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In a couple of excellent posts, Susan at the Wellness Writer has written about ecotherapy, a form of treatment that seeks to restore the lost connections with the natural world that are essential to health. (She cites a new book of, the same name as a good introduction.) Of course, reconnecting is an important part of wellness, but it drove home the fact that we’ve so lost the natural connection that it’s now a treatment rather than a part of everyday life.

Of course, lack of connection to people, places, emotions – pretty much anything – is a hallmark of severe depression, and multiple therapies are usually necessary to help get a depressed person out of a world of gray sameness. Awakening the feelings and senses by participating in the natural world, in whatever form it might be available, can be a powerful way to begin this process. It’s also true, though, that people without depression need that same restorative connection to sustaining wellness.

No matter how many places I’ve lived in or traveled to, I’ve always felt a strong response to the natural setting. It’s a need to reach into those spaces to feel their influence and to let them work on me. Susan’s post reminded me of that dimension of my experience. It’s all too possible to lose touch with it, not only when depressed but also when overly absorbed by work.

The book,Ecotherapy, is especially interesting because it brings together essays on psychological, spiritual, social and political dimensions of restoring the human relationship to nature. (In this post, I’m talking about the personal dimension related to healing, and will look at other contexts in future posts.)

The “nature” discussed here and in many recent books and articles is not a single thing, but includes the flows of life and earth even in lands changed drastically by human cultivation. Entering wildland, rural areas of farm and range, or gardens covers many forms of healing experience. Before there can be healing, though, there has to be an openness to the sensations of each place, a relaxing of mind, a different awareness of one’s own physical presence. As Jim Nollman puts it in Why We Garden, this is not something we are born with.

… A sense of place evolves as we live, experience, grow, touch and perhaps taste soil, learn to predict weather, garden. … It begins to evolve only after a person starts to perceive himself or herself participating … with the natural processes of place.

…[A] sense emanates from every part of the body. In other words, a sense of place includes attitudes. And perceptions. And a touch of spirituality: a sensitivity to dreams, perceptions and visions. And gut feelings – like the gut feeling that is currently prompting so many of us to put down roots … .

He also describes a sense of place as including the relationship to place. As he says above, it’s not just about the thoughts and responses but also about participating, getting close to the natural processes of growth and change wherever they may be found. It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic contrast of experience than that between remote wildlands of vast extent and the backyard garden. Yet both in their own ways can awaken mind, feeling, body and soul to the sense, relationship and sustaining power of the natural world.

The experience of wilderness is that of participating in and responding to a power of nature far greater than anything in our normal scale of living. It is a reminder of a vaster order in life in which we have a place but which we do not control completely. For me, at least, part of the experience is the hard work of getting there, hiking with a backpack for miles. That’s a sort boot camp to purge and sweat out the stress and preoccupations of a more mind-centered self, full of tension, worry and depression. That purging relaxes me and brings back the ability to be surprised. It opens the senses to awareness and awe in the presence of forces so much greater than the plans of human minds. Then the awareness, the sense of what’s important, the experience of time, all begin to change. Healing, for me, is almost incidental to such deep changes of perception, feeling and thought.

Experience of nature at the small scale of the garden is all about participating in a different way, through the daily, hands-into-the dirt work of digging, planting, weeding, watering, composting and a dozen other jobs. It’s about watching closely the daily changes of weather, the influence of heat and cold, rain and drought, the content of the soil and what it can grow. The sense of time turns to seasons and cycles of growth, fruit and flower-bearing and decay. All around are the presences of living, growing things that instill a close responsiveness to their needs. Gardening adds to who we are as we concentrate thought, touch and all our senses on working with the natural processes unfolding before us.

Of course, it’s possible to heal in the presence of nature without quite so much labor. Walking into a garden or seeing mountains and canyons at a distance evoke two kinds of responses in me. One is the feeling of beauty and balance I get in the presence of great art, a restorative harmony that fills my being. Allied with that is a kind of blending into what I see in a way I think of as spiritual. I can’t get it very well into words because the experience gets into some part of me that precedes words and thinking. It is the stuff that words and ideas try to capture but never succeed at expressing. Words like transcendence, transformation, vision come to mind. Whatever the experience should be called, it’s often overwhelming, and it’s always healing.

