Depression & The Caterpillar

I was invited to take a medicine walk. I don’t remember what my intention was. I just remember standing in the center of a circle of branches, a turkey wing wafting sage all around me and their voices chanting, a man and a woman: “Take our sister, Nancy. Watch over her on her journey.” The usual wandering of my mind through all its familiar stories mirrored my wandering past the familiar trees, across the Iittle stream, and through the meadow thick with green thistles and rattle snake grass going to seed. The trees began crowding closer and understory became thick with minor’s lettuce and poison oak. All I knew was that I had been tasked with finding something that was dead or dying, and conversing with it.

As I looked around me, the air and water were bursting with life – fish, insects, flowers, leafy branches vibrant with the vitality of late spring. What could I possibly find that was dead? And then it struck me – most of what I was looking at is dead. All this life around us is just a thin crust over a layer of compost and miles of mineralized rock. Everything that is alive today stands at the end of a long line of ancestors and consumes many times its body weight to survive. Life is mostly death. My gaze came to rest on a jumble of tree branches piled in the middle of the creek, and was captured by a small movement. A single caterpillar, donning a streak of color and a coat of bristles, undulated among the thicket, and I thought with a sense of upliftment, “Even among death, there is life.”

Then I looked more deeply and realized, with a twinge of dismay, “but this caterpillar won’t last long.” I thought of Michael Meade’s distinction between fate and destiny. It was this caterpillar’s destiny to become a butterfly, but it’s fate was to wander into or fall onto this pile of bare branches. With nothing to eat, it would surely starve, or slip from a branch in its frenzy and drown in the river. I was looking at a pile of Death, being desperately explored by the Dying. Echoing my thoughts, the caterpillar suddenly stopped its frantic scramble and froze, as if surrendering to its fate.

In the days following the introductory weekend of my apprenticeship with Terra Soma, I came to accept that I had to let go of a romance I had been cultivating with someone who felt like a soul connection. He had become a muse for my poetry, I felt inspired and emboldened by the choices he had made to commit to his soul call, and I was deeply moved by our mutual enthusiasm for guiding together. But I also felt familiar triggers draining my confidence and vitality. I knew I had to sever the bond to feed my own fledgling life and when I did, the momentary relief I felt was followed by a total spiraling implosion. I had lost what felt like the only buffer between me and the reality that I am simply wandering, lost, living someone else’s life, waiting for something I couldn’t envision or articulate. This most recent loss seemed to underscore how incapable I am at choosing and nurturing a healthy relationship and having already lost a guiding vision for my life, I felt as though I had nothing to live for. And, perhaps for the first time in my life, I had no hope that it would ever be different.

That’s when my sister responded to my 1am texts by telling me I don’t have to suffer this much, reminding me of our family’s history of mental illness, and sending me links to some sliding scale counseling services. I don’t know if that means I have a disorder that needs medication. I don’t know how different I am from everyone else. But I do know from my own history that I need at least one secure relationship with another human being and meditation in order to keep ahead of depression and addiction. So I got myself into counseling and started attending weekly meditation, and found just enough relief to re-engage with my life.

On a recent episode of On Being with Krista Tippett, her guest shared a break-through moment he had had during an episode of major depression. A counselor pointed out that he seemed to be trying to escape from it and asked if he could, perhaps, see the depression as pressing him down onto ground on which it was safe to stand. I have taken a valiant stand against the Predator, but when everything in and around me is dying, perhaps Death is not the enemy, but the Liberator. As a fellow apprentice recently shared: “To enter life, become food.” Sometimes living to the fullest means allowing ourselves to be constricted, dismantled, ground down, liquified, and digested, just like a caterpillar in its coccoon. And that process looks and feels an awful lot like depression.

I am also aware of how I have relied my whole life on various addictions – first to sugar, then to liquor, and always to romance – to help regulate my nervous system. When I am anxious or over-stimulated, a good food coma, glass of whisky, or rush of oxytocin will calm me right down. And when I am feeling worthless or lost, a sugar buzz, drunken revelry, or being admired makes me feel strong enough to tackle anything. But this also leads me towards recklessness, believing I am stronger and safer and more capable than I am. I make choices about who to trust, how to drive, what to invest my money and energy in, what to eat, and what to believe that are out of integrity with my deeper needs and knowing until I am completely drained. Until I learn to regulate myself, work with the real limitations within and around me, and consciously foster my relationship with both transcendence and shadow, depression will keep taking me out.

So I have given myself permission to stop. I have stopped promoting myself, stopped trying to be a teacher and visionary, stopped researching next steps for my life, stopped networking, stopped even trying to be a good friend. My life has become making sure I keep my job and setting whatever boundaries I must to create a safe coccoon: Not hugging someone just because they ask. Telling my boss how his anxiety affects me. Not allowing my mind to get caught in a fear spiral with too much comparison, regret, or projecting too many months or years down the line. All I want to do besides sleep is wander in the hills, so that’s what I do with the time and energy I have left. When I wander, I find a pristine little creek whose precious, simple beauty makes me burst into tears. And the moon peeking through the redwood trunks sends me a dream of a secret place I can go filled with allies new and old.

Watching the caterpillar struggling with its fate, it occurred to me that I was not a passive observer. I could decide whether to leave it to its fate or to intervene. I didn’t know what leaves it was looking for. I didn’t know if what I offered it would improve its chances in any way or would just traumatize it further. But I did know that having witnessed its struggle, I couldn’t just walk away. I was a part of its story now. So I picked a few leaves from nearby plants and offered them. The caterpillar just scurried across them, but I was able to lift it over the water and into the bushes, leaving the leaves for it to explore as it wandered on.

Bill Plotkin has taught me that part of the process of soul initiation is losing all hope, all faith in ever getting through what we face, ever finding our way or finding something of value to live for. When we have not found the center of the image we were born with, our journey can be desolate and meaningless. We may feel we are hanging onto life by just a thread, but what is that thread that anchors us? Is it, like the thread that suspends a caterpillar in mid-air, the thread that will become the caccoon of our rebirth? The thing in us that is trying to come out doesn’t change with circumstance. Our destiny, even if we never reach it, is immutable.

Our fate, by contrast, is always changing, and we are all participating in the unfolding of each other’s story. I’ll never know if that caterpillar survived, just like I’ll never know for sure which meetings and partings really took me further from or closer to my own destiny. My sister’s intervention got me into counseling. My time spent learning and teaching meditation provided a vital way of being that I cannot forget. The allies in my dreams and all the beings in the hills listen and speak to me. But what really brought me through when I was in my darkest place wasn’t any of these outer encounters. I had the will to reach out and engage with them because of what I believe.

I don’t believe in the finality of death – in either an eternal heaven or the nihilist’s “lights out”. Choosing to die, by literally ending my life or by simply disengaging from it, will only delay a lesson until the next time around in this life or the next. I can avoid or prolong my suffering, but there is no escape from it. If I choose to live, I must first make peace with my limitations and then fall back in love with my best guess at what my destiny is. This process is as simple as it is difficult – and is one teachers have been echoing for ages: whatever you feel, just relax around it. Allow the knowing to come, and the resistance to the knowing; the lostness and the resistance to being lost. In practicing this, I not only survive, but I become more durable and more content. Ultimately perhaps this will all only really make sense if and when I emerge from my own coccoon and gaze at what I have become. All this desolate wandering will arrange itself into a clear path only in hindsight, sown with grief and gratitude.

Nancy