“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our
troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we
ourselves receive from God.”
~ The
Apostle Paul
(Coldplay ~ Yellow)
You ask my thoughts
Through the long
night
I spent listening
To the heavy rain
Beating against the
windows
~ Izumi Shikibu
“Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity,
of the seriousness of your suffering, except by your death. So long as you are
alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.”
~
Albert Camus, The Fall
What is at issue with me is not doing too little in life or
being stuck or stagnant in a chronic way – acutely yes, I have experienced paralysis
of being periodically over the last three years but not chronically.
Rather what is at issue is doing and trying to do too much.
And now I have finally had enough and have to stop and breathe and my
depression is evidence of, in William Styron’s words in his memoir, Darkness Visible,
the “exquisite fragility” involved in living life.
I sketched out highlights of the last three years or so as a
reminder to me of what has happened and to ponder the stress and triggers
involved in my depressive episodes.
March 2009 ~ Full time job terminated due to economic turn down
Memorial Day 2009 ~ found out my wife was having an affair
Fall 2009 ~ wife and I begin separation
Spring 2010 ~ graduated with my B.A.
Summer/Fall ~ started bar church, went through bankruptcy
I see our children
I see you
I weep
How did we fuck
things up so bad?
Was it really that
horrible between us?
Why do I grieve still?
Why do I love you
still?
This is all so crazy
How did we get here?
How did I become your
bête noir?
I want to rewind
Go back in time
And do it all again
Take it all in slower
God
Help
Me
Fall 2010 ~ started grad school part-time
Winter 2011 ~ house foreclosed on, went away and traveled
for six weeks to London, Australia, France, Ireland and visited my brothers
Spring/Summer 2011 ~ worked three jobs ~ EMT on an ambulance
service, Job Coach for developmentally disabled adults and a bartender.
Fall 2011 ~ travelled to London, Italy, Ireland
Winter 2012 ~ continued with grad school, moved and worked
Spring 2012 ~ grad school, work, homeless, and divorced
Summer 2012 ~ depressive episode, emotional collapse, leave
of absence from work and grad school, went to parents, tired
I certainly did not stop participating in life; if anything
I did more living. If I am aware, awake, self-reflective and conscious it is
not to be criticized or maligned but praised. Only the unaware, asleep, unconscious
and incapable of reflection would not recognize what the journey of becoming
human looks like. On this journey I by necessity must go through the darkness
of depression and no one can set the times and seasons of a dark night of the
soul, it simply must be lived.
Richard Rohr writes in his book Falling Up writes, “A dark night may appear, paradoxically, as a way to return
to living. It pares life down to its essentials and helps you get a new
start….A dark night is like Dante getting sleepy, wandering from his path,
mindlessly slipping into a cave. It is like Alice looking at the mirror and
then going through it. It is like Odysseus being tossed by stormy waves and
Tristan adrift without an oar. You don’t choose a dark night for yourself. It
is given to you. Your job is to get close to it and sift it for its gold.”
Going into the desert whether literally or symbolically (there
is not much difference in the two) means doing nothing while there. Jesus did
nothing, St. Anthony nothing, Paul nothing – nothing in the perspective of a
world which understands doing nothing as sin or sloth or laziness. But nothing
in the desert means doing everything urgent and important – wrestling with the
darkness and yourself. Jesus forty days
and nights, Paul three years, St. Anthony twenty years before being able to
engage powerfully with life beyond the desert.
I cannot think of any fully alive person who has not
followed this path in some way or another although some have perished in the
desert, along the way or shortly after walking out. But the duration is not
significant, it is not the goal, nor is longevity of life but rather the
experience of transformation. Yes, some die on the journey but do we not all
die on this journey – why die empty and unable to feel.
It is in the engagement with the totality of the life
experience when we as humans become human, our true selves and no longer remain
what we never truly were.
So many winding and
meandering paths
Lost on the warm
sands of the desert
Chasing mirages
Where did I turn in
the wrong direction?
Is there even such a
thing?
(a wrong direction in
a desert)
Rivers flow
Clocks tick
Sand blows
People huddle in the
space
Between the
disconcerting night
And the break of dawn
We pray for someday
to arrive in Her yellow splendor
To wash away the
anguish of the years
The dust of travel
From between our toes
Until then
We live with the
debilitating ache of soul vertigo
Quelled by the touch of
friends
With loves’ silent
smile
Knowing She will come
in her tangerine beauty
To warm cold bodies
In the east Her eyes
will shine over the horizon
Slicing the darkness
like a knife
Wielding her glory
To breathe life anew
into deaths dark night
Mortals born once
more to journey onward
In Her radiance
Albert Camus in his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus postulates, “There
is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging
whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental
question of philosophy.”
