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.

The Persistent Gauze

Mornings can have a persistent gauze about them, obscuring all the finer details.  There is an underlying restlessness.  You reach a certain level of consciousness and it becomes a burden; it becomes something that must be maintained, like everything else, the dishes in the sink, the grease around the stove, the particulate exhaust on the shutters.  The mind, too needs its washings, its daily ablutions.  My teacher reminds me: "This is what it means to be a spirit in a body."

My mother, too, has said this, and perhaps countless others.  So it's an entrapment of sorts, is it?  And this is especially true when I have those moments when even my breathing is foreign to me.  The ache in my back, the bundled nerve in my left foot that sends up a sharp pain when I swing my legs out of bed; this is the body inflicting itself upon itself.  But this is obvious and expected.  What is not so obvious is the gauze of the morning, the aberrant yet perfectly normal, mindless mind.

Dillard says this:

The actual world is a kind of tedious plane where dwells, and goes to school, the body, the boring body, the boring body which houses the eyes to read the books and houses the heart the books inflame.  The very boring body seems to require an inordinately big, very boring world to keep it up, a world where you have to spend far too much time, have to do time like a prisoner, always looking for a chance to slip away, to escape back home to books, or escape back home to any concentration - fanciful, mental, or physical- where you can lose yourself at last.

I am constantly nagged by the thought of writing fiction.  And everyday I say I will do it, and everyday I don't, because I am tired, but not physically tired; I am tired from dragging around my consciousness all day, from being bored, trapped in my role as a mother, trapped in this body, trapped and tolerating and oh the energy it takes to tolerate.  Fiction is the ultimate escape, the ultimate indulgence, and I wonder if there is a part of me, the ascetic part, that knows this and inhibits me from my indulgences as a sort of penance.

"Nothing could be less apparently interesting, for example, than a certain infuriatingly dull sight I always looked at with hatred," Dillard writes in An American Childhood.  "This sight slew me in my seat.  It was so dull it unstrung me, so I could barely breathe.  How could I flee it, the very landscape, the dull rock, the bleak miles, the dark rain?  I slumped under the weight of my own passive helplessness."

The key word is passive.  And passive implies that the mind is inactive, bored, helpless.  It's a form of short-sightedness.  As Dillard eventually finds out through her study of geology and rock crystals, the dull rock is not so dull: "The earth was like a shut eye... Pry open the lid and find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed and sidereal beauty.  Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetical flowers.  They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones - maybe only the stones - understood."

It's a discipline, this looking deeply.  It's a harness for the mindless mind, leading it back to drink.  "Think!"  Dillard reminds herself.  Look deeper!  I remind myself.

 Sometimes I must go in and replace my kids in their beds because they're roaming and ransacking the place.  This is after the shackles of the day have been loosed and I have my freedom.  By their own restlessness and excess freedoms (they are no longer in cribs), they begin crying after about a half an hour or so, they don't know what else to do with themselves after scattering every last thing they can get their hands on- books, stuffed animals, mostly, and before my husband and I had wised up, diapers, bottles of lotion, the contents of the first aid kit.  It can take two or three visits to the room before they fall asleep.  I have learned that I can nip the night in the bud and return only once if I sing them a few songs.  When I do this, I sing ever so softly (the softer I sing the more manageable and tolerable my voice) and stroke their hair, and they nod off.  My daughter looks at me in the diffused darkness and with all color eradicated (she is fair and blue-eyed, I am olive-skinned and brown-eyed), I can recognize the shape of my features in her face.  So as I look deeply into her face, which is my girl face, now, in the diffused darkness, and I see her staring back at me with apprehension.  I wonder, has the diffused darkness morphed my face as well?  How do I look to her, faded, obscured, old, someone other than Mommy?  How do I look to her? 

They're not just my children, my charges, I tell myself.  What else am I not seeing?

 

Baby Raccoon, Revisited

True compassion takes perseverance.  This became especially evident when I rescued a stranded baby raccoon.  True compassion means listening to a subtler voice urging you forward despite the voices of fear and self preservation banging in your ear.

And when I mean self preservation, I really mean selfishness.  I had no time for a stranded baby raccoon in my life, not with two-year-old toddlers to care for and a book to publish, not to mention professional development endeavors that I signed on to do.  But everyone has the "no time" sob story, and it certainly becomes tiresome after a while, so tiresome one wonders if it is actually legit.

