Up, Up (from Upon Waking)

They went up, up over the menagerie of hippos, lions, tigers. A giraffe licked her foot as the plane dipped and wavered and Lena thought of how delightfully treacherous it all was, the ferocious animals, the slender beasts with mile-long necks. If the plane went down in the middle of the savanna, both she and Derek would be eaten. She put her hand to her throat--this is where it begins, she thought-- the eating. They scaled another giraffe, up, up and she forgot about the neck and felt the glory of flight. Lena had thought she had seen a gate then, the same kind of wooden gate that existed in back of her yard that led to the woods. Could it be that the animals were that close when she walked the dog? Could it be that she would meet a lion or tiger on the trail? There were lions everywhere.

She and Derek were a bi-coastal couple. She lived on the East Coast and he on the West. They were returning from his place where she had recently threatened his ex-girlfriends with a bat. Lena laughed at the scenario now that she was safely on her way home. When they were taunting her from the lawn, she had asked him for a gun--it would be simpler with a gun--but he said no. He grabbed the wooden bat that he kept under the bed for intruders and shoved it at her. "Take it," he said. She took it. She went out and wielded the bat like a rapier. "Don't make me use this," she yelled, "because I will." The bunch of them in high hair and silver spandex and bangles flipped her the bird then drove off in a convertible. It may have been red. Afterward she went in, pleased with herself.

Derek watched the whole thing from the window and when she appeared in the bedroom, he went to her and kissed her neck with excruciating gentleness. He started to undress her. His hair was cut short now and she had the distinct memory of it when it was long and sensual, a river of curls. Lena, while being kissed here and there, tried to discern whether she still loved him now that he had short hair. She took his chin in her hands and looked directly at his face; he still had that pale skin of boy innocence. Then he said, "You know how I like it" and pulled her pelvis to him. "I want to slam you into the headboard hard." 

She looked at him now with his eyes closed as the plane climbed in altitude away from the West and toward the East. She was no longer laughing; she did not tell him how much it hurt. She wondered if  it was all worth it.

Naming the Snake: How to Recognize the Signs of a Creativity Perverse (Depression) and What Meditation and Compassion Can Do About It

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 have also been in that dark wood as a child and an adult, and I have known this obstinate grip of fear. 

It was as if someone re-coded the software of my thoughts, infecting me with a cognitive virus that brought on a diatribe of angst. I literally tried joyous thoughts on for size; they perched a moment like a sparrow on a pine branch then flitted away. Ultimately, I became curled up in the corner of my mind—my thoughts on one side, me on the other—as a person would be if a snake slithered into the room. I knew it was depression when I couldn't wave the snake out of the house and into the garden.

With every new depressive episode, however, I began to understand the key components. Stress, rejection, ennui were prominent, as were hormonal and seasonal changes. I had eventually realized that the driving force behind my depressions was my refusal to recognize myself as an artist and my insistence on remaining in a meaningless career that did not engage my creative prowess the way I needed it to be engaged. Woolf writes in A Room of One's Own:

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.

The gift, in this case, is creativity. When a creative person is not following her bliss and is continuously put in a situation hostile to creativity, the creativity becomes perverse. So, instead of being a constructive force, creativity becomes destructive; this perverse creativity can translate into a form of mental illness like depression, anxiety, or addiction.

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. It’s in how we’re wired. 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 are two things: persistence and the inner critic. 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." The inner critic that constantly clamors that one’s work isn’t good enough 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." 

However, in creativity perverse mode, persistence fuels the circular patterns of woe, and the inner critic is amplified such that it looms larger than everything else. In my novel A Portal to Vibrancy, Jackie, my autobiographical protagonist, speaks of "the devil," a serpentine creature that 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 the point where the devil is most conspicuous, 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.
 
Like Jackie, depressed people closely adhere to the diatribes and fears of the inner critic-turn-reptile; they are in the dark wood. How can an artist reclaim her creativity? Well yes, first she could find a room of her own, and second, a room in her mind.

Meditation is a way of establishing that room. John D. Dunne, PhD, co-director of Emory University's Contemplative Practices and Studies program studies 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 first step to ending this self-focus/negative tone is to recognize it. It’s almost cliché to say that sitting with one’s feelings and identifying them helps; the reason it does is because one begins to realize the witness self. The witness self is the true self, the one who simply notices, making no judgments or analysis on negative thoughts. With enough meditation, space begins to develop around the witness self and it is in this space that compassion shows up. Compassion is the antithesis, the anecdote of the inner critic/reptile; it is a sort of balm that relaxes us and with this settling one might see the beginnings of a plan, an idea, the silhouette of the muse.

