Shannon Scoates: When Instinct Remembers Who We Are

Abstract

Shannon Scoates approaches instinct not as something primitive to overcome, but as a form of memory. Her work turns toward the natural world to ask what remains when social expectations become quiet enough for deeper perception to return. Through the symbolic presence of the lynx, her writing explores observation, solitude, intuition, identity, and the possibility that part of becoming ourselves may involve remembering what we already knew before the world taught us what to ignore.

Featured in Krafty Page ChronicleS

Scoates is part of the Issue 3 creative conversation, Metamorphoses: Lives in Translation, where contributors examine transformation through identity, perception, culture, memory, and lived experience. Her work adds another dimension to that theme by asking what transformation looks like when the movement is inward: not becoming someone new, but returning to something essential.

Explore KPC Issue 3 — Metamorphoses

The Instinct Beneath Language

There are forms of knowing that arrive before explanation. A shift in the room. A change in tone. The feeling that something is approaching before there is evidence for it. Human beings often call these moments instinct, intuition, or perception, but Scoates gives them a larger place in the emotional landscape.

The lynx becomes an image for that kind of attention: quiet, observant, alert, and comfortable in spaces where noise falls away. It is not a symbol of aggression. It is a symbol of awareness.

That distinction matters. The poem is less interested in escaping humanity than in asking what part of humanity we lose when we stop listening to ourselves.

Memory Before Expectation

One of the strongest ideas in Scoates’s work is the possibility that identity can be remembered, not merely constructed. The poem briefly reaches toward the self that existed before outside voices became definitions. That idea gives the piece its emotional center.

“before the world told me who to be”

The line works because it touches something familiar: the tension between the self we experience internally and the identities that are handed back to us by family, culture, institutions, relationships, and expectation. The question is not whether those influences matter. They do. The deeper question is whether they are the whole story.

Instinct as Lineage

Scoates also frames instinct as something inherited rather than accidental. That turns intuition from a private feeling into a form of continuity. The body notices. Memory notices. Culture notices. Experience teaches quietly, often before language catches up.

“instinct is not a reaction, but a lineage.”

That idea opens the poem outward. Instinct becomes more than reflex. It becomes accumulated awareness: what the self has learned, what the body has survived, and what generations may carry forward without always having words for it.

The Poem as Published

The original work appears in Krafty Page ChronicleS Issue 3. The published magazine page is presented below so the poem remains connected to the visual context in which readers first encountered it.

About Shannon Scoates

Shannon Scoates is a Canadian poet whose writing explores instinct, emotional truth, nature, mysticism, and the quiet spaces where identity shifts. Her work often blends natural imagery with inward reflection, using the landscape as both setting and metaphor.

In this feature, the lynx becomes a guide into that creative world: watchful rather than loud, solitary without being empty, and alert to what exists beneath the obvious.

When Instinct Remembers

What stays with me in this work is the idea that becoming can also be a return. We spend so much of life learning how to function in the world that we can forget the quieter knowledge that existed before performance, before explanation, before the pressure to become legible to everyone else.

Scoates’s poem does not reject thought. It simply reminds us that thought is not the only way we know.

Sometimes the next version of ourselves is not waiting ahead. Sometimes it is waiting underneath.

References & Credits

Scoates, Shannon. “Lynx Keep of Secrets.” Krafty Page ChronicleS: Metamorphoses — Lives in Translation, Issue 3, 2026.

Original poetry and creative rights remain with Shannon Scoates. Editorial presentation by KVI Network.

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