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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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Merely Me wrote a wonderful post on the importance of bringing play back into everyday life. It is the forgotten tonic among adults in general and depressed adults in particular. She paints a vivid scene of a group therapy session where she coaxed recovering addicts into playing rather than talking about themselves. Some brought in precious toys they’d probably had for years, and everyone got immersed in their games. It sounded like they felt the release of a long-buried instinct – for play is surely one of the basic human instincts.

Her post brought to mind one of the most extraordinary people I’ve known. He was a born teacher infusing his own life and the lives of those around him with imagination and play as a natural part of his instinct for life.

Steven and his lifelong friend Maria arrived in town one day, found a small space they could rent to start a school and dubbed it Little Earth. Its first citizens were both kindergarten age kids and the dozens of figures emerging from the imaginations of this gifted pair. The little kids referred to them as the grownup kids because they took the imaginative adventures and instinctive games of children as seriously as any event in adult life. They accepted kids on their own terms, could speak their language, play with them, win their confidence and teach them through play-adapted methods.

They told dramatic tales with hand puppets and marionette shows, taking on the voices of all the characters as they either crouched behind the puppet theater or stood over it guiding strings that brought the flopping marionettes to life. The artifice disappeared as the puppets took on life in zany stories that always reflected back on what the kids were really going through. Drawing on their network of talented friends, they arranged visits by performers from street theater groups who taught the kids circus arts. Everyone learned to walk on stilts, perform acrobatics and turn into dangerous tigers and bears that challenged the ring master’s control and composure as he flashed his string whip. That intense training culminated in a public circus performance in a city park, the Greatest Show on Little Earth. Each kid, no matter how timid or bold, found a role to play and drew great cheers from the crowd.

Each year, All Species Day was celebrated by a parade around the downtown plaza, kids and parents together dressed as river otters, eagles, polar bears, and bearing signs about the endangered animals and how to protect them. Steven’s teaching, in particular, was filled with guitar accompanied songs for all instructive and fun occasions. Small and slender, he had a kid-like curiosity, wonder and imagination that saw the play and teaching possibilities in almost everything.

He also played the magician, appearing in his black top hat and tails over blue jeans. Coins, eggs, stuffed animals would appear and disappear, often with the tap of his magic cane over the upturned hat. Reaching for a handkerchief stuffed up his sleeve, he would be amazed as he drew forth an endless stream of red silk. And most miraculously, his assistant, Maria, would disappear in a huge smoke puff from his ever present flash powder. For Halloween evening, the two organized an outdoor extravaganza with bonfires, magic incantations, bursts of mysterious smoke, cauldrons of potions and a gentle witch and wizard presiding over all. There was a sense of instructive ceremony about all of Steven’s ideas. He cajoled the most reluctant kids into playing lead roles in dramas designed to stretch their ideas of who they were and what they could do.

This was not just dramatic flair. There were sound teaching principles woven through everything he created. Eventually, with the help of friends, he and Maria produced a book about Little Earth, and as the school grew into a much larger and more complicated place, they both retired to find new adventures. Steven fulfilled a lifelong dream of traveling to Egypt. There with his irrepressible personality, he befriended the sister of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the former ruler of the country, and persuaded her to support the establishment of a new school in Alexandria – based, of course, on Little Earth principles. After some years he continued his travels around the world and eventually found his way back to our small city.

But when he returned he brought the news that he had AIDS. Even then, he followed his instinct to teach through ceremony. One night he gathered a group of friends to share with them what the disease meant in his life and what his prospects were. After greeting many he had not seen in years and swapping many stories, he settled himself on the floor in the middle of the room and spread out in a semi-circle before him the dozens of small dark bottles that contained his daily regimen of pills. He swept his arm over all those medications and said simply: This is the umbrella of hope in the 90s. Always concerned that we know and learn, he described the symptoms he was living with, the impact of the medications and eventually made it clear that this chemical hope might not be effective.

