Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand,
outstretched caressingly?
~Francis Thompson from “The Hound of Heaven”
When I’m down, discouraged, overwhelmed,
I focus inward,not out and beyond my own troubles.
If I were to look outside myself
I would see there is a reasoning
for my darkness.
His hand hovers over ready
to hold me when I fail and fall
so I’m unable to see past
to the broad expense of light
that is the rest of His glory,
not hidden, just invisible to me
at this moment.
This wasn’t just plain terrible,
this was fancy terrible.
This was terrible with raisins in it.
~Dorothy Parker
More and more of my clinic time is devoted to evaluation and treatment of depression and anxiety rather than sore throats, coughs, UTIs and sprains/strains. An outbreak of overwhelming misery is climbing to epidemic proportions in our society. A majority of the patients who are coming in for mental health assessment are at the point where their symptoms are interfering with nearly every aspect of their daily activities and they can no longer cope. Their relationships are disintegrating, their work/school responsibilities are suffering, they are alarmingly self-medicating with alcohol, marijuana and pornography or whatever seems to give momentary relief. Suicidal ideation has become common, almost normative, certainly no longer rare.
Things seem terrible. And not just plain terrible. First-world-problem-terrible with raisins in it.
We have lost all perspective about terrible.
Terrible is what happened to the Philippine people in the midst of the most horrific typhoon this month –losing everything from their lives to shelter to any means to stay warm, fed and secure, much less find medical care.
Terrible is what happens in numerous countries where political oppression sends refugees across hundreds of miles and borders to seek asylum in foreign lands.
Terrible is what happens when hundreds of thousands are dying from AIDs, leaving behind their infected orphans to fend for themselves and care for each other.
Terrible is trafficking of human beings for power, gratification and money.
There is plenty of just plain terrible and most of us have no clue what it feels like. We are so absorbed in our own scratches from the ubiquitous thorns of life, grousing about the raisins that pop up in our own version of terrible, oblivious to the relative comfort with which we are graced daily compared to most of the world’s population.
Sometimes I think the best treatment for anxiety and depression has little to do with correcting brain chemistry or getting to the right cognitive behavioral insights to beat back negative thoughts, but rather to spend a year digging wells and latrines for those who have never used one. It is spending hours caring for the detoxing or the dying to see what misery really looks like. It is understanding how the fight for basic survival after an earthquake, a hurricane, a typhoon, a flood, a tsunami, makes life even more precious, rather than thrown away as if it is something you can simply upgrade or exchange for a new version.
Maybe, just maybe, when we reach in deeply, even sustaining the scars that come with everyday living, we can look past the thorns to the fruit. We may bleed getting to it. Maybe then the raisins don’t seem quite so terrible after all.
See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build — but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou Lord of life, send my roots rain
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Thou art indeed just, Lord”
As I look out through a tear-streaked window at the beginning of this dark day,
I fear I’m inadequate to the task before me.
Parched and struggling patients line my schedule;
they are anxious and already weary and barren, seeking something, anything
to ease their distress in a hostile world,
preferably an easy pill to swallow.
Nothing that hurts going down.
While others are thriving around them, they wilt and wither, wishing to die.
Lord of Life, equip me to find the words to say that might help.
May it be about more than genetics, neurotransmitters and physiology.
In this dry season for young lives, send your penetrating rain.
Reach down and shake our roots
fiercely
and slake our thirst.
In all the woods that day I was
the only living thing
fretful, exhausted, or unsure.
Giant fir and spruce and cedar trees
that had stood their ground
three hundred years
stretched in sunlight calmly
unimpressed by whatever
it was that held me
hunched and tense above the stream,
biting my nails, calculating all
my impossibilities.
Nor did the water pause
to reflect or enter into
my considerations.
It found its way
over and around a crowd
of rocks in easy flourishes,
in laughing evasions and
shifts in direction.
Nothing could slow it down for long.
It even made a little song
out of all the things
that got in its way,
a music against the hard edges
of whatever might interrupt its going.
