Estes refers to the "peaks and valleys" of our lives and how wolves "ride them as efficiently, as fluidly, as possible." She goes on to write that "the instinctual nature has the miraculous ability to live through all positive boon, all negative consequence, and still maintain relationship to self, to another." I've been working to become more attuned to my instincts and intuition over the last year (as opposed to focusing on knowledge and reasoning), which has opened me up to remarkable and surprising synchronicities and associations/relationships----what I've been needing for so long. It's these relationships that our culture so easily cuts off with its pressures on us to produce and maintain a certain style of living.
And so, I am trying to focus on looking at the depressions I fall into on occasion not as something I should or even can avoid, but as a kind of "compost pile" I'm naturally a part of at certain points on my wheel of living, a necessary breaking down in order to find myself built up again.
To quote Estes: "We have erroneously been trained to accept a broken form of one of the most profound and basic aspects of the wild nature. We have been taught that death is always followed by more death. It is simply not so, death is always in the process of incubating new life, even when one's existence has been cut down to the bones."
Thus, when I'm depressed, I can remind myself that I am in a necessary period of incubation, preparing for the new (and surprising) that is to come.