He went through a long decline like most other AIDS patients of that time. Infections plagued and weakened him, minor strokes began to affect his concentration and memory, weakness kept him in a wheelchair, and his body started to shrink as eating became too painful. But he created one more ceremony before he died. He asked (and no one could ever refuse one of Steven’s requests) that a circle of friends join around him to be present for the end of his life. It was as if he wanted to be sure that his spirit would become one with our own. And so a small phone tree was organized, and one day my wife and I received the call to come.

He was unconscious by then and kept alive by means of an oxygen tank. One friend, who had come from San Francisco where he worked with AIDS patients, took a look at him lying on the bed and agreed that he was just about gone. He had seen a lot of this before. The attending nurse explained that Steven would probably go shortly after the oxygen tubes were removed. His sister, who had helped him through this long ending phase of life, said it was time, the tubes were taken out, and we held hands in a circle around his bed as he had wished. He managed a few rough-edged breaths, then a quiet one, then nothing. I doubt that anyone there thought of him as dead. We all took turns alone with him, saying personal good-byes. When I stood over him, his face still looked close to life, as if he might at wake any moment and start telling a story. All I could do was bend down and kiss him good-bye.

Naturally, we organized a costume parade to honor him. The procession around the central plaza was led by his off-white 62 Chevy with the fake feet sticking out of the half-open trunk – one of his trademarks -and followed by the rest of us in whatever costume pieces had come immediately to hand – along with a few of our musician friends playing familiar Little Earth songs. Then we packed ourselves into a church hall for an impromptu service, and each took turns reminiscing. The one I most remember was a story told by the AIDS worker from San Francisco.

One day he visited Steven and found him putting up on the walls a series of portraits, each surrounded by his fanciful painting. They all looked like small celebratory shrines. As he looked at the portraits, the visitor recognized each one. He turned to Steven and said: Steven, all these guys treated you horribly – they abused and betrayed you and left you in agony each time. Why are you putting all this up as if you’re honoring them? Steven answered quite simply: Yes, it’s true they hurt me – but they were all angels who brought love into my life, and I want to celebrate each one.

That was pure Steven, who died when he was 36. There is no forgetting him or the spirit he shared with everyone he knew – a spirit that might appear in a sudden flash of light tossed from his magic hand.

Who is that special person in your life who has helped in whatever way to wake up a sleeping part of your spirit?

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Here are more journal excerpts from many years ago about my first experiences working with meditation to deal with depression. Unlike Revellian, as he explains so well in a recent comment here, I have not so far cultivated meditation as a long-term practice and discipline. Nevertheless, from these first attempts I found a method that has helped blunt the deep stress and anxiety that accompany depression. Sometimes it can even bring me out of a deep downswing.

Today I tried meditating while getting one of my periodic bone scans – one grisly aftermath of a cancer exam. Has it metastasized to the bones? If so, likely an agonizing death ahead – but fortunately that’s not probable. This is the second one, and the first only showed the widespread spots of arthritis that one day will give me a lot more pain than they do now. To do the scan I have to lie down on a narrow gurney and be absolutely still while this big machine moves slowly over my whole body, just an inch or so away.

So I worked at meditating during the scan and that made the time pass very quickly. It also distracted me from the fear of the machine’s humming invasion that recorded every inch of my body’s deepest structure. I couldn’t help but think of death while this was happening, and even the narrow gurney reminded me of how small a body gets when the life is gone. I strained to hold still since there was nothing to rest my arms on, but I finally figured out that I could keep my hands from slipping off the cold side bars by tucking the thumbs just under my hips. Still I couldn’t get a restful position for my elbows. So I closed my eyes and meditated on loving kindness and tried enumerating the things I was worried about and afraid of. Those fears felt more distant then, not as urgent – more like empty shapes or brief flashes rather than stabbing realities. After the scan, I felt a peacefulness that made it easier to hear whatever the results might be. Once again, I was clear of any sign of cancer in those aging bones.

• I am trying to meditate and observe my feelings and thoughts and judgments and just note them. They’re they are. That is a wonderful part of this practice – in a way it helps internalize the therapist who is getting an objective view of you and so able to help identify what you are doing. I can observe what flows in and flows out and, while I’m doing it, enter into the peaceful but alert state I achieved during the bone scan. I only wish I could sustain this – perhaps I will internalize the discipline after a time. I wonder if the practice could help root out the deepest depression, for that strikes at a level far below thought or feeling within a deep hard structure of the brain. After decades of residence there, it just won’t move.

