Storied Mind

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In Silence

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
To speak your

Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are you? Whose
Silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones
Are quiet). Do not
Think of what you are
Still less of
What you may one day be.
Rather
Be what you are (but who?) be
The unthinkable one
You do not know.

O be still, while
You are still alive,
And all things live around you
Speaking (I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
To be my own silence:
And this is difficult. The whole
World is secretly on fire. The stones
Burn, even the stones
They burn me. How can a man be still or
Listen to all things burning? How can he dare
To sit with them
When all their silence
Is on fire?”

~ Thomas Merton ~

(The Strange Islands: Poems by Thomas Merton)

Thanks to Panhala for highlighting this poem.

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My partner in life is an artist who works in many media. She fills the space around us, inside and outside our home, with beautiful things. Her gardens crowd with daily works-in-progress as she adds one more spot of life to a year-round creation. It unfolds in time as the season and color for one group of living things peaks and then fades, in a cycle that never ends and that never repeats in quite the same way. Read the rest of this entry »

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Talking to the depression of a spouse or partner is usually a no-win trap. I speak from the experience of having angrily fought off so many attempts my wife made over the years simply to let me know that something was deeply wrong. Depression is the intruder in any intimate relationship. It creates a replica of the person you know and love, like the pod people of the Body Snatchers films – identical bodies taking the life away from the man or woman living with you and substituting a terrifying, unknown being.

People enduring the pain of relationships distorted by depression tell their stories over and over again in the user groups, blogs, forums and message boards of the internet. These partners to depression, often bewildered and desperate, need the outpouring of support they get on these sites, but they want more than that. They want to know what to do.

Advice is easy to come by on the forums, and we’ve all had mixed experiences with it. Sometimes, it’s enormously helpful, but it can be preachy, dogmatic, irrelevant and even offensive or wounding. But whatever the shortcomings of the help offered, I find it always to be passionate. Most of the participants online have learned what they know from hard experience, and sharing it is usually part of their own healing. Despite having to sort through much that is not relevant to my situation, I keep returning to these forums to understand more about the struggle of living with depression.

But I have a very different experience when I turn to some of the best known books offering analysis and advice on how to respond to a depressed partner. I’m going to avoid names here because there seems to be a more generic problem than one I find in a single writer. It’s a very tricky thing to offer step by step advice to people dealing with depression because the term covers a multitude of conditions along a spectrum from mild to suicidal.

The best writers, from my perspective, ground advice in their own experience with the illness and are helpful in guiding readers to adapt the suggestions to their own unique circumstances. I find Julie Fast’s work – though dealing with bipolar rather than depression, (Loving Someone with Bipolar Disorder) to be very helpful for just these reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

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Therese Borchard at Beyond Blue recently did a couple of posts on managing time. She described the Stephen Covey
method of separating the urgent from the important, and a guest she interviewed emphasized a related idea of focusing on significant goals rather than isolated tasks.

This is excellent advice if you find yourself getting distracted from the big things in favor of reading the latest email, following the interesting links they contain all over the internet, or delaying the important tasks because something inside is reluctant to take those on just now. The problem is that I’ve tried this method and a dozen others, and none of them have worked. Many are complicated, take hours to learn and set up, demand detailed updating and take so much time that I can’t keep up with the important goals I’ve spent days trying to refine.

Reading about this problem, though, helped me remember a book I have called Never Be Late Again by Diana DeLonzor. She takes a completely different approach. Though her emphasis is on the “punctually challenged,” I found her ideas to be just as applicable to dealing with lack of focus and perpetual delay. What sets her book apart from the others is that she looks at the psychological causes that underlie these self-defeating behaviors. Read the rest of this entry »

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Thanks again to isabella at moritherapy and her post about Mental Health Camp, I’ve been reading Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing. She discusses at length not only the healing power of the writing process but also the need for a writer to care for the creative self.

Her own breakthrough in becoming a professional writer started when she discovered a demanding form of Japanese painting that grows out of the Zen tradition. It requires that the painter prepare by achieving an inner balance and “emptiness” that allows total concentration on the creative act. The painting itself is achieved with a series of strokes in one sitting that permits no changes. This is an art requiring an inner harmony cultivated through spiritual practice and a balance in all aspects of life.

There’s a similar tradition in the Chinese art of calligraphy, as explained in a beautiful book – The Way of Chinese Painting by Mai Mai Sze. The tradition is also described in Wen Fong’s Images of the Mind, which includes dozens of excellent reproductions of calligraphy, poetry and paintings. According to the Chinese “way,” the artist not only achieves spiritual, mental, emotional and physical wholeness but also captures the essential spirit and energy of external reality. There is a connecting energy that relates the individual to the larger world. The artist expresses that unity not only in the finished work but also in the act of creating it. During those creative moments, the calligrapher/painter stands apart from the tumble of thoughts and emotions and works in a state similar to meditation. Read the rest of this entry »

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This is a story I had to get out of my head onto paper purely for healing. It’s still hard, though, and I may not be getting it right – best I can do for now. A name has been changed, but otherwise this is the way I can remember it.

This seemed to happen at first without sound, as if I were watching a silent film with the words blown up on screens.

My brother and my father had their fights – I was used to those. But this was different. I had been in my room upstairs and started down when I heard the heavy shut of the solid oak front door. That meant my father had just come in, and usually I could count off the seconds before the clash between them began. There would be a cautious, almost polite questioning in my father’s baritone, a hoarse, tuneless challenge from my mother, then my brother’s raging tenor. That twisted music of a family fight had begun.

As I came downstairs this time, though, I heard no voices. But then at the foot of the stairs I stood completely still as I looked dumbly into the small foyer at the front door. Dad and my brother stood face to face, but I could hardly see them as my eyes fixed on the 16 gauge shotgun in my brother’s hands. It was aiming right at my father’s chest, the end of the barrel no more than a foot away.

I could almost hear a switch flipping off. I felt and heard nothing but just floated there in my own distance. Anything could have happened. Read the rest of this entry »