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 connection. In A Portal to Vibrancy, Jackie begins to break the cycle of negative self-focus by first receiving compassion from an old friend, a fellow creative type who understands her despairs. This gives her enough space in her head to make a plan.

The plan is to move farther away from the inner reptile and commit a creative and compassionate act: Jackie proposes that she will heal her grandmother of her agoraphobia by planting a vibrant garden to lure her out of her house and into the world. Jackie's compassionate act is meaningful to her and not entirely unselfish: if she can help her grandmother with her mental illness, then she can help herself.  The fact that it is a meaningful act is key.

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 is only the catalyst. Creative depressives need to not only right their brain chemistry through medication, they need to alter their belief systems with new practices and then reap the benefits of new artistic inspirations. In short, they need to redress their creativity from destructive to constructive and see that mindfulness/meditation/compassion/creativity is a valid way of life and positivity has a momentum as well.  Good begets good, eventually.

Jump (from Upon Waking)

We were stranded in New York City after missing the last bus out. Our parents had gone to bed, refusing to fetch us after we had missed our curfew, so we had to take a train. I was in the station ready to board an Amtrak train when I saw you in another terminal. We recognized one another and I said to my weary brother, "I know him." You were in mid-stride when I saw you and your own hand caught the wall to reverse your direction. You were older, a man, a gentleman who had taken a gentleman's path of boarding school and then Harvard. You were alone, free of baggage, and eager. You rushed up to me and embraced me. It had been such a long time indeed, yet you smelled the same--a cross between soap and musk. You told my brother and me that you could get us home, that you knew of an alternate path-- one that would take us through dark exotic places. Were we up for the adventure? Of course we were.

It was not exactly clear just how we lost my brother. He was there and then he was not. He was not there when you told me we needed to jump from the plane into the river. You told me we would do it holding hands and without a parachute. But the water was too shallow, I insisted; I could see the bottom pebbles shifting in the diaphanous curtains of water. We would break our necks. We jumped anyway and tried to cover ourselves with water. In the muddy banks of the river where the water had evaporated from the heat, bullets buzzed by us like flies. Or were they rocks? I was less worried than you about this (you took this all so seriously). You were terrified: you called our pursuers jihadists. I called them children.

We reached the dock and headed for a cruise ship. Your shirt blew open exposing the tangled blond hairs on your chest as we ran hand-in-hand. The ship sounded its long horn and the boat moved like a behemoth for deeper waters. Perhaps we had retreated to the lavatory to rid ourselves of the mud. Perhaps you had known the captain and that's how we got on board. The only thing I remember is this: once all land was out of sight, you went to the railing and told me we must jump again. The man (the captain?) in the background working the controls said "Jump now." I jumped but you were mesmerized by the waves and froze. I looked up at you from the water and coaxed you in. It was here that the captain dumped the secret cargo (it was an undercover operation). A fleet of flatbed trucks buoyed up like toy boats. We saw the dark heads of the refugees up front in the cab as we climbed aboard one of the beds. You were calm enough now, under the deep blue of the night sky and the deeper blue of the sea, to undress me. We stared at the naked sky as the fleet of trucks bobbed in the waves.

Eventually you chose your dark world over me. The last time I saw you I was in the back of a taxi and my brother was dictating directions to the cab driver; we were on our way home. You shot at us from a truck packed with migrant workers. I was insulted. Hurt. You disappointed me again. You would never be the hero I needed.

Upon Waking: My Personal Mythology

We're studying Greek mythology in my World Lit I class and just this past week we watched an excerpt from "Power of Myth," Bill Moyers' classic interview with Joseph Campbell. Having reacquainted myself with Joseph Campbell's philosophy, I have more clarity on my own mythology and its symbols. This is made apparent in my dreams and what I'm trying to get at with the collection of shorts titled Upon Waking. According to Campbell, myth is the stuff of dreams; the two come from the same place--the subconscious, which is the driving force of our desires and fears despite what our intellects tell us. So this has been my project with Upon Waking, to decipher the mythology, the symbols of my subconscious and figure out the themes I grapple with, both subconsciously and consciously.

What are these themes? Rejection is one for sure. Despite my successes as a writer, rejection has damn well become commonplace, and although I pretend to shrug it off, I don't really. It manifests in my dreams as an experience with an ex-boyfriend, someone who, in the past, broke my sweet little heart. This person's ghost rises up from my inner depths and hurts me all over again in a situation that almost always borders on the absurd. "Dauphin" is an example of this, where an ex-boyfriend's ghost walks through my classroom on his way to a business meeting.

A second theme is my battle with the drudgery and the bludgeoning repetition of the days. This is accompanied by my desire to immerse myself in some natural and majestic place. "Roundabout to Wilderness" adequately portrays this theme, as does "The Ship." Both stories feature natural, almost mythical kingdoms, where I (through the guise of a persona, perhaps) experience a feeling of freedom.