• These last two days I have been meditating for forty-five minutes at a time. As my therapist says, that sounds like a lot of minutes, but it’s nothing – and he says it is work, with a capital W. You can’t play it like ping pong. You have to do it. He himself plans to spend a year in a monastery before too long. I see better now that following an emotion with detachment brings you into its midst – you can even move around inside it, so to speak, taking its measure, observing what it is about but without being dominated by it. The key is that distance, that stance. I am not sure I can or even want to maintain that as the norm, but it is helping me see how I put my life and reactions together. I am always amazed at how much time I spend tearing myself down, and in meditating I can see myself doing this more objectively. That alone helps me to stop the torment of that inner ripping. This practice isn’t yet helping get to the depression in a sustainable way, but achieving that would take much longer. I just wonder if it is possible to go that far.

• Lately I have been meditating irregularly even though it has become a crucial centering activity. I’m not cultivating much of a discipline about it or having a sense of developing skill in exploration of consciousness. This is the trouble with depression – when it takes over, all the defenses I have don’t just fail. I forget all about them, as if I had never known what they were. Except in those worst times, there are mantras, and a prayer I have developed over time, that help bring balance into my life. Concentrating on breath gets me deeply into that different space.

The guidance for meditation to calm nervousness and fears is this:

Mindfulness of fears and nervousness

Number them

Focus on breath

Note them in turn, return to breath

Awareness of breathing – acknowledge breath by saying: in/out
Focus on center of chest – go way inside – explore the feeling.

And the simple lines I go over and over as part of the meditation on loving kindness are these:

May I be healed

May I feel love

May I experience myself for what I am

May I accept myself

This next is a meditative prayer that formed gradually while I was trotting up and down arroyos in the foothills near our old home in northern New Mexico. It is influenced by Lakota practice, but out of respect for those traditions, which are not mine, I do not use them directly.

I pray for all I am related to throughout the world

for I am a part of all life

now, through the past and into future time.

I pray for the earth, surrounded by the great directions,

the eastern white light of the new day

the yellow warmth of the south

the west’s returning red

the sacred night of the north

and the rooted earth below me

the flowing sky above

and here the center of the world,

all embraced by the greatest spirit of God.

I pray for all life and living spirit

I pray for the creatures of the earth,

for the winged beings and the sea swimmers

for the crawling creatures and for those that run

and for the beings that stand upright on the land

I pray for the flowing waters, the surging mountains

for the open plains and bounded valleys,

for the seas and the oceans of air we breathe.

I pray for my family and the love flowing through us

I pray for the friends I have known,

for all the communities I am a part of

and for the nations of the world,

that peace may become their way of life.

I pray for humankind.

I pray for forgiveness from those I have hurt

and pray I may forgive those who have caused me pain.

I pray that a growing love may fill me to overflowing

through the enduring grace of God.

I pray for all I am related to throughout the world,

for I am a part of all life

now, through the past and into future time.

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Susan and Dano have presented in comments here two different ideas about isolation that I need to explore more deeply, with your help. This is hard for me to pin down alone. My mind wants to wander, to lose focus, to put itself to sleep because this gets at something I don’t want to face – so bear with me as I try to chain together a few thoughts about what is happening in the urge or the necessity to isolate.

Dano has written with crushing power about the worst times of depression when the illness flattens her under its unremitting pressure and pain. Isolation, then, is not a choice but a necessity. The ability to face others, to speak, to interact is completely stripped away.

I know that when I’m crashing into the thicket of Depression, I need to be alone. The very act of making eye contact, speaking, inhaling and exhaling have become monumental tasks. I feel contagious, as if by even being near me, others will get sucked into my mental black hole.

