Join me in the pursuit of greater understanding, greater community, and greater love in this overwhelmingly vast, beautifully complex, exhilarating abyss we call human consciousness.
I’ve had a few different meaningful conversations about depression this week with humans I love, and then On Being with Krista Tippett released some amazing interview archives on the topic of depression, which I devoured. My reflection from both of those things led to me writing some of my own language about what it feels like for me to experience depression in different seasons of my life. Depression, like many aspects of the human experience can only be pointed to with words. Words are never enough, but they’re at least a step toward naming what cannot fully be names, and that, I believe, is enough.
I wrote this poem on a particularly hard day of managing Seasonal Affective Disorder a few weeks ago. It is month 3 of 5 of the coldest and darkest months in the mountains, and I’m feeling it.
In case you didn’t read my last post, I spoke about a morning meditation that I have incorporated into my practice which has made a world of difference for me during this pandemic. It grounds me when I don’t know what to do with all of the endless possibilities and outcomes of what reality is now. It orients me toward hope when news headlines fill me with despair. It opens me up so that I have more room inside of myself to welcome and embrace this new and most unexpected reality that we find ourselves in. It reminds me to let go of yesterday, and to not worry so much about tomorrow, for today is all we have.
I wanted to make a post more explicitly about the meditation and provide some extra pandemic-specific reflections you can incorporate into each section as you read, meditate, contemplate, or pray through it.
In the midst of the most uncertain and confusing and challenging and chaotic time many of us around the entire world have ever experienced, I find myself reminded over and over again of the importance of ritual, of ceremony, of routines that we perform intentionally in order to name our emotions and orient ourselves around the values that keep us grounded in the midst of this roller coaster of emotion we didn’t ask to be on but are suddenly strapped into.