It's a funny thing, writing about dreams. You think it's just a bunch of mishmash but when you sit down to record it, you realize there is an actual story there. The absurdity unveils itself into reason and it's curiously spot on with respect to your issues. Also, it's quick. It tumbles out onto the page effortlessly and in minutes. But this is what happens when your mind is trained in meditation; it's the focusing and the breathing that can get you back there. And it's funny how adaptable creativity is; as a mother with young children and a job, I don't think I would be able to write any other way at this point in my life.

Of Sand and Gold (from Upon Waking)

You had brought me to your gilded house in the sand where your sisters sat at a long table drinking wine amidst candles flickering and the white of cloth and the scurry of maids, gossiping, perhaps, to surmise if I were a decent prize with my fine brown hair and embroidered gown. I was allowed to wander; it was an island after all, down to the sea where the waves pushed up the rocks, foaming in laughter, mocking my fear, mocking me, as perhaps your sisters mocked me in their gilded dining hall with the flames elongating like fingers depicting a speaker here, a listener there.

I am humble, you see, a woman. A prize. You are the one with the desire, or are you, absent prince? I walked along the sand when the waves retreated and the island bore her legs. The long rays of the sun warmed my slender white arms; the beach was a pool of amber. They were searching for him, my bone, my blood, for he had been lost, perhaps taken, perhaps dead, according to Rumour. I would not be permitted to greet my sorrow in my own homeland, mourn him.

In the sand, the rocks were smooth, cobbled by the sea; I bent down to gather them, cradle them in my veil, tie them to my waist. On my way back to the pier laughter could be heard, the waves, far away but not too far.

It was there and then it was not, the jetty into the water, the dark wave, your voice, the wash of crepuscular sky.

Battlegrounds and the Need for a Cleared Space

Battlegrounds and the Need for a Cleared Space

The Compassion Anthology: Letter from the Editor

In my twenties I lived in a house with two male roommates: one was a good-natured, unemployed packrat who gleaned (to use Sandra Winter's term in her essay "The Gleaners") from our neighbors' trash, and the other was an ex-con yogi who painted mandalas and hung them on his bedroom wall. The packrat roommate was constantly home creating a mess wherever he went in the house. There were always dirty dishes in the sink, towels on the floor, overflowing trash, CDs, magazines, clothes everywhere, and of course, his gleanings. Nothing had a place. I took the room in the house because I couldn't find an apartment that would take my dog. Also, I was broke. The only way I could live in that chaotic household was to constantly clear a space for myself to exist.

I had my own room and spent most of my time there where it was clean and warm and cozy and where my dog and I watched the Romance Channel. In the kitchen, I cleared a space for a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee every morning. I cleared a small space in the sink to wash my dishes. In the den, I cleared a space on the floor for my yoga mat to center myself after a stressful day of teaching. I managed to exist in this chaos, and I still hold this philosophy, especially when things are in disarray, mentally and/or physically. I think clearing a space is an essential skill for survival, but not only this. When you clear a space and push the minutiae back, you choose a different consciousness,  a sort of simplification. You choose, in a word, peace.

This past winter break I spent every spare moment delving into ancient texts like the Iliad and the Odyssey to create curriculum for the World Literature I class I was assigned. I had forgotten that Homer spares us not the gory details of how larger-than-life soldiers slaughtered one another in the Iliad. The brutality is a bit exhausting to read (in the Iliad, it's the men who are slain; in the Odyssey there's an animal sacrifice on nearly every page) and yet in the midst of Homer's account of the Trojan War occurs a most tender and compassionate scene where King Priam of Troy visits the great hero Achilles to ask for the body of his son, Hector. Achilles not only slays Hector out of revenge for the blood of his comrade Patroclus, he ties Hector to his chariot and drags his body around the camp for days.

Now, Priam is an easy target for the revered warrior Achilles, a lamb gone to slaughter, if you will, but instead of killing Priam on the spot, Achilles does something utterly amazing: he weeps with him. When Achilles beholds Priam, he has "a deep desire to grieve for his own father" and the two "[give] way to grief." Achilles then commands the women slaves to have Hector's body bathed and anointed with olive oil; he himself wraps it in a battle-cape, loads it unto Priam's wagon, and promises Priam a cease fire until Hector's funeral rites are over.

I have been exceptionally aware as of late, how my own battles persist: the battle for good health despite my aging body and its minor yet annoying ailments; the battle with disorder, uncleanliness, and chaos inherent to raising two toddlers; the obstinate battle between creativity and livelihood; the prominent battle between creativity and motherhood. Being a soldier of 101 battles wears me out, and I know when I've reached the point when I need to clear a space for myself; I know when I need to construct a demilitarized zone.

