HEALTHY ATTITUDES (DEPRESSION IS A LIAR)

I was reading an article where I came across the statement that sorrow makes life rich and turns us toward an appreciation of all things meaningful.  Oh my goodness NO.  Sorrow does not make life rich.  If it does, it isn't sorrow.  It is something else.  Disappointment maybe.  An unfulfilled wish or dream that, when it dies, leaves room for something else, something just as good or better.  But not Real Sorrow.

In "Give All to Love" Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) says "when half gods go the gods arrive."  When I was young and a boy I loved broke up with me, I repeated these words over and over.  He was a "half-god" I decided; he had to be.  Someone better would  appear, and did--the person I still love.  So as bad as I felt about the break-up, I knew it wasn't the end.  The future was still limitless--only he would not be in it.  

When real sorrow occurs we are more likely to feel that our life as we knew it is gone.  If someone has hurt us to the core, that fact never changes, whether we forgive and reconcile or not.  The devastation may recede but it remains an immutable fact.  The repentance, the forgiveness, the reconciliation may make our life richer, but the hurt itself or the sorrow over it does not.   

If someone we love dies young, real sorrow is the only response. The death will never be right.  If someone we love is mentally ill, real sorrow is the only response.  Their transformation into someone whose personality is borderline, hurtful, fathomless, does not make life rich.  Not theirs, not ours.

At the same time, sorrow is not despair.  Sorrow can abate, as we become better at living with it's cause, like a person who has lost a leg becomes better at being a one-legged person.  Or a parent can becomes better at living with the loss of a child. What caused the sorrow may change.  Sorrow does not kill resilience and it does not kill us. We know we don't actually die of our broken hearts because they can break again.

Sorrow can be the most appropriate response.  It isn't the liar.  Depression is.

This summer two well-known people took their lives:  Kate Spade (d. June 5, 2018) and Anthony Bourdain (d. June 8, 2018)--celebrity designer and master chef.   (Post:  HEALTHY ATTITUDES (ULTIMATE THINGS).  We feel sorrow over that.  Since then the rise in suicide rates has been in the news. Like a rise in poverty or in the numbers of uninsured, behind each statistic is the suffering of a precious man, woman or child. Today I read of a 9 year-old boy found by his mother--this is almost too hard to write--hanging in his room.  It was the 4th day of school and the bullying from last year had begun again.  These three succumbed to more than sorrow; they succumbed to despair, the wall with no door.

The poet Longfellow (1807-1882) said, "Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not." Some people say that everyone gets depressed sometimes, but everyone just doesn't talk about it. 

In response to the recently publicized suicides, many people wrote in to the New York Times about their own encounters with not wanting to live.  None of them said that this kind of sorrow made their lives richer. No.  What they did say is important for everyone to hear.  They said, "Depression is a Liar."  

Depression made them feel trapped, made them think that no one cared, that ending their life was a good solution, even reasonable. This made me think about the post I wrote about loving ourselves (Post:  Fall in Love with Yourself for Valentine's).  There is not a person alive whom no one cares about.  Not one.  Strangers care.  God cares.

The Universe or their own inner being cares. If we feel the lie that no one loves us, we can still love ourselves, love our world, love the trees and stars and sky, love the universe, love God.  Love all of these long enough to realize that yes, "Depression is a Liar."  It never tells the truth. 

Then what?  Therapy, prayer, medication if necessary, seeking the ways to nourish our souls, living for the moments we can't put into words.  Setting our intentions for a peaceful mind, a loving heart, a healthy body.  And being prepared to do it again and again.  

NOURISH YOUR SOUL AFTER A RAIN

Amanita Jacksonii

This is a truly beautiful mushroom with a brilliant red cap.  They are sprouting all over the woods. It is not poisonous, but some look-a likes are deadly.  So we can't eat them! I'm pretty sure I have this labelled correctly, but . . . . this is my first foray into identifying wild mushrooms.  I am way beyond my comfort level.  I could have gotten them all wrong or all right, no telling.  Still, don't you love trying to learn something new? Gills, spots, stalk, cap, bruising, spores--all part of a specialized vocabulary.  Plenty of web sites to help.

 

We've had so much rain in North Carolina that the fungi are exploding.  The amount of rain, in fact, is rather alarming.  So are the fires in California, the melting ice in Glacier National Park, and the grieving mother Orca holding her dead calf for 17 days and 1,000 miles.  It all makes me more than a little nervous.  I'm trying to do my part.  But the rain has definitely brought it's own beauty.  Some friends saw the sprouting mushrooms first when their headlights hit a cluster.  Since then I've been spotting them everywhere, in every shape and size.  I love it! Look at the one below at 7 inches!  And the little thumb-nail sized one.  We must have a hundred of those!

