Depression-sometimes it's a disease, sometimes it is a scavenger. It senses the dread, the weariness, the hopelessness, the despair, the anguish, it circles, and it finds the carrion. Your dreams, your hopes, your sense of self, your ability to see the future clearly, all the treasures and loveliness and wonderful sounds and scenes of your life...she finds it, this bird.
So what do I do? I put on a head scarf-you can't touch my mind. I wear a cloak-no pecking at my heart. I keep my eyes open-look out. I turn my head-too quick for you. I breath deep and find a change of scenery.
I will continue to try to elude you, scavenger. I will run through water, I will swim through sand. I will fly in mud and climb stairs of clouds. You will never really have me. Claim me. My mind is my own. I may always struggle with depression, with anxiety...and all the complexities tied to these "diseases". That's okay-if I can spend the rest of my life embracing and embellishing who and what I am. Not trying to escape it...
Monday, June 8, 2009
Circling...
Posted by Erin at 8:08 PM
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A poem for you...
Human Life’s Mystery
We sow the glebe, we reap the corn,
We build the house where we may rest,
And then, at moments, suddenly,
We look up to the great wide sky,
Inquiring wherefore we were born…
For earnest or for jest?
The senses folding thick and dark
About the stifled soul within,
We guess diviner things beyond,
And yearn to them with yearning fond;
We strike out blindly to a mark
Believed in, but not seen.
We vibrate to the pant and thrill
Wherewith Eternity has curled
In serpent-twine about God’s seat;
While, freshening upward to His feet,
In gradual growth His full-leaved will
Expands from world to world.
And, in the tumult and excess
Of act and passion under sun,
We sometimes hear—oh, soft and far,
As silver star did touch with star,
The kiss of Peace and Righteousness
Through all things that are done.
God keeps His holy mysteries
Just on the outside of man’s dream;
In diapason slow, we think
To hear their pinions rise and sink,
While they float pure beneath His eyes,
Like swans adown a stream.
Abstractions, are they, from the forms
Of His great beauty?—exaltations
From His great glory?—strong previsions
Of what we shall be?—intuitions
Of what we are—in calms and storms,
Beyond our peace and passions?
Things nameless! which, in passing so,
Do stroke us with a subtle grace.
We say, ‘Who passes?’—they are dumb.
We cannot see them go or come:
Their touches fall soft, cold, as snow
Upon a blind man’s face.
Yet, touching so, they draw above
Our common thoughts to Heaven’s unknown,
Our daily joy and pain advance
To a divine significance,
Our human love—O mortal love,
That light is not its own!
And sometimes horror chills our blood
To be so near such mystic Things,
And we wrap round us for defence
Our purple manners, moods of sense—
As angels from the face of God
Stand hidden in their wings.
And sometimes through life’s heavy swound
We grope for them!—with strangled breath
We stretch our hands abroad and try
To reach them in our agony,—
And widen, so, the broad life-wound
Which soon is large enough for death.
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning~
Thank you, Elisha, that is a beautiful poem, and EBB is one of my favorite female poets.
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