Summer Findings

Every morning, the kitchen sink, filled with soaking pots, sippy cups, dishes, silverware.  Every morning, the locust trees, on guard in the backyard; the neighbor’s dog lunging at the screen as we walk by.  Every morning a plastic Dunkin Donuts cup (with straw) tossed in the overgrowth.  The camp kids gathering under the boxelder, kicking soccer balls and playing tag.  Every morning, crows, quotidian and legion, strutting in the grass, perching on the backstop.  Summer makes the minutiae of suburbia ever more prominent and yet, in the midst of all mundane, there is an undercurrent of mindfulness and also, discovery.  My twin toddlers discovered flowers and ants and rocks.  Black-eyed Susans were Stevie's favorite, while Marielle preferred small white clovers, insignificant to anyone or anything else except bees.  Once, she carried around a small dried blade of grass for hours.

(Go out and make your own discoveries importunes Dr. Scott, the paleontologist, on Dinosaur Train).

This summer I discovered the blackberry bushes in the woods by Ayer School, sweet, dark gems that reminded me of Jefferson, NJ, and specifically, Lake Morskioko.  I spent part of my childhood there at the lake, where the blackberries grew on the side of a steep, narrow dirt road to the entrance, and pickerel fish wavered in sunlight near high grasses; where daring girls aligned themselves perfectly on the high dive and fell blindly backward, and wet feet slapped at concrete.  I had learned to swim there, and dive, push myself into the chilly morning water and feel the immediate and imposed vigor of being awake.

My kids continued their discovery of words; they repeated them like parrots, sang them, adorably mispronounced and misused them.  Mary was more confident; she said them like she knew what she was talking about but didn't mind being corrected.  She parroted Mommy (still does) to test the words on her lips, see how they sound, memorize them for later.  Stevie pronounced quasi-sentences tentatively (still does), looking at me to see if he's got it right and he was so endearing, I ached.

I have discovered my aging body.  Sprouts of gray here and there, age spots, aches.  My most precious finding in July was a small wooden bench someone tossed in the woods behind Ayer school.  I had been thinking about this bench nearly a month before I found it.  The rocks at the park are too low to the ground and hard; I have long needed a sitting place of ample height to rest and even meditate while Josie takes a break from her morning fetching.  This sitting place needed to be natural (I thought of a log, but where would I get it and how would I get it there?) something subtle, under the radar of potential thieves.  One day I saw the little bench stuffed into a bramble bush behind the school.  I trekked out of the woods with the it resting against my hip and brought it to the place under the boxwood tree where I had (and continue to have, as long as the weather keeps) a few moments of meditation in the morning.

Josie has aged as well with her ever-whitening snoot, the slight lift to her paws when she lies down, as if she's getting her nails done.  Evidence of arthritis.

At twilight one evening in early August, I heard a screech owl.  I was sitting at the kitchen table after clearing the dinner dishes, checking the weather on the ipad, when I heard a trill.  It's a bird, I thought.  A frog?  I rushed outside and heard it again coming from the darkening woods.  It was pleasant, serendipitous, like an unexpected kiss on the cheek, but more than this: it was totemic.  My husband heard it too.  Owl, he said.  My neighbors apparently heard nothing, because they continued to talk loudly and eventually scared the critter away.  I returned to the ipad and researched owl calls.  I found him; the diminutive screech owl whose call was nothing like a screech at all, but a soft, whistle, a sonorous purr.  So here was a thing vastly different from its name, evidence that something must be experienced to know what it truly is.

[Source: Southern Wisconsin Atlas And Field Guide]

Sometime in mid August, I got it in my head to do collages; this is what some call "found" art.  The etiolation of summer flowers, the heat of the summer daze, had me searching for a portal to vibrancy.  I fetched a copy of Architectural Digest (a magazine that appeared one day in the mail, sans subscription) cut out an image of a non-descript white house and placed it atop a mountain range with Laura Bush's flowers in the foreground (her summer ranch home was featured).  The background was a gilded glow, a southwestern evening.  In this collage, I had found a fictitious place and solved a mystery: I imagined my deceased father living there, atop the Southern Sierras.  He always loved the west.

Now, the semester has begun and the kids have started going to daycare twice a week.  Our lives are filling with things to do and the mundane has been eclipsed by urgency.  It feels good to be in the groove again, to have a role outside of my house.  But I will miss this summer’s slow undercurrent of mindfulness made apparent and remember the gifts it brought.

