Synchronicity

Whenever I use this term, I must sing it syllabically ("Syn-chro-ni-ci-ty") whether in my head only or aloud to the melody of the Police song by that title. Lately, so many instances have occurred that I feel buzzing with excitement.

This particular time began with a forwarded e-mail referring me to a talk by poet Kim Rosen titled "Poetry: Medicine for the Soul." I'd not heard of Kim before, but I've always loved the idea (and experienced the reality) of poetry as a means of healing, so after listening to this talk, I ordered her book (with an accompanying CD), Saved by a Poem.

Though I didn't have time to begin reading the book before leaving for a short trip to southern Oregon, I did bring along the CD to listen to on the way. While in Oregon, I was invited to stay the night at the lovely woman's home where I attended a meeting because temperatures dropped quickly into the teens and a late-night drive back to the California coast on icy winding mountain roads would have been dangerous.

The following morning, drinking tea and talking to my hostess, I mentioned Rosen's CD and asked whether she'd heard of her. "Well," my new friend said, "Kim began writing that book in the room you just spent the night in. In fact, she's going to be in Eugene soon, which is only three hours from here." The details of how Kim Rosen ended up staying there are my friend's own tale of synchronicity, one rich in meaning to her life.

Needless to say, we are going to hear Kim Rosen in Eugene on Sunday and my anticipation over following the next length of thread to this event is growing.

Women Who Run with the Wolves

Lately, I read from this book by Clarissa Pinkola Estes (I fondly think of her as "Pinky") each day, allowing these archetypal stories to slowly steep in me. Over the last few days, I've felt this sinking in my spirit, a feeling I once named depression but now choose not to name it (and thus all-too-conveniently wrap it up in all the [sometimes false] notions I have about it) but to explore the feeling instead.

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.