“Zosimas said about Mary of Egypt, ‘I did not hold for long the one who would not be held.’ And I took that to mean the Wild Woman archetype. This Wild Woman we’re after is not someone who we find and then we have her figured out and we can put her in a box and say “Look! Here’s the memento of me finding the Wild Woman!” She’s always in the process of disappearing. She’s always out ahead of you on the path. There’s never a moment where you capture that person. She’s beyond you.”
“The first piece of [what makes] a Wild Woman is the actual wilderness. These spaces in Jordan that Mary of Egypt may have lived in are extraordinary. They are truly wild places...They speak; they tell stories; and they have a lot to say.”
“I think Mary was on a quest herself for what it meant to be fully alive, for what it meant to really meet the world as it is..She was so full of desire for something she couldn't even name, and she just kept seeking bigger and bigger landscapes to uncover that. And I think as a contemporary person, I can definitely feel that she calls me to that journey, to that quest, and she models for me what it would mean to take a risk, to figure out how you become fully alive.”
“You think of Mikey up there in the attic asking what if? what if this map is real? And that was very much my own question. What if this woman actually lived? What would it be like to follow in her footsteps? Everything was telling me that was ridiculous and impossible, and that just made it even more compelling.”
“When you’re on a journey like this you are constantly reading the landscape as if it were some kind of map. [I had] this sense that Mary wanted to be known, that I was being gently led in her direction.”