~John Brehm “Passage”
“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
…And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird…
~Emily Dickinson from Poem 254
The end of the school year is the season of barely feathered hope in my world. The academic nest is crowded, the competition fierce, the future uncertain. Those who have struggled to survive in classes, in debt, in relationships, in a tenuous job market, can find themselves ill equipped and unprepared to fly on their own. Their lack of feathering becomes obvious the closer they get to the edge. Bashed and abashed, they worry and panic, sleep little, self-medicate, cry easily, contemplate death. Sometimes they tumble.
We try to catch them before they fall.
We remind them: it takes only one feather to have hope in a soaring future of grace and strength. Only one.
The others will come.
And when they do, they will be beautiful.
…difficulties are magnified out of all proportion simply by fear and anxiety. From the moment we wake until we fall asleep we must commend other people wholly and unreservedly to God and leave them in his hands, and transform our anxiety for them into prayers on their behalf:
With sorrow and with grief…
God will not be distracted.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Letters from Prison
Every day I see college students who are so consumed by anxiety they become immobilized in their ability to move forward through the midst of life’s inevitable obstacles and difficulties. They become so stuck in their own overwhelming feelings they can’t sleep or eat or think clearly, so distracted are they by their symptoms. They self-medicate, self-injure and self-hate. Being unable to nurture themselves or others, they wither like a young tree without roots deep enough to reach the vast reservoir that lies untapped beneath them. In epidemic numbers, some decide to die, even before life really has fully begun for them.
I grieve for them in their distress. My role is to help find healing solutions, whether it is counseling therapy, a break from school, or a medicine that may give some form of relief. My heart knows the ultimate answer is not as simple as the right prescription.
We who are anxious are not trusting a Creator who does not suffer from attention deficit disorder and who is not distracted from His care for us even when we turn away in worry and sorrow. We magnify our difficult circumstances by staying so tightly into ourselves, unable to look beyond our own eyelashes. Instead we are to reach higher and deeper, through prayer, through service to others, through acknowledging there is power greater than ourselves.
So we are called to pray for ourselves and for others, disabling anxiety and fear and transforming it to gratitude and grace. No longer withering, we just might bloom.
And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment … a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present…
~Wendell Berry
My days are filled with anxious people, one after another after another. They sit at the edge of their seat, eyes brimming, fingers gripping the arms of the chair. Each moment, each breath, each rapid heart beat overwhelmed by fear-filled questions: will there be another breath? must there be another breath? Must this life go on like this in panic of what the next moment will bring?
The only thing more frightening than the unknown is the known that the next moment will be just like the last. There is a deficit of thankfulness, no recognition of a moment just passed that can never be retrieved and relived. There is only fear of the next and the next so that the now and now is lost forever.
Their worry and angst is contagious as the flu.
I mask up and wash my hands of it throughout the day.
I wish a vaccination could protect us all from unnamed fears.
I want to say to them and myself:
Stop. Stop this. Stop this moment in time.
Stop expecting some one, some thing or some drug must fix this feeling.
Stop being blind and deaf to the gift of each breath.
Just stop.
And simply be.
I want to say:
this moment is ours,
this moment of weeping and sharing
and breath and pulse and light.
Shout for joy in it.
Celebrate it.
Be thankful for tears that can flow over grateful lips.
Stop me before I write,
because of my own anxiety,
yet another prescription
you don’t really need.
Just be–
and be blessed–
in the now and now.
Surely there is something in the unruffled calm of nature that overawes our little anxieties and doubts: the sight of the deep-blue sky, and the clustering stars above seem to impart a quiet to the mind.
Jonathan Edwards
During times like the last couple weeks, nature has certainly been less than calm (wildfires, windstorms, drought, overbearing heat, flooding). Anxiety and worry seems an appropriate response in the face of such tragedy.
We have been spared in our part of the world, dealing only with unseasonably cool and wet weather, disrupting the growing season and hay harvest. Our anxieties, ever present nevertheless, are quite little compared to those elsewhere who have lost family members, their homes and all their belongings.
Even with that point of view, anxiety and doubt can take root like a weed in a garden patch– overwhelming, crowding out and impairing plants trying to be fruitful. The result is nothing of value grows–only unchecked proliferation of more weeds.
