nothing political in the least. I’m on the list. I can’t get any access at all to Meta, even old business accounts with Id. It’s a sign from the Universe…. “You don’t need them.”

They are correct.

The future is not in the socials like we are used to.

It’s in the socials in front of us.

I’m not anti tech.

I’m pro ethical tech.

New socials need to be created that stay away from what we have in existence now, because my friends, our regime is a big problem but big tech is a bigger one.

The new era is growing.

Literally.

Growing your food.

Learning to live without the scroll.

Reading a book again.

Making art again.

Ethical use of materials again.

Sure maybe it’ll be a subculture first but nearly ever subculture has it’s day in the light.

When there’s no water, no energy, your homes been taken, your job is no more, you have no healthcare, your food is what you can grow in your backyard or a bucket on the balcony…. will we awaken then.

We are. Awakening.

Some more than others.

We are growing.

And I know this word love is flopped around like Kleenex box in an elementary classroom (that’s pretty frequent), so when I say we must soften our hearts and not harden them, is doesn’t mean be permissible with boundaries to the things that are obscene and atrocious.

I means…. revisiting a feeling of love, goodness, happiness, regenerating it within you… looking at other with eyes of compassion, not permissibility,(sometimes the most compassionate thing to do is put a offender in jail); to remain heart connected in how we operate each day.

That… is the guide.

The Ultimate guide.

That is what will change this.

That…. and continuing on.

Today I recorded a visualization for all of us….

Keep growing.

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