Defining Depression as Creativity Perverse and Realizing Its Formidable Adversary, Compassion

I don't think anybody who hasn't been through depression knows what it's like to be frightened out of your mind every day from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep...terrified that something is happening to you and not knowing what to do.  You are in a dark wood; there isn't a path.  Nobody is saying 'Go that way.'"  Nobody is saying anything.

This is a quote from Lord Melvyn Bragg, a veteran broadcaster of the former South Bank television show (UK) who suffered several bouts of clinical depression, the first one occurring at 14 years old.  I found the quote while doing research on depression and it resonated with me, because I too have been in that dark wood as a child and an adult, and I have known that obstinate grip of fear.

Most of my depressions have been existential in nature.  I experienced my first episode as a senior in high school when I experienced such intense bouts of ennui, I began to think life had no purpose, immediate or otherwise.  I was grappling with a hefty dose of uncertainty as well; I would be going to college in the fall and the sheltered life I lived under my parents' roof would be ending.  I remember driving to the mall one January evening, looking at the night sky, feeling as if the car were careening off the surface of the Earth into the vacuousness of space, and it was only a matter of time before I plummeted.  I told no one because I was quite certain no one else around me had experienced such angst, but also, I was terrified to speak of it because of what others might think.  So I hid it and waited patiently for it to subside, and luckily, months later, it did, after I made the transition to college. 

With every new depressive episode, however, I seem to be getting closer to understanding the components.  There's usually a trigger, like an impending change, or a profound dissatisfaction with something. Ennui is a key element because it promotes rumination, the modus operandi of depression.  Other elements include isolation, rejection, self-criticism, lack of faith, hormones and seasons.  Also, it's no secret that depression is common among creative people.  According to Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at John Hopkins, artists are eight times more likely to suffer from depression than the general population.  Neuroscientist Nancy Andresan claims that depression is intertwined with "a cognitive style that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art." 

At the heart of this cognitive style is persistence.  Andresan conducted a study on 30 writers from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and discovered that "successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won't go down.  They'll stick with it until it's right." And here that inner critic damning everything you do is useful; as Jonah Lehrer says in his NY Time article "Depression's Upside," it's that belaboring inner critic that produces a more refined prose: "the sentences <are> polished by our angst." 

The problem of depression for creative people begins when there is no creative vision.  It's that feeling of discovery, the clues that point to fruition of a vision that keeps the artist/writer coming back, tolerating blows of rejection and a society unreceptive to the creative life.  When apathy strikes and there is no vision, the persistence that drives a creative mind to wander along its inward journey despite all else is the same persistence that allows for the recursive thought patterns of woe.  In my novel A Portal to Vibrancy, I call these recursive negative thoughts a "creativity perverse."

In the novel, Jackie, the artist protagonist, speaks of "the devil," a serpentine creature who embodies all of her negative impulses.   (If you're a Catholic, this isn't far-fetched).  In the beginning of the novel, these impulses or thoughts consist mainly of temptation, like stealing a Reese's peanut butter cup from the drugstore, and sexual acts.  Later in the novel, the devil matures along with Jackie and becomes so prominent "he" strikes her down at every turn and is like an oil slick moving into the rippling tides of her thoughts, destroying her clarity, forging guilt, and forcing her into alienation.  In this way, Jackie's inner devil is a metaphor for clinical depression. 

At this point in the novel, Jackie is not exercising her creativity and the inner critic that would normally keep her focused on perfecting creative tasks has no immediate artistic vision, is out of control, and paving a path of destruction:
 

Farin and I lie in his bed looking at the ceiling where there is longitudinal cracking in the plaster. I am wide awake and vibrating with fear. The panic comes not only with subway rides but mornings as well. Farin gets up, gets dressed; he wants to start his day, has things to do that don’t include me, favors he must do for his sister or the Dutch woman. I am terrified of him leaving me, of being alone. My mind has divided in two, one side me, the other side, something treacherous. This treacherous thing has me cornered inside my own head. It says that if I don’t watch it, I am going to kill myself.

Like Jackie, depressed people closely adhere to the diatribes and fears of the inner reptile; they are in the dark wood.  There is a way out, however.

John D. Dunne, PhD, co-director of Emory University's Contemplative Practices and Studies program is studying the effects of mindfulness and compassion on depressed patients.  He exclaims that depressed people "hold onto (negative) thoughts very, very strongly" and "the goal of mindfulness meditation and compassion is to end this self-focus, this negative tone."