So it goes like this, I climb the last hill of my route in Phillips Conservation Land and I note how out of breath I am, that I am never in top notch shape to take this hill comfortably.  Josie has her ball and is content with being the lead, stopping every once and a while to put the ball at my feet and then snatch it just before I kick it.  (This Lucy-Charlie Brown scenario seems to amuse her).  I get to the top of the hill and there in the leaves beside the trail is this little gray ball of fluff.  I look closer and it's squirming, trying to swim up an incline into the woods.  It's got those tell-tale markings: raccoon eye mask.  There's mosquitoes whining about me and it, circling its tiny pill-size nose.  My heart cleaves; it is adorable.  Beyond adorable.  I ask it if it's okay.  Of course it's not okay, it's stranded and scared.  But it doesn't look sick.  It looks well-fed.  Its fur is thick and there's no blood, nor any damage that I can see.  Mother raccoons keep their dens high up in the trees, away from predators; perhaps he had a fall and is internally wounded.  I look up and see nothing conspicuous, no hole, just the verdant canopy.

When I bend to observe him more closely, coo to him to comfort him, Josie's ears perk up.  She starts to sniff the air; she's got wind of him.  So I grab her harness and latch her to the leash.  We walk back to the car.  Due to lack of time, I don't immediately go back.  My husband has to leave for work and I have the twins to care for.  Also, I remember the drowned baby squirrels in the Kleinhoffers' yard, under the big pine tree.  I was five at the time.  My brother and I had found the fallen nest and observed how one of the squirrels was twitching.  It was still alive.  So we showed our dad and he contacted a softball buddy who rehabilitated wounded or sick wildlife.  Later we went to see the now healthy squirrel in a cage.  I need to get in touch with one of these people.

I make a dozen calls to wildlife organizations and animal hospitals.  I either get no answer or a rejection; they don't take raccoons because raccoons are infamous for having rabies.  I remember that people who contract rabies get painful stomach shots.  When my sister was a toddler she attempted to feed bubblegum to a squirrel.  It bit her, not because it was aggressive, we found out later, but because squirrels don't focus on what their eating; they are too busy looking for predators.  So the squirrel bit my two-year-old sister and my parents flipped out.  We had just moved to northern New Jersey from Long Island.  The kids next door said the squirrel was actually one of four that was bottle-fed and raised by the former owners of our house.  My parents were never informed of these tame, yet ambitious squirrels, probably because the owners thought it might discourage potential buyers.  Jerks.

The doctor told my parents that in order to be sure if the squirrel had rabies or not, the brain needed to be examined.  So my parents hired a wildlife officer to shoot every squirrel he saw and for a few days, it was raining squirrels.  I don't know how many squirrels lost their heads, but somehow it was determined that my sister was fine, probably because she exhibited no symptoms whatsoever.  This is the story I have on my mind when I go back later that day to visit the baby raccoon.

Turns out he was moved.  A girl with a nose piercing that resembled devil's horns wrapped him in a sweatshirt and transported him across the woods, away from the trail.  I tell her I need to move him back because his mother will not be able to find him if he is so far away.  She leads me to him and he's backed up against a fallen tree with his hand-like paws in front of him, as if he's taking a stretch.  At this point, I'm terrified to touch him.  We guide him onto my sweatshirt and I take him to the place where I first found him earlier that morning.  I leave him behind a tree with a conspicuous black gash down the middle of it, say a prayer for him, and trek out of the woods.

The next morning, I continue to have no luck with finding a wildlife rehabilitator who is willing to take a baby raccoon.  The one person on the North Shore who does accept raccoons already has thirty.  She tells me to call animal control and have him euthanized.  I tell her I am not going to do that.  I call another animal hospital who takes in wounded or sick wildlife and the vet tech tells me adamantly not to touch the baby raccoon.  "But he's not sick," I say.  "He's plump.  And has nice fur.  No mange."  She tells me I shouldn't risk it.  But I do risk it.  I go back later that day with a makeshift syringe filled with Pedialyte and topped off with a baby bottle nipple.  I had read up on how to care for a baby raccoon; the first thing you do is hydrate it with electrolytes.

