Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The Faithful Gardener is a true tale-within-a-tale from her own family treasury, which introduces Estés’s Uncle Zovar: a Hungarian refugee and slave-labour camp survivor whom she describes as one of the “dancing fools, wise old crows, grumpy sages and ‘almost saints’ who made up the old people” of Estés’s refugee-immigran

On this lively fourth volume of the Dangerous Old Woman Series with Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, she says:

“Call her Our Lady, La Nuestra Señora, Holy Mother—or one of her thousands of other names,” says Dr. Estés. “She wears hundreds of costumes, dozens of skin tones, is patroness of deserts, mountains, stars and oceans. Thus she comes to us in billions of images, but at her center, she is the Great Immaculate Heart.”

As a child growing up in a family of cantadoras (keepers of the old stories), Clarissa Pinkola Estés learned firsthand how a story told at bedtime can soothe away the troubles of the day, and prepare the way for another night’s dreams to follow.