I know this feeling. When it hits, I can’t talk, can’t think, can hardly move in any direction. And all I’m hearing are voices tearing into my soul, full of hate and contempt. It becomes so intense I think I can’t stand living with myself for another minute. That’s when my inner rebellion begins, and I know it’s a battle for survival. The determination comes back that I’m not going to be defeated by this illness, I won’t let my mind be poisoned into wishing for death. That’s the inner struggle going on. If I don’t isolate myself to get through this fight, I won’t last long. That’s not choosing isolation – it’s a victory for survival and inner resilience.

Susan wrote in a comment here about a different state of feeling – or at least one that I see as very different. She calls it a Siren song of isolation -

I long for it when I am depressed, take the phone off the hook, don’t collect the mail, no human contact. I don’t want it. A few days into it, I long for it, but get so afraid of it…..I’ve lost so many friends over the years through this I don’t know. How can you long for something which is so toxic, but sings to you like a siren and destroys you in the end, and all your friendships and love relationships?

The Siren song is a good comparison. In Homer’s story, that song is an irresistible call to sailors passing the Sirens’ island, only to lure them to their deaths. Ulysses wants to know what their song sounds like so has his crew tie him to the ship’s mast, then seal their ears with wax, warning them not to pay attention to anything he might say or do to get them to obey the Siren’s call. So he listens and fiercely orders his men to free him and to head for the nearby island where the Sirens live. They ignore him and so he and his men survive. He has managed to outwit another of the fatal snares set for him and other travelers in their dangerous voyage. It’s a great fable for this problem.

I’ve heard this song too and have longed to give into it. But, like Susan, I know it will destroy me if I do. So what’s the equivalent of tying myself to the mast? I have no ship’s crew to turn to for help because I am not letting them get near me, but if that’ s true, I’ve already given in. I have to search back to the first moment I feel this lure, the first step I take to seal myself off. What is that? One of my best defenses against other symptoms is simply catching myself starting to accept the reality of the symptom. That’s where I have to stop and think; This is not a real state of mine – it’s a symptom of depression – shut it down, kick it out, just stop it! NOW!

That has worked when I start hearing the voice in my head telling me I can’t do anything right, I’m no good at this, give it up. I can catch myself believing that trash and yell back NO, shut up, you have nothing to do with me! And recently, I’ve been able to catch myself falling into another trap, especially when I’m writing, trying to reach deep inside, express real feeling. I suddenly get foggy in mind and feel the need to sleep, or I actually start nodding off in front of the computer. I know damn well that if I give in to that, I will wake up not refreshed but sluggish and more depressed than ever because my defenses are down. What I do instead is jump to an alternate activity, something more mechanical that can absorb my attention for a few minutes – or I get outside in the air, pace around, look up at the sky, respond to the simple life of the day, feel a part of that, come alive again. Then I can go back to writing, truly refreshed and energized.

What, then, is the first thing I do to isolate myself? In my case, as I think about it now, I stop talking to people, everyone, focus on my own thoughts, which suddenly take so much attention that I hardly notice anything or anyone around me. If I’m already alone, I cut off every possible way I might be reached. Turn off phones, computers, don’t respond to any knocking at my awareness, withdraw into a mesmerizing passivity, staring into a rich nothingness that offers a hope of inner peace.

This depression’s disguise as a pleasant condition promising restoration. It is inducing me to step aside from a troubling day, take a little rest, a little harmless rest. I can see myself soaking into the feeling, like bathing in perfect water. I want to slide under the surface and glide, glide smoothly in comfort and tranquility, the medium I flow in offering no resistance. I long to become one with it, feel myself dissolving in its warmth, wanting nothing more than to disappear as I descend.

But in the midst of that I can suddenly see I’m heading into a kind of death, either literal destruction or the emptiness of a total blockade against everything in my life. Panic sets in, and I am desperate to back away. By then, though, a lot of damage has already been done, especially to those closest to me, who have so much support to offer until I shut them out without a word.

All that I know how to do is to catch myself at that first sensation of yearning for the comfort of solitude. If I can recognize that, call it what it is – another symptom, not a real need of mine – I can see around it, avoid it, reach out to my loved ones and simply say, here’s what’s happening, I’m trying to fight, bear with me. Get a few words out, let myself hear a voice responding and so move farther and farther away from the fake call of a deadly Siren.

What do you do to break out of this trap?