 Raccoons are just so damn cute.  Songs, poetry, books have been written about them.  In Japan in the 1970s, a cartoon called Rascal the Raccoon inspired thousands of Japanese families to buy raccoon babies and have them shipped from North America.  These families soon realized that raccoons can be very destructive and opted to release them back into the forests.  So thousands of raccoons were released into the forests of Japan where they had no predators.  They took over.  They damaged 80% of the Buddhist shrines and temples found in the forests by scratching, urinating, and defecating all over them.  Japan has since implemented a zero tolerance policy regarding raccoons and tens of thousands of them are destroyed every year.  The Buddhist monks, ironically, are in full compliance with this ruthless killing.  I can't quite wrap my mind around this idea, because Buddhists believe in compassion for all sentient beings. 

So, I go back into the woods in a raincoat and jeans carrying a bag of Pedialyte solution, a syringe with a baby bottle nipple secured with a bread bag twisty tie, and gloves.  It's raining softly and the woods is in a full burgeoning green.  I am alone and scared and praying that the mother had come back for him.  But she didn't, because there he is, curled up on my sweatshirt, his fur undulating with breath.  I circle him a few times and he rouses, backs away from me, growling.  I try to assess whether this is erratic behavior or just fear.   I have rabies on the brain.  I position the nipple near his mouth and squirt it.  This pisses him off.  I try again and get some in his mouth.  Mosquitoes are biting me mercilessly, through my jeans, on my fingers and face.  One last squirt and the nipple pops off.  It starts to rain.  He growls and I jump.  I am doing him no good whatsoever.  I leave him downtrodden, a failure.

That night I go to a dinner for adjunct professors and meet up with my friend Joanne.  I am so despondent about the baby raccoon and the fate I bequeathed him, I just mope at the table and talk to no one but her.  I share my endeavors with Joanne and she tells me her own raccoon story. I take it as a sign.

Joanne had come to know a raccoon couple who lived in an old rotted-out tree in the conservation land behind her house.  They were her neighbors.  She saw them from time to time, gathering food.  Knowing full well that raccoons were vulnerable to rabies, she tried to get a vaccine for them, but no one was willing to help her do this, because the vaccine was produced in Vermont and she was living in Massachusetts.  So the raccoons both contracted the disease.  One of them died instantly and the other came to her door, looking for her, as if he were a friend in distress.  She was powerless and had no choice to call animal control.  The officer secured the raccoon and kicked him into a cage.  "Don't worry.  It will be destroyed tonight," he said.  "It's a living being," Joanne said to me in the parking lot before we parted ways.  "Where's the compassion?"

I thought about this; I thought about the value of a raccoon's life.  Is it a precious life or is it a dispensable, subordinate life?  Most people would think it's a subordinate life and be on their way.  It has a smaller brain; it isn't as intelligent as a human.  Well, human beings can be pretty dumb, especially when it comes to nuclear weapons.  It takes a significant lack of foresight to construct even one nuclear weapon because nuclear weapons are like termites: if you've got one, there will be others and before you know it, you have an arsenal that can destroy the planet ten times over.

Speaking of intelligence, raccoons are climbing the evolutionary ladder fast.  They are naturally more intelligent than other mammals because they spend nearly a year living with their mothers; animals that spend a long period of time with their mothers are smarter.  Also, there is a link between an animal's ability to manipulate objects and its intelligence.  Their hand-like paws can manipulate food sources quite deftly; this is an evolutionary adaptation from prowling around river beds and reaching into the mud for food.  Raccoons are now successfully living in cities with Toronto being the city with the highest raccoon population.  It is a fact that city raccoons have different brain structures than country raccoons and that these city raccoons are becoming smarter.  In fact, we are making them smarter with our different security devices to deter them from food sources; they are outwitting us and debunking our contraptions.  These clever raccoons survive and pass that gene of cleverness on and the rest is history. 

I am determined not to let the raccoon die.  That night, after the dinner, I go to Pet Life in Danvers and buy a bottle feeder and kitten replacement formula, the next best thing to raccoon milk.  I tell the woman at the counter that I am going to feed a baby raccoon, but we are deathly afraid of one another.  She cheers me on.  "You can do it," she says.  "Everything's going to be all right."  She had rescued all sorts of animals, raccoons, skunks, birds.  I tell her he's plump, but the vet tech said he could be sick with rabies.  She shakes her head, as if she knows all the hullabaloo about rabies and raccoons and doesn't buy it.  "They don't get sick as much as you think."  I ask her if I could bring the raccoon to her the next day, if I am having trouble feeding him, and she gives me her hours.  "Sure," she says, "I'll get it down 'em."  I leave feeling hopeful.

