… The gift was the activity itself, like being shown how to use a dowsing rod, except that instead of looking for water I was divining what was real in my life.
I had thought, for a long time, that I had a choice between being human and being a poet. Now I know that being a poet is my best way of being human …
But where does depression fit in? It’s essential to writing if, by depression, you mean the feeling of not knowing the meaning of anything, if not having energy at your own beck and call, of falling without control in the world. In order to ‘catch’ a poem you have to be prepared to write nonsense for quite a period. You need to look at the world out of focus for a while in order to see it in a new, fresh way when it finally resolves into a clear image. Without this obscurity, a poem is likely to be facile, the product of the conscious brain rather than the record of a journey into the unconscious and back. This not knowing, far from being an enemy to writing, is the guarantor of its quality. It should, therefore, be cherished and not endured, valued rather than avoided at all costs.
The same is true of everyday life.
Gwyneth Lewis, from Sunbathing in the Rain
(NB Sunbathing in the Rain is the best book on depression I have ever read. If you know someone with depression, or are caring for someone with depression, it is really worth giving yourselves this Blue Christmas gift! (And nobody is paying me for this endorsement))
Today is Blue Christmas, a day for remembering all those who find it difficult to feel or perceive any joy in this season.
I wanted to write a post about how I have found comfort, and some measure of healing, from finding as many ways as I can to create my way out of chronic depression; how investing in my diverse creativity has brought glimmers of a future for which God may be readying me.
But I find I can’t. Today, my own conditions are just too overwhelming. I can’t summon either the physical, spiritual, emotional or imaginative energy necessary to craft these sentences in ways that they may be of some illumination to another - either as they sit with their own ‘dark places’, or as they care for one who feels dominated by the ‘dark’.
So I will have to let the voices of others speak for me today. All I can say is that today, once again, I am clinging on to the promises of this Bible verse which seemed to match the spark of hope that a week ago I could glimpse in today’s image, and which today remains stubbornly out of focus.
I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden
in secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the LORD,
the God of Israel, who calls you by your name.
(Isaiah 45.3 NRSV)
I cling onto the knowledge that God as Gift to me remains eternally true, no matter what I feel, no matter whether I can glimpse, the Presence of the Loving One who calls me by name.
Think of it as ink:
an indigo dye descending
between the leaves of the trees
and down to the grasses.
There is no dying of the light -
just the washing of a bowl,
and overturning it for night.
When day arrives we must write with
bottled darkness.
In the night we can dream
free messages of light.
‘Early Darkness’
D. Patrick Miller
I follow light. iPhone image.
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