I believe this is true and on the problem hangs all of life.
I have come to a preliminary consideration to the problem – a reason to remain
alive and not end a life. The one reason being the unknown – I mean this idea
of the unknown in two senses.
The first sense being the unknown in this life now, what is
now within my epistemological and existential capabilities to experience.
Concretely this means all which is occurring or may or may not yet occur while
I am alive – to be rather than not to be. For example, to be: with my children,
my family, friends, to sit at a U2 concert, to watch a sunset or sunrise, to
smell a flower, hold a baby, enjoy music, art, literature, poetry, a river,
countries, a walk with my dog, coffee, tea, a beer, a shot of whiskey, making
love, seeing beauty, holding a hand, giving a hug, writing, healing, loving, conversations,
creating poetic memories, and all that still may come which is unknown in both
its beauty and horror.
The second sense being after this life, what is not now
epistemologically or existentially experienced but only fathomed in
possibilities and conjecture. Yet, the unknowability is in itself reason enough
to remain fully alive on this side of knowing. There may be more – then great!
There may not be – then live now! In the Christian tradition there is the hope
of the resurrection and that is a wonderful hope which promises a continuation
of this life we now have. If this is true, is there any reason to think what
has not been ameliorated now would not yet have to be? So really escape of
complications is an illusion – heaven is not up but through.
So to Camus’s problem I have but one answer – the unknown.
Hence, the great courage it takes to live and persevere through darkness and
pain for even in the desire to live for the unknown there is the capitulation
of dancing with a shadow.
The Fury of Rain Storms ~ Anne Sexton
The rain drums down like red ants,
Each bouncing off my window.
The ants are in great pain
And they cry out as they hit
As if their little legs were only
Stitched on and their heads pasted.
And oh they bring to mind the grave,
So humble, so willing to be beat upon
With its awful lettering and
The body lying underneath
Without an umbrella.
Depression is boring, I think
And I would do better to make
Some soup and light up the cave.
Whether dancing with a shadow, walking through a desert or
watching rain like red ants, depression is as Sexton writes, boring. It would
be, “…better to make/Some soup and light up the cave” but that is oh so excruciatingly
hard as Susan Horwitch has described it, “…sheer undiluted slog…” for a person
in the grips of depression. Something, as Andrew Solomon in his book The
Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression writes, “Depression is a condition that
is almost unimaginable to anyone who has not known it.” This makes it very difficult
to find words, metaphors or symbols to express its debilitating force on a person.
Anne Sexton succumbed to as many have in the desert of despondency and
unmitigated pain. As much as we may want soup and a lit up cave which may
happen many times along the way and then it may not happen one time and that
time is the end.
I am profoundly struck with the awareness of the path I am
on and the pain and joy I have endured and rejoiced in. Also, I am now able to
more easily live with the ambiguity and uncertainty inherent in the journey of
my soul becoming alive and precious. It is still arduous to comprehend the
reality of, “Those things that speak to the soul may or may not make sense to
the practical world" (Moore). But to give in to the practical world, my own self
doubt, the critics, or the presumptuous ones who believe they have answers and
yet have never lived would be for me to die, a still birth in the womb of life.
It is not in doing more or less or being something you are
not but in being authentically you and in all the darkness and the light. Also,
it is coming to accept depression really never goes away, it may hide for
awhile, go into remission, yet it is always in you somewhere and may return at
anytime. Solomon writes, “Living with depression is like trying to keep your
balance while you dance with a goat— it is perfectly sane to prefer a partner
with a better sense of balance.”
The journey is a delicate balancing act and the need for new
oases to be discovered along the way, “… to counter your heaviness without
denying it or even escaping it. You don’t want to neutralize your sadness, but
you want to find ways not to succumb to it. This is a fine but crucial line to
walk (Moore). I am now endeavoring to walk that precarious line with respites at
refreshing oases so as to be able to walk out of the desert fully alive.
“And so we are left
with a great battle, not between good and evil, but between really living and
just pretending.”
~ Thomas Moore
(U2 ~ Yellow/Moment of Surrender)
No comments:
Post a Comment