The next morning I wake at 6:30, dress myself in jeans, a sweatshirt, a raincoat, boots and stock my bag with a hand towel, Pedialyte, the bottle feeder, the syringe and gloves.  I douse myself with Off and take Josie with me for moral support, packing three tennis balls to distract her.  We enter the woods and the air is musty and humid.  We walk toward the tree with the black gash and when we are close, I tie up Josie and leave her with her balls.  I carry my bag over to the raccoon, who is there again, curled up on my sweatshirt.  I put the bottle of milk near his nose, and he perks up.  I wrap him in the hand towel and take him in my hands and offer him the milk.  He coos and chirps.  He tries to grasp the bottle with his hands.  At one point, he even purrs.  I can feel his feisty heart thumping between my fingers; he is light, barely a pound.  It is just like holding a kitten, a thing with paper bones and air for muscles.  But that thumping heart, it tells me he wants to live.  I get some milk down him and it starts to rain, so I pack him into the reusable shopping bag with the towel and sweatshirt and take him home.

I found a wildlife rehabilitator in Wrenthan through Tufts Wildlife Clinic.  These people are hardcore animal lovers, real Saint Francis types.  He's doing fine now, I hear, and nursing like a champ.

I'm not sure where this love for animals comes from; perhaps my paternal grandmother, who once found a baby bird and nursed it back to health by feeding it spaghetti and meatballs.  Or perhaps I've just had my fill of suffering.  Thich Nhat Hanh says "suffering is always there, around us and inside us, and we have to find ways that alleviate the suffering and transform it into well-being and peace."  In this world where suffering, like water, is the path of least resistance, I want to be the pump.  You don't see water flowing uphill; it flows downhill.  In order for water to flow uphill, you need to add energy, a pump.  This will get the water to people on higher ground.  In order to combat suffering, you need a spiritual pump; you need to exert your own time and energy to bring well-being.

The Brain is Wider Than the Sky

I am still having unsettling dreams.  In these dreams, I become characters, some of them I have consciously created beforehand, others were spur of the moment, a persona-du-jour of my subconscious.  One night, I was a construction worker at a site and the ceiling fell on me.  I was the man and then I was not the man; I was an observer from above watching the doctors frenetically working to repair the mangled body.  I can pinpoint the moment before the ceiling fell; it was like a scene in a movie.  Will I feel it? I ask someone off camera.  Will I feel it when it crushes my spine?  No, you will not feel it, the obscured director says.  The ceiling falls.  The body is pulled from the rubble.  The doctors rush to the scene.  Why do I need to become the man with the mangled body?  What is it that I want to know?

I use my imagination to go there, to the unthinkable.  I plunge the knife into a lover's heart.  I plunge the knife into my own heart.  It is a thought, lightning fast.  But I am only imagining what I have heard on the news or saw on the television.  It is a scene from somewhere else and has nothing the do with me; I have no desire to kill anyone or anything. 

Boredom has been the impetus to all of my makeshift horrors, and I am speaking here more of an ennui.  I believe these disturbing and perplexing thoughts are jolts to my consciousness, to wake myself up.  So sitting on the beach one Sunday, I think of these mind states, of boredom, of imagination, and I think of Dickinson's poem, The Brain is Wider Than the Sky:

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As Sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound— 


I am not my mind.  I am the "you" beside, as Dickinson says.  And the brain is wide and deep and it contains storms and sunny days and currents and trenches and self-illuminating fish that troll the depths.  And the mind is a god itself, deciding this and that, creating this, destroying that, loving, hating, like a mini Zeus or a compact Athena.  But is the mind The God?  Like it or not, it is our god, and temperamental at best.

Buddhists speak of this temperamental inner god and recognizing it for what it is: a drama queen.  There is a place inside all of us where equanimity lies.  And this equanimity has more to do with life and death, than anything else we've known.

A Compilation of Ideas That Have Since Passed

I write this blog to keep track of the ideas that in one way or another change my life for the better.  It is also a place to be spontaneously creative and nonjudgmental.  But lately I've tried to write and the inner critic - that reptilian part of the brain - has shunted my ideas.  No, that's not good enough, no that's solipsism, no that's too personal, no, no, no.  So fuck that; I'm going to catch those evasive fish, despite the Godzillas in my head.