I need reminding to keep my anxiousness winnowed out. I don’t need a large scale natural disaster as impetus. I simply need to look up at the sky to know: I am not God and never will be. My worry helps no one, changes nothing, only hinders me from being fruitful.
Reaching for the unruffled calm overawes, imparting quiet to the mind, taking a deep breath and knowing He is in control.
Published in Country Magazine 2007
Chores at our farm are rarely routine since our batch of four male kittens were born 6 months ago. They were delivered unceremoniously in the corner of one of the horse stalls by their young mother whose spontaneous adoption we accepted a mere four weeks before, not realizing we were accepting five kitties, not just one.
They were born under a Haflinger’s nose, and amazingly survived the ordeal and managed to stay safe until the next day when we came in to clean and discovered them warming near a nice fresh pile of poop. What a birthing spot this mama had chosen. Thankfully Haflingers are tolerant about sharing their space as long as you don’t ask for a share of their food too…
We moved them and mama to a safer spot in the barn, away from big Haflinger feet, and they thrived, getting more adventuresome by the week, until they are now in full adolescent glory, mock fighting with each other, scrambling up and down the hay bales, using the shavings as their personal litter box, doing rodent patrol, and most of all, strolling along the shelves that line the stalls, breathing in the Haflinger smell, and rubbing their fur up against Haflinger noses through the wire. They are best of friends with these ponies in the light of day, as after all they were born right in a Haflinger bed.
But at night it’s another story. Each evening as I come out to do chores after returning home from work, it is pitch dark and the Haflingers, out in their winter paddocks, must walk with me one by one back to their box stalls for the night. Only this is now far more of an adventure thanks to four cats who glory in stealth attacks in the dark, like mountain lions in the shadows, waiting for their prey to pass by.
These rascals are two gray tabbies, one black and one gray, perfectly suited to be camouflaged in the northwest dim misty fall evenings along a barely lit pathway between paddocks and barn. They flatten themselves tight on the ground, just inches from where our feet will pass, and suddenly, they spring into the air as we approach, just looking for a reaction from either the horse or myself. It never fails to unnerve me, as I’m always anticipating and fearing the horse’s response to a surprise cat attack. Interestingly, the Haflingers, used to kitten antics all night long in the barn, are completely bored by the whole show, but when the tension from me as I tighten on the lead rope comes through to them, their head goes up and they sense there must be something to fear. Then the dancing on the lead rope begins, only because I’m the one with the fear transmitted like an electric current to the Haflinger. We do this four times along the path to the barn as four kittens lay in wait, one after another, just to torment me. By the end of bringing in eight horses, I’m done in by my own case of nerves.
You’d think I’d learn to stop fearing, and start laughing at these pranksters. They are hilarious in their hiding places, their attempts to “guard” the barn door from intruders, their occasional miscalculations that land them right in front of a hoof about to hit the ground. Why I haven’t had at least one squished kitten by now is beyond my comprehension. Yet they survive to torment me and delight me yet another night. I cuddle them after the horses are all put away, flopping them on their backs in my arms, and tickling their tummies and scolding them for their contribution to my increasing gray hair.
I’m a slow learner. These are like so many of my little daily fears, which seem to hide, blended in to the surroundings of my daily life, ready to spring at me without warning, looking like much bigger scarier things than they really are. I’m a highly skilled catastrophizer in the best of circumstances, and if I have a kitten sized worry, it becomes a mountain lion sized melodrama in no time. Only because I allow it to become so.
Stepping back, taking a deep breath, if I learn to laugh at the small stuff, then it won’t become a “cat”astrophe, now will it? If I can grab those fears, turn them over on their back and tickle their tummies until they purr, then I’m the one enjoying a good time.
I’ll try that the next time I feel that old familiar sensation of “what if?” making my muscles tense and my step quicken. I just might tolerate that walk in the dark a little better, whether it is the scary plane flight, the worry over a loved one’s health, the state of the economy, or the uncertainty of what tomorrow might bring.
I’ll know that behind that mountain lion is a soft loving purring fur ball, granting me relief from the mundane, for which I’m extremely grateful. Life is always an adventure, even if it is just a stroll down a barn lane in the dark wondering what might come at me next on the path.
Barnstorming 