Cycles

I've become aware of times when I feel like interacting with no other adults - strangely, I'm OK with being around The Kid, but I want nothing to do with others, either online or in person. Rather than despairing over my apparent anti-social nature, I'm beginning to see this time as a clue to just take time for myself.

Back to Women Who Run With the Wolves by Estes, a book which seems to give me answers. If I had a Bible, I think this would be it.

Page 256: The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place. When we are children and young girls, the instinctive nature notices all these phases and cycles. It hovers quite near us and we are aware and active at various intervals as we see fit....Once, we lived by these cycles and seasons year after year, and they lived in us. They calmed us, danced us, shook us, reassured us, made us learn creaturally. They were part of our soul-skins - a pelt that enveloped us and the wild and natural world - at least until we were told that there really were only four seasons to a year, and that women themselves really only had three seasons -girlhood, adulthood, and old womanhood. And that was supposed to be that.But we cannot allow ourselves to sleepwalk wrapped in this flimsy and unobservant fabrication, for it causes women to deviate from their natural and soulful cycles and therefore to suffer from dryness, tiredness, and homesickness. It is far better for us to return to our own unique and soulful cycles regularly, all of them, any of them....

p.266 - It is ironic that we have made wildlife refuges for ibis, pelican, egret, wolf, crane, deer, mouse, moose, and bear, but not for ourselves in the places where we live day after day.