Amanita Jacksonii

The Amanita Jacksonii is usually solitary, but sometimes occurs in scattered groups. Doesn't that description sound more like an animal than a plant?  The Russula, below, is a very complicated genus, with more than 750 species I learned.  Wikipedia says that "Russula is mostly free of deadly poisonous species, and mild-tasting ones are all edible."  Well, that kind of sounds like I'd have to taste one to know, and that makes me nervous too.  I'll have to learn more. 

Russula Mushrooms

The one below is edible, at least it is if I've identified it correctly.  Chicken of the Woods.  Obviously tastes like chicken to some people.  We have a lot of Chicken of the Woods on fallen trunks and heavy branches.  

Chicken of the Woods

But the Northern Tooth fungus is not edible.  It's a combination shelf and tooth fungus.  Since it is a parasite, it causes the central core of a living tree to rot.  Then a strong wind will blow the tree over.  Not surprisingly I found this fungus on a trunk on the ground.  

Northern Tooth Fungus

The next one I've nicknamed Pancake.  It looks like a stack of these with maple syrup and butter would taste just right.  But I'm not going to experiment!  It's enough fun just to hunt these out and photograph them.  Because we have white-tailed deer, who apparently can eat at least some amount of even a toxic mushroom, the ones around our house keep disappearing after a few days.  This too is a subject I'd like to find out more about.  

The ugliest mushroom I found is apparently nicknamed Old Man of the Woods.  Not sure why old men are the butt here.  The ones in my life are as handsome as ever.  But here it is.  It grows alone on the ground with a layer of woolly scales on the top.  

The other treasures in the yard that the rain has helped are the heaps of wild mint and the spreading carpets of moss.  Both now come right up to our patios. Wild mint after a rain smells so wonderful.  

Chasing down these mushrooms and finding more and more squishy new moss is a silent adventure. So much of nature is noisy--the chattering of the birds, the deafening cicadas, the deer snorting, the boisterous foxes that were under our deck (Post:  "Make Your Life a Little Easier, Especially In Your Head"). Finding mushrooms is calming.  They're as beautiful as flowers.  They grow silently out of matter we often think of as dead--thick layers of fallen  leaves. But the natural compost is rich and good.  Pico Iyer (b. 1957), British born travel writer, essayist and novelist of Indian descent, says, 

It's the open spaces in any life, I suspect--

the moments when you lost yourself--

that make for happiness, peace, and clarity.

Each day, by the time I have taken all the pictures of mushrooms that I want, my body is relaxed and my mind quiet.  I've been totally absorbed.  My mind isn't trying to be still; it just happens. 

HEALTHY ATTITUDES (MARRIAGE)

 

Linda Hock, "Set for Two," Mattie King Davis Gallery, Beaufort, NC

What makes a healthy marriage?  How much independence should spouses give up in order not to hurt one another?  These questions are not meant for abusive or unequal relationships.  They are meant for relationships where both partners want nothing more than comfort, peace, companionship  and love and want it to last a lifetime.  

It doesn't have to be in a marriage.  But it is a marriage where people take vows, make promises, become a new entity.  It is a marriage that creates duties.  Some are absolute duties--the duty of fidelity (emotional, spiritual and physical) for example.  If it is a Christian marriage the partners are "made one in Christ."  A marriage or other committed relationship brings the obligation of no secrets.  This does not mean every moment of the past has to be deconstructed.  But it does mean no present secrets.  No e-mails that the other cannot read.  No conversations that flourish in private.  No intimacy in word or thought with someone else.  In other words, no one about whom one partner has to claim, "We're just friends."  These are by nature betrayals.  And, no self-deceit that allows such a relationship outside the marriage to exist. 

The best way to avoid these situations is to be honest with ourselves and open with our spouses.  If we want to have coffee with someone and we know (or should know--that's the hallmark of 'no self-deceit') that our spouse will be made uneasy by this, we don't do it.  To ignore our spouse's preference out of a need for independence is devaluing our spouse.  It jeopardizes something of paramount importance (a lifetime relationship) for something less, whatever that lesser thing may be. 

Whenever we choose something that has even the potential of causing discomfort to the person to whom we are committed, we are making a statement.  "I  want something (or someone) other than you, even for just a few hours. I'm happy to maintain our status quo but only if I can do what I want. I have moved beyond the friends who strengthen our marriage. I want [admiration, a feeling of youthfulness, the buoyancy of a 'special friendship,' whatever . . .] even if that bothers you (or would if you knew)."  Otherwise why not ask,  "I was thinking about catching up with so and so.  Are you free to do that with me? "  Now that makes a healthy marriage!  

There may still be questions as to why you want to catch up with so and so.  But at least nothing will occur in private.  Boundaries will be set.  After all, private is the same as secret.  And if our spouse says, "No, I don't want to come and I don't want you to meet with him/her either," that is something we should respect.  Friends should be friends of the marriage.  Friends of the marriage are