whatever my lot

Last night's sunset was incredible. I drove to Freeport Beach, rocky and cluttered (though mostly now with driftwood and dried algae instead of the trash I remember from my childhood -- the environmental 80s had an effect on the local sense of ecology), to wander the shoreline getting my skirt wet, because the last few times I've gone there it was to find some space in the existential sadness, and yesterday I wanted to go because I was happy and the house was too small to contain the happiness. I needed open sky and water.

So I stood in the waves up to my knees and stared at the sinking sun and the colors it streaked across the sky and smiled...and saw, off to one side of the sun, caught perfectly in one tiny shard of refracting cloud, a fragment of a rainbow. I've blogged before about how rainbows are a sign to me of God's love, vis a vis Isaiah 54:6-10. So I smiled even more broadly, and swallowed a few tears, and looked at the blue-beyond-blue of the mostly calm water and thought, Yes. Of course there's a slice of rainbow, a sign for me, today. Anything is possible, today.

Then of course I woke up sticky-eyed with poor sleep this morning (the teeny little gargoyle I bought at the Ren Faire -- I think his name is Nelo but I'm not sure -- seems to be doing his job of frightening away most of the nightmares, but a few slip past him anyway) and got lost in my head while putting on my makeup. Lost in my head usually involves intensive thinking about three or four or five things simultaneously but not in words while mentally replaying music, so it gets kind of crowded and noisy in there, and moves far, far away from language (I let myself go into the semiotic order and forget about the symbolic for a little while; I really need to read Black Sun), and when Mom came into my room to tell me something she started talking before I had a chance to turn down the internal volume, so to speak, and come back to the world of words, and I missed everything she said and had to ask her (had to remember how to ask her) to repeat it. This frustrates her, but she said it's because she forgets that it takes me a few moments to engage ("Especially now," I said), and I'm just like my dad that way but she doesn't always remember to apply it to me.

My folks are being great about this whole thing. I've never really let them see it before -- in high school (and man, was I a depressed kid. I was reading over my graduation portfolio which I took very seriously and very seriously overdid, and good grief my writing was all dark and sad. I started laughing as I flipped through pages of old poetry and said, "Someone go back in time and give Teenaged Sarah a Prozac") I never let anyone see how bad it was, except maybe Hillori; during my college years my parents and Laura and I were all angry with each other; and when I moved out to the Midwest I disappeared for days while I dealt with the depressive spells on my own, so my parents haven't really had to watch me deal with this before, and when this particular long stretch of life-in-death started they wanted so desperately to help, and they can't help; and even if they could, I wouldn't want them to.

The best thing they can do, which is what they're doing, now, is to talk to me when I emerge from my room, and otherwise to let me be. I have never asked anyone to take care of me; I enjoy companionship, sometimes, when I go under (Jeff doesn't believe that I'm all that introverted, and he's right; I lie pretty fifty-fifty on the Extrovert/Introvert scale, skewed slightly toward introvert like I'm skewed slightly toward being right-handed though I'm actually ambidextrous), but I don't ask or want anyone to fix it. I just want to be let to be, whatever that means in the moment, and, since my mood cycles tend to move pretty quickly, that changes a dozen times a day (upside: I'm never in a bad mood for long. Depression really isn't all that tightly linked to mood). In some moments I'm laughing and engaging, totally focused on others' company and conversation; in other moments I'm staring at the wall and lost in my head (though the shift from one to the other is hardly instantaneous; depressed isn't crazy).

Lest I sound bratty and ungrateful, I will add that it's a tremendous help that I don't have to care for an entire living space on my own.

I'm kind of worried about Simon. Last night he was angry with me and elected to sleep under my bed instead of on it, and this morning he was listless and curled up on my bed while I got ready for work and just lay there. He still has his appetite, and he purred when I kissed his fuzzy little forehead goodbye (I love his wrinkly fuzzy kitty forehead), but he seemed a little, well, depressed. I think I need to spend more time with my boy; I've been out of the house a lot, and distracted when I'm home, and I think he's in need of some Mommy time. (Needy keetie.)

Anyway, here's a sonnet I wrote my junior year in college, when I was going through my imitative-with-a-twist phase (which resurfaces from time to time), and credit for the first line of this one goes to John Donne. (I was much more depressed my junior year, having just been diagnosed as clinically depressed, and still not sure whether or not my sister would survive her own ordeal, and struggling to deal with a repressed backlash of really horrible stuff that I'd bottled for years. So the thoughts of death, this time around, are minimal, like little cirrus wisps, barely there and mostly idle, whereas then they were thunderheads; but the moments of determination still resonate.)

Life Be Not Proud

Life, be not proud, though some have called you
stark and spiteful. Yes, I know you are;
but you can only nick my skin with scars;
you have no power to slice my throat-veins through
or slick my wrists with blood. That power is mine,
but one that I won't wield. I will to live,
I will to take on all that you can give
and stagger with you on my twisted spine.
Your foot can grind my joints and knob my bones
till, crippled, I can barely smile or walk,
but I'll outlast you. Because in the end,
my praise will rise above the song of stones
and powder you beneath my heel to chalk.
So cram my mouth with dust and blood: I'll mend.


God has been flooding me with encouragement and reminders of His love, from many sources. So this? This isn't so bad. It's just something that is, and I'm learning, and it's not fun, but when He said, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness," He meant exactly that: sufficient. Not sufficient as in, "so much that you'll be full of happiness even though the sorrow is still there and will jump around for joy"; he meant sufficient. As in, Just Enough. Like Job. Job had faith, and Job was counted faithful (even though he got fed up with his circumstances himself), and he spent most of the book sitting in a heap of ashes with no clothes on, scraping his skin with broken pottery. No one can call that happy. But God's grace was sufficient. God's grace was Just Enough.

So God isn't mad at me, and I'm not doing anything wrong. This is just something that is, and God's grace is sufficient. I will survive it, and I have faith that it will come to good in the end, however much it sucks right now. And even in the more or less constant battle against the Nothing, I still have moments of joy and moments of happiness and moments of connection and peace and presence, and those moments can last awhile. Yesterday, for example, was marvelous. So this thing doesn't always keep me down. And when it does, cosmically, everything is still okay, even when it's horrible.

It is well with my soul.

Also I'm getting in the mood for fall. No matter how far removed from school I am, August brings this sense of delightful expectancy. I keep getting flashbacks of Grove City in the fall, the slow flare of leaves, bright shallowing sunshine, crisp dry-leaf-and-vinegar-smelling air, renewal and change and long afternoon walks with pockets full of apples, and long nighttime walks with leaves whirling like ghosts under the harvest moon, the gladness of reunited friends, the eagerness of learning, the joy of becoming.

This mood calls for Nickel Creek. I first listened to Why Should the Fire Die? on the long drive from South Bend to Grove City for a homecoming four or five years ago, and ever since, that album has quintessentialized fall.