We must not lose hope throughout the times we are suffering. I know there are people out there reading this who think they will not get through the specific depression they’re in. I know because I know that same feeling has lived inside me… and whatever lives in me must live in someone else too. In the same way that the God in me sees the God in you (footnote: I will always use the word God in my writing as interchangeable with Love or whatever vibration of sound for you that depicts a higher / indwelling power for which words transcend anyway.)
We are all connected and this experience of being alive comes with the experience of pain. Buddha tells us life is suffering. Christ shows us on the cross. Easter just reminded us that death doesn’t have the final say. But it doesn’t make the feeling go away does it?
The famous playwright Publius Terentius Afer once said ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’ A line from his play The Self-Tormentor, which was written in 165 B.C (let that sink in for a second.)
He’s right but the first thing I feel when I am gripped by depression is like an alien. As the world spins around me, I feel less and less as though I belong to it. Yet it’s this very pain I am hosting that might actually connect me to others.
These are the things we’re not speaking about. At least from a personal place (there’s plenty of statistics to suggest the rise of depression and anxiety in our modern day but doesn’t this sometimes just add to the despair, as opposed to a sense of solidarity?) We’re cramming life with distractions and when we go to speak of these states we stammer with our half-mouths to attempt words for what is so deeply disorienting (as Rilke refers to in his poem ‘I Am Prayer Again’ which you will find below.)
Tasting freedom has a price, it seems. We want to live there always but the Hero’s journey is to grow, change and age into freedom with patience and grit. This season will birth grit and resilience. But it feels like the opposite, right? Like it’s sucking you away, distorting all sense of self and the world. Disconnecting, disassociating. Yes. But this is the soil fermenting, and it’s not pretty. Yet it is here we must stay present, wait for wisdom to permeate our surroundings once more. The sweet taste of awakening and colour probably won’t come back overnight. It might. It has for me sometimes. But it may be more of a slow burn back to yourself. Back to a sense of partnership with the indwelling spirit who whispers to us. Always. Even now.
I have found some balms along the way. I share a few recent ones with anybody who is struggling. However isolating it feels, there is someone else who has experienced it too, it is your unique cross to carry and your unique offering to a world who needs your angle on pain and, also your angle on joy. The inevitable counterpart.
Balms To Remember You’re Not Alone
I Am Prayer Again
Rainer Maria Rilke
I am praying again Awesome One,
You hear me again as words from the depths rush toward you in wind.
I’ve been scattered in pieces in alleyways.
I sweep myself out of garbage and broken glass.
With my half-mouth I stammer you who are eternal in your symmetry.
I lift to you my half-hands in wordless beseeching that I may find again the eyes with which I once beheld you.
I am a house gutted by fire where the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out into the open.
I am a city by the sea, sinking into a toxic tide.
I am strange to myself as though someone unknown had poisoned my mother as she carried me.
It’s here in all the pieces of my shame that I now find myself again.
How I yearn to belong to something, to be contained in an all-embracing mind that sees me as a single thing.
And I yearn to be held in the great hands of your heart.
Oh let them take me now.
Into your hands I place these fragments, my life, and you my God spend them however you want.
Wherever I Go - Arvo Pärt
Is it just me or does listening to minimal, sad and haunting music somehow ease a somber day?
Perhaps use this music as a chance to grieve (yes you can set a timer like I do and let tears purge out like rain for 20 minutes or longer if you need - they will subside eventually and you’ll have given them a place to go so you can move on to other tasks.)
Sometimes ignoring what we feel only makes it louder, so let this album ease you into quiet observance of what you cannot go around but must go through. This music helps me to be calm in the face of panicked states.
'Anything that's human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.’
-Mr Rogers
A follow up poem and additional balm.
The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski
your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
-- by Charles Bukowski
Oh my, I am too old to not honor one's gift; and more than that, the willingness to use one's gift. Culture so often says withhold encouragement, why?
Who else in popular music cares enough to host something like this, a philosopher, a poet, a mystic and (if I am not mistaken) a Brahmin, a host of healing and sacred ritual.
I wish I was reading this material 9 months ago. I would have felt so much less lonely. But I'm here now.
Praying not so much for joy this season, but for a myriad of emotions that in the words of Reinhold Neubaur, author of the serenity prayer, a pathway to peace, so we can be reasonable happy in the life; and (my edit), not fear what comes next and been instilled with hope that the universe is unfolding is a good and loving way.
Gaia, heaven, or even nothingness where pain is no longer felt. People like Kimbra make feel remember there is good in the cosmos. Thank you.