These experiences are shared by everyone to some degree. What are some of the restorative places and moments that stand out in your memory?

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I always had a hard time linking forgiveness and peace with my early family life. In fact, it was hard for me to understand what forgiveness itself was all about. I thought of it as a remote dream, a utopian feeling. There were many people I had struggled with, and I often let go the anger and blame I had felt, restoring my own sense of balance. If that was forgiveness, it seemed too one-sided to work on the bonds between people. On my rational side, I couldn’t quite get it.

But things can change.

I promised my mother I would do one last thing for her after she was gone. So, about a month after her death, C_, my wife, and I drove to Mill Valley, not far north of San Francisco, and met my cousin M_ at a local cafe. We were then to drive on to Bolinas Ridge, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, where we would scatter my mother’s ashes.

At lunch, I asked my cousin, who’s 15 years older than I, about his early memories of my mother. He told me a few things I hadn’t known. His father had lost his job on Wall Street in 1930 and then went to San Francisco to attend law school. During that time, M_ and his mother, Mom’s oldest sister, lived at home in Manhattan with his grandparents. By that time, my mother had long since broken free, bought her first car – a black Ford coupe – and driven across the country on her own to visit a few friends in Los Angeles, as well as her brother-in-law in San Francisco. That would have been in the late 1920s, and after that she made several trips back and forth to the west coast, always impatient to be on the move.

From his earliest years, M_ experienced my mother as a strong dominating presence, someone who immediately expressed her thoughts with no censorship or concern about others’ feelings. Her independence impressed him – she was a fearless adventurer to a boy growing up in Manhattan. During that period of his youth in the 1930′s, his impression of Mom was that she came and went a lot but never stayed long.

As he grew older, he appreciated her as talented, smart and ambitious about succeeding in business, but unable to advance very far because she was a woman. She managed the office of a wealthy dermatologist, and later did the same for a famous song-writer – even organizing and running the production of a Broadway musical he had written. M_ thought she could have run anything.

By the time my brother and I came along, she was a very different person. Frustrated, even embittered by confinement in a marriage that wasn’t going well, she was in turn prostrate in depression, quietly furious or stonily silent, the mood I dreaded most. When we had visitors, though, she was bright, sociable and funny – and so vivid, especially when sweeping into a dinner party in her bright red, satin evening dress.

But the daily and nightly routines among the four of us at home were anything but bright. The understated fury between my parents, the bitter arguments, the knife-point words, the moments of overt violence, the impassivity of my mother’s face – that was the dangerous flack of boyhood. It’s not that there wasn’t love as well – it was just buried so deep we hardly ever noticed. Every now and then, though, my irrepressible brother would pull Mom and me into a “chain kiss,” and round the tight circle we’d go, kissing cheek to cheek, arm in arm, as close as we would ever be.

For dispersing Mom’s ashes, my cousin had found an area along Bolinas Ridge – well-known to my mother for its windswept, rounded hills and vast-horizon views of the Pacific. We made a couple of stops, each time walking a hundred yards or so from the road to small groves of trees sculpted by relentless winds. We took turns scattering ashes from atop boulders among the cypress and redwoods. C_ felt the location was just right, close to the ocean my mother loved but not in it. (Mom couldn’t bear the thought of her ashes being eaten by the fish at sea.) The second spot was right above Stinson Beach – a favorite walking place of hers. It was a warm, clear day, with only a gentle sea breeze, but all around us the bent-back trees had captured the violence of storm after storm.

After we’d scattered the last of the ashes, M_ said perhaps she’ll rest in peace. I said peace was not her thing. Yet at the moment, I could feel nothing but peace, and a simple love for her that finally pushed aside the tension and simmering anger that usually filled me. She really had let go of her own hurt and frustration in her last months and had reached a sense of acceptance I had never seen in her before. I could begin to feel what that letting go was like. I wanted just then to leave behind the inner violence of all that had happened so many years before, stop thinking about whatever hurt had shaped her as a kid, what she had passed on to me, and the fears I had about leaving a similar legacy to my children. Let the breezes carry that away just as they carried off the ashes.