The DMZ that exists between North and South Korea is a favored trope, referenced often by poets and writers. It is, quite literally, "an accidental paradise" to quote CNN, where rare and endangered species live relatively peaceful lives. It is an anomaly, a paradox, just like the space cleared for compassion in Achilles' lodgings.

This clearing of space, this DMZ inside Achilles' lodgings, would never have been possible if not for the god Hermes who put Achilles' soldiers to sleep before they could overtake Priam's wagon. The presence of the god is a metaphor for aligning with our higher natures to claim compassion paramount for ourselves and others. In our rushed and stressed world, to clear a space really seems like a monumental task--a task for a god. But it's possible. This focus on our higher nature is the subject behind Lily Prince's painting "The Better Angels of Our Nature" (pictured above right). This vibrant, ethereal, yet earthy piece has the goddess of liberty figuring prominently in the high ground, an indication that our alignment with such natures is the true meaning of freedom.

For our winter 2016 issue of the anthology, we are especially privileged to have poems from the manuscript Songs in the Storm by the late Admiral Mahic, a Bosnian poet who cleared a space for poetry in the midst of a war. I've been working closely with Mahic's translator and friend, the Canadian writer Brian Fawcett, who resurrected the manuscript from the archives at the University of Northern British Columbia. Mahic's poetry strikes me with a sense of awe for the human spirit and its dichotomies; it reminds me of the Joseph Campbell philosophy of the transcendent energy of God and how, when it hits the time space continuum, breaks into opposites: yin and yang, good and evil, male and female, war and compassion.

Please clear a space in your own lives to process the work here by our artists, poets, and writers and consider joining us for our annual exhibit in May at North Shore Community College titled Women Artists and Writers: Compassion, Creativity, and Courage to benefit Amirah (see Submission Guidelines).

Yours in creativity and compassion,

Laurette Folk, Editor of The Compassion Anthology

Priam and Achilles by Alessando Padovanino (above), The Better Angels of Our Nature by Lily Prince (below)

Dauphin (from Upon Waking)

When she awoke, the children were gathered at tables in their apartment. Apparently the classroom was locked and the parents brought them here, to the apartment she shared with her husband who, not surprisingly, slept throughout the whole ordeal and then miraculously vanished. The children were getting restless, and she, still in her robe with a curious stain on the collar, was slightly intimidated by having some twenty pre-schoolers in her private home, becoming all the more rowdy by the minute. But she was a seasoned veteran of teaching, and she knew she could pull something from the stocked bag of tricks that comes with some fifteen years in the profession. She decided on the game of telephone, and she lined them up and handed the first child the message realizing then that of course the child couldn't read, so she whispered it into his ear, this ridiculously banal message (what should the message be, she panicked, just a minute before and thought of something at last) and the child turned to the next and so on and so forth. As the message passed from child to child, she went to close the door to the hallway, when suddenly her ex-boyfriend's ghost, X, passed through it. X had left for the day, relinquishing his childlike Japanese wife to their children and in one fell swoop, dismissed the children playing telephone, commenting something about her having her hands full (no adoration in his voice whatsoever), then passed through the exterior walls and onto his meeting with a guy, the guy, regarding the online dating business he was starting. She tried her best to dismiss him as he did her, but couldn't. Just the night before, X's ghost shared a bed with her and her husband, and she, eagerly, with heart brimming, opened her legs to him and he entered her to experience sensation only, as one does when one reaches for a piece of cake or a glass of sherry. It was her husband who watched from over her shoulder, almost as if he pitied her because he knew full well her rampant desire to be loved and the heartache she was to feel by this heartless engagement. The ghost of X did not consummate the act; he withdrew and put on his clothes, packed up his things, and went back to the home he shared with his childlike Japanese wife, unfulfilled. So here he was now, casually walking through her life again, a ghost, a resurrected being from the dark lake of her subconscious where all was myth and mystery--his relationship with his childlike Japanese wife, mystery, his daily routine, mystery, his haunting ghost--myth. But she was an old pro at carrying around that tarnished chalice, and she went about doing her job, keeping the children in line, thinking to herself, consequences, there should be consequences, and then peering up at the clock--3:20--class would be soon dismissed and she could go back to picking up the pieces, tidy up, (she was always, always tidying up) recollect herself. The message came down to the last child and she asked her to repeat it, and she said one word: dauphin. The sentence, the original banal message (whatever it was) was now condensed to this, and she asked the children what it meant and hands went up, and a child said an animal of the water. Parents started to arrive then and mayhem ensued. She was left with the word, a word for a king's son, a word for an animal of the water, a word for a historical mystery.