Let's start with the Shamanic journeys.  First let me say I am not sure if these are indeed spiritual journeys with telltale guides and oracles.  I know my imagination and its tricks.  But I shall keep these "emergences" here, in this trove, and tell their stories nonetheless because their effects on me were positive.

(Tangent:  Regarding the dreamlike images of the dead...are they visitations or reflections, and does it matter?  I think the key word is emergences because the images quite literally bloomed or emerged inside my head.  Again, I need to reiterate my belief here of archetypes and symbols, of images and mind ghosts: if DNA is the cell's way of communicating with the environment, then the archetypes/symbols/images might very well be the spirit's way of communicating with the mind.)

I am a lover.  I love deeply.  I have recognized that same love in Walt Whitman (clear and sweet is my soul ...and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul).  I long to hear the voices of those who have left me; I long to see the familiar shape of their bodies and faces, watch their mouths laugh.  (I tend to feel isolated; I have a brain with deep trenches).  So...I journeyed to find those people who have moved on in one way or another and I found them in the valley of blossoms, a world in eternal half light.  And they were indeed there, under the trees, with countenances I remember, with clothes too, I remember.  My father in his office garb, a capped pen in his pocket-- I felt the pinch of his fingers on my elbow and I threw my arms about his thick neck.  My aunt was there in bell bottom jeans and bangs, my grandmother in a long, ethereal gown.  Their message to me...we're always here, in this place.  We still know you and you, us. 

The second time I journeyed, I was a member of a procession moving through the valley.  I saw footprints in the mud, my own foot, Ralphie's pawprints.  The procession sought the flatlands where a fire could be tended, a focal point for dancing and singing.  A deer appeared then, nimble-footed and graceful; she danced and in her doe eyes, the fire danced.  The leader handed me a piece of the fire and a flame burst from my palms (before it had been a flock of birds).  This was the symbol for creativity, a constructive and destructive force.  I accepted it hesitantly, and as I did so, was yanked backward into the sky by a flock of crows.

Both journeys were products of my imagination, yes.  Some of it was contrived, yes.  What was not contrived was the eradication of my loneliness.  I felt genuinely accompanied.

Last week, I saw my first ovenbird.  I did not know this small, sweet choirmaster from his song.  I had to chase him into the wood, where he rustled among the leaves, observe the stripe of auburn at his crown and his speckled breast, then look him up in Audubon.  What an illustrious song; what a lovely gift.  I remembered Frost had written a poem about him:

The Oven Bird

By Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

The thing diminished is now winter.  The thing diminished is the school semester, and it saddens me.  Oh the swan song of the oven bird is a beautiful thing.  It is the song of time passing.

I awoke last Sunday to Christ's face impressed in the shadows and highlights of my suede bedroom curtain.  I could not not see him.  It was the face of the crucified Christ, twisted and hollow, the face of the dead Christ.  Oh great, I thought to myself what does this mean?  Do you have something to tell me?  No answer.  There is never any answer, at least one that comes definitely and immediately.  I told my meditation teacher this: I suffered for them, my children.  All my ignorance, my illusions, for their sakes.  I don't mean to sound like a martyr, but there's got to be a purpose other than my own painful enlightenment.  O the suffering of middle youth.  I'll recognize the signs; I'll try to make it right, because as a mother, that's what I do.                                                                                                          

Easter Thoughts

Alleluia!  Mary, Light burst
from your untouched
womb like a flower
on the far side
of death.  The world tree
is blossoming.  Two
realms are becoming one.
Alleluia.

- Hildegard of Bingen, Hymn

Tam Marin Fowles of Hope in the Heart, an organization that promotes peace and compassion, talks about that moment when darkness is first infiltrated, when the a pinhole develops in one's consciousness to let in new, constructive ideas.  We recognize this as hope, in its truest form, and Martin Fowles and her crew aim to create a library of images of hope to help people overcome adversity and live richer lives.  I have been thinking about this pinhole moment when enlightenment occurs; I've been trying to pinpoint how it occurs and what I've come up with is this: it is an alleluia moment, a mini Easter, a resurrection of spirit that is kindled within the hearth of compassion.  Here is a sample image:

Credit: Hope in the Heart at http://hopeintheheart.org