Somewhere it all had to stop, the cycle of hurt and self-hate broken, and the love that bonded even a screaming family together – however weak or lost that force of gentleness might have seemed – had to come through as the only memory and feeling worth keeping. I tried to put the broken parts of her life back together again and see her as the complicated, rich being she had been – and as the adventurer in her soul, driving across country in her latest car, heading west just to be heading somewhere.

That’s when forgiveness finally meant something to me – the love emerging from its hiding place, the past let go in whispers, and the best of that shared life vivid again in my feelings and memory.

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I run a race with depression that keeps me on edge. The stakes are high because we race to take each other apart. I intend to keep the lead. For years, I’d hit the wall and lose the bare will to win. But somehow I got back not just the energy to move but a belief in myself that had long been lost. I can separate myself from depression, understand it’s a condition to be dealt with and so gain the inner strength not to give up anymore. Of course, in this race I never quite get to the finish line. There is no ending.

You can’t live with depression for fifty years, as I have, and fall for easy answers or mental tricks or chemical doses as ways to escape the problem and get on with your life. Bill Wilson once wrote an essay in The Language of the Heart that told his history with this problem. He couldn’t understand how the breakthroughs of the 12-step method could work with alcoholism but not with depression.

He thought he’d finally found the answer by becoming aware of two powerful drives in his personality. One was his dependence on external things, whether alcohol or womanizing or business success or praise that would bolster his ego artificially; the other was his demand for control over everything around him. By catching these drives at work, he was able to forestall the sequence that led to his recurring bouts with deep depression. According to one biography, My Name Is Bill, that turned out to be less than successful – depression stayed with him.

But there are a few things I take from his story that resemble the way I’ve learned to adapt.

1. Total recovery will probably never happen. So I have to redefine the problem. It’s more like dealing with alcoholism through the 12-step method. Recovering means adapting to a life that includes depression but not letting it destroy me. That is the basic priority, as Therese Borchard has so powerfully given through her own fearless example: Staying alive!
2. Staying ahead of depression takes active work that never stops. For major depression of the type I have, the treatments that are done to me don’t work for long. And the condition has become virtually self-sustaining, that is, no longer triggered by external situations but recurring without any evident change in my life circumstances.
3. So I have to work from within, staying alert and catching the illness as it tries to seep under my skin. If I lose my focus, I will be letting depression take the lead. And that means it will make me an instrument of self-torture. I will do its bidding and take myself apart, bit by bit, until I find nothing left to live for.
4. Just as Bill Wilson learned, one of the most effect methods is recognizing the different symptoms and moods of the condition as they begin to take hold of my behavior and thinking. If I can step aside for just an instant from the full assault of the symptom, long enough to glance sideways at it, I can spot what’s happening and immediately see myself experiencing that particular bend of mind or feeling. Here it comes, here it is, I’m feeling miserable because I’m depressed. Or I’m tearing myself down with every other thought – I don’t have to do that so you in there, you shut up, I’m not listening anymore – you’re just a disease, and you will not get me to believe what you’re saying. Of I see obsessive thinking taking hold, sizzling my mind and gut with something, invariably, that I did wrong. I see that I’m replaying it over and over, and I have to step back and just say to myself, you’re obsessing, that’s another symptom, so stop!
5. All this requires attention and determination, and, of course, those are two qualities depression takes out at the earliest opportunity, like a military attack on command and control centers. My mind loses all focus in a fog, and I want to sit and stare at nothing as will is shot full of holes, like Dick Tracy and his villains after a gun battle. Daylight shows through my suddenly two-dimensional self. These are the toughest things: to maintain attention to what I’m going through and keep the ability to take action against those habits of taking myself apart.
6. If all else fails, at least I retain the knowledge that this is part of a cycle that will pass, and that helps me get through.

What do you do to stay a step or two ahead – of whatever it might be that breaks your pace and knocks you flat?

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Which insightfully bewildered comic strip character was it who said: I never knew what I was missing until I lost it?

I read that line about ten years ago after a series of surgeries had removed a few expendable body parts and left me in a lot of pain during the weeks of recovery. Suddenly I thought of all the things a healthy body lets you do – simple things, like bending down to get your shoe on, that I had never imagined having trouble with, or complicated things, like climbing mountains, that I had never realized I might someday might dream of doing. So those words hit home.

