Random Thoughts

Some time ago I assembled a book pairing photos of beautiful places I’d visited with quotes collected over the decades.  Needing a new book to grab me, I peeked in for some inspiration and found these by Kathleen Norris, from Dakota: A Spiritual Geography:

        “A door that opens onto the still point where my heart is…Of course it is silence that makes 

listening possible.  The willingly embraced desert fosters realism, not despair.”

        “A person is forced inward by the spareness of what’s outward and visible in all this land and sky.  

        The beauty of the plains is like that of an icon…what seems stern and almost empty is merely 

open, a door into some simple and holy state.”

So I borrowed her most recent:  Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer’s Life.  Amidst the thicket of difficult stories and her religious thinking, I found some good pointers and nuggets.  In discussing the widespread use of antidepressants, she sites Kathryn Schulz, author of the New York Times Magazine article “Did Antidepressants Depress Japan?” who quotes a Japanese psychiatrist:  

“Melancholia, sensitivity, fragility — these are not negative things in a Japanese context…It never occurred to us that we should try to remove them.” (p 271). Huh!

Soon after this, Norris was writing about the desert monk Evagrius, and this popped out:  “…both tears and the psalter itself are the monk’s essential tools for living a grounded spiritual life.” (p 277). That sounded promising, but I was soon disappointed.  Those tears were about self-recrimination — facing one’s guilt, sin, and need for reform.  

I prefer Melanie Klein’s take on sadness in the depressive position, where the ups and downs of life aren’t polarized into good and bad — sadness, loss, grief simply come along with love, joy and the rest.  Duh…Inevitable.  It brings to mind Judy Collins’ rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”:

I’ve looked at life from both sides now

from win and lose and still somehow

it’s life’s illusions I recall

I really don’t know life at all

At nearly 73, like the Velvet Rabbit, I've gotten pretty real with tears shed and fur rubbed off.  The lyrics that felt so true a half century ago no longer apply.

And here’s Judy looking more gorgeous than ever with her snow-white hair...of course we'd all look better professionally done up for publicity photos!