The physics of compassion-as-anti-depressant make sense, whether the compassion be received or given.  Compassion requires empathy, the ability to see self in other; in this way it eradicates the isolation effect of depression and promotes a sense of connectedness.  In A Portal to Vibrancy, Jackie begins to break the cycle of negative self-focus by committing a compassionate act: she plants a garden to lure her agoraphobic grandmother out of her house:

 Citronella candles highlight the chins of women, aunts, cousins, women talking about other people's problems, divorced women, abusive men, alcoholics, people not present, "other" people who have screwed up their lives.  The possibility that I have become an "other" person flashes across my mind, but I don't focus on it.  I focus instead on the garden and my grandmother bending over so I can see the elastic bands of her nylons just below the rim of her cotton house dress.  She was in that garden a lot.  I decide I am going to recreate my grandfather's garden.  I do this for reasons besides my need for vibrancy.  I do this because I want to heal my grandmother of the fear disease.

Jackie's compassionate act is meaningful to her and not entirely unselfish.  If she can help her grandmother out of the dark wood, then she can help herself.  The fact that it is a meaningful act is key.

Mindfulness is also a way of cultivating compassion.  By sitting and being with your feelings, they often lose their edge and you begin to see them for what they are, just feelings.  This instills well-being while also cultivating compassion; if you can get past your own demons, you would like to see others do the same.  But Dunne's cohort Charles L. Raison, MD asserts that "many people with mood disorders find they can't do meditation when they're depressed.  Their thoughts are too overwhelming.  They are anxious, nervous, and can't sit - and likely they need antidepressants."  While I have experienced this first hand, my conviction is that the use of an antidepressant alone is not the answer.  Depressives need to not only right their brain chemistry through medication, they need to alter their belief systems with new practices; they need to see that compassion is a valid way of life and positivity has a momentum as well.  Good begets good, eventually.

Patterns and Rituals

Today I had this thought: I had made it to spiritual fruition, whatever that may be- Nirvana, Heaven, etc. - and a wise old angel exclaimed, "Why would it be anything different?"  Death and rebirth were all around you; why would you doubt that it would continue?"  The natural world has its tell-tale signs.  Take the Universal Law of Gravitation: every mass is attracted to every other mass in the universe.  Is not love a kind of gravity?  And Newton's laws of inertia, acceleration, action-reaction; they have their spiritual counterparts as well.  Take depression.  It's a closed and isolated system and it will continue as such until an outside force like compassion knocks it on its head, sending it ever so slowly in a direction.  And action-reaction- cause and effect.  It is the multitude of action-reaction couplets that create one's history, one's experience, knowledge and eventually, enlightenment.

Patterns.  The microcosm of the self, the macrocosm of the universe. Artists are constantly striking these comparisons.  As Dillard says in An American Childhood:

 Artists, for their part, noticed the things that engaged the mind's private and idiosyncratic interior, that area where the life of the senses mingles with the life of the spirit: the shattering of light into color, and the way it shades off round a bend.  The humble attention painters gave to the shadow of a stalk, or the reflected sheen under a chin, or the lapping layers of strong strokes, included and extended the scientists' vision of each least thing as unendingly interesting.  But artists laid down the vision in the form of beauty bare ...- radiant and fierce, inexplicable, and without the math.

The life of the senses mingles with the life of the spirit; they reflect, dance, intertwine and it's up to us to observe and define.

Last night I had lunch with a friend on the wharf in Salem when a wayward night heron perched on a boat observing the goings on.  I had never seen a night heron out and about in a crowded place; it was an anomaly.  The sun was setting and it was cool; I had not brought a sweater and I was starting to be chilled.  But there was something else chilling me and it had to do with change.  I had sensed the turn of the Earth through the solstice toward darkness, starkness, and cold.  I thought about the news I'd heard: my brother-in-law's mother was dying from cancer.  Her body was riddled with it and she told no one.  What is it about the culminations of the little deaths that we have known?  This is what that first acknowledgement of the oncoming darkness presents.  Over and over again, we pass through winter to spring, and over and over again, the harbinger of darkness sets us at unease.  We forget the patterns.  We forget, because they are not properly acknowledged.  We forget the patterns because we have lost our rituals.

According to Psychology Today's Hal E. Hershfield, Ph.D., rituals "increase our involvement with the experience itself."  They create community and connect us with nature.  In short, we live a more fulfilled life through ritual because we connect the life of the senses to the life of the spirit.  We feel in control, better equipped for uncertainty.  But the conundrum for our less-than-religious society is how to engage in seasonal rituals that are meaningful (not superficially materialistic) as well as independent of religion.  This requires a certain amount of creativity, open-mindedness, and possible research.  This might be asking too much of the typical overworked American.

And yet, if we don't do it, we'll be living a fraction of what our lives could be.