"The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
~ Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms



"Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey sequence of bumping into's and tumblings apart."
~ Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet



Friday, August 24, 2012

Apologia Peripeteia...

 

“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
 
Bête Noir 
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.
 
Desert
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
 
By experiencing what I am now I will be able to give my children at sometime in their lives the greatest gift of being a guide to them through their dark nights I pray will come so they can become fully alive, reborn as human beings in all the vitality possible. Then, they too can be guides and compassionate companions and healers in life for others. Thomas Moore comments, children “… need a parent who is boldly and caringly embracing life, and it’s unusual for life to be both strong and neatly ordered. Chaos is one way in which life renews itself, and if a parent avoids chaos, the children will not have the energetic care and modeling they need (Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals).
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)
 
 
 


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