Depression wasn’t so immediate in impact as surgery. Instead it crept up on me over such a long period that I didn’t realize how much energy of life and mind was disappearing until I got to a point where others had to tell me what I had lost. A basic force for life had gone missing, and I wasn’t sure I would get it back. It was no small part of depression’s voice to tell me over and over again how I had wasted life, and I hadn’t fully realized what was passing me by. Strange how a comic strip character can make you laugh about a condition that wants to leave you hopeless and humorless all the time, that wants you to think about loss, about what you lack that normal people still have. Comic insights often run deep.

That line was in my mind the other day when talking to an insightful friend and helper about the cyclic pattern of my ups and downs. I was describing a particular pattern I had observed in thinking about long periods of my life. I had often put myself into leadership positions in great bursts of outer directed energy, but then I would pull back to what is for me much more normal, an inner directed state of recharging and creating things in a quiet way. People would get angry and disappointed because they wanted me out there and at my peak all the time. My friend thought about that and said: It’s really all about the assumptions. We hear from family, friends, school, work, everywhere, that our varying moods aren’t acceptable – so we grow up with the assumption, the belief, that there is something wrong with us. What if you, if everyone, could just accept those ups and downs, extroverted times vs introverted times, high energy, low energy, as something that happens, without the stigma of success or failure or of healthy vs. sick?

This was an interesting thought. The pattern could simply be seen as what’s normal for me, a variation in ways of being in the world and expressing who I am. The problem is that parents, when observing these variations in children, start worrying that all is not well, school teachers make comments, and later in life colleagues in the workplace are upset at the loss of the person they want to see. All come to agree that something has to change, and that assumption seeps into one’s mind early in life. My friend’s point made a lot of sense. I could begin to grasp what several writers have claimed, that the meaning assigned to one’s mental health or mental disorder comes partly from what we learn to accept as what is normal and what is not, what is health and what is disease.

Normal? What was that in my case? I’m not sure I could begin to understand or miss being normal until I had lost that state and arrived at depression. Then it was a scramble through various treatments and medications to get back what I had lost. But what was the normality I had to get back to? My friend’s approach was more appealing, but to accept the changing flows of energy and focus in my life, I would have to make a lot of progress in undoing the assumptions I had grown up with.

I started thinking from a very early age that there was something wrong with me, that I ought to be different – more like the person my parents said or implied I should be. I was never quite clear what sort of person that was, other than completely “successful,” but I assumed, I knew deep down that I wasn’t it. In fact, I was all wrong, somehow fatally flawed, never able to be quite that splendid guy. That didn’t stop me, though, from trying to be the number one success, imagining all sorts of great things I would do on the upswing side of my outer-directed energies. But by following the path based on just one side of my personality, I was forcing myself into a life that didn’t really suit me in the first place.

I was creating a false self to meet my inner assumptions and the apparent expectations of everyone around me. Now, that’s a pretty tiring and draining thing to do – constantly going against the grain of my own personality. I would not only attack myself for not achieving those perfect goals, I would also be resisting – unconsciously – that whole course of my work life since I was having to suppress a big part of who I was. So round and round I would go, reaching for a career that didn’t fit and at the same time undermining my attempts to get there. To reach the logical conclusion of this trend, if I were somehow able to achieve that perfect success, I would also be achieving perfect unhappiness in work that wasn’t right for me to begin with.

It took years to become aware of that pattern. In living through it, I came to think of myself as healthy or normal when the outer directed energy was high and sick or inadequate when that energy redirected itself to inner needs. Almost always, the work that directed me toward social goals won out over the inner life that seemed illegitimate, self-indulgent – simply wrong. So the overall effect was that I became inconsistent in what I could do in either sphere. Sometimes I was really good, sometimes I fell flat. I simply couldn’t get comfortable with my own natural rhythm and differing needs. For so long, I couldn’t get over the inner belief that being me wasn’t acceptable, that my energies needed to go in just one direction.

This is a point where a form of social conditioning got right inside my mind. People didn’t want my changing energies and mind swings. It wasn’t normal, it wasn’t healthy. How much does the inner belief encouraged by those reactions contribute to depression? What is the link between the psychological loss or distortion we might grow up with and the socially reinforced meanings of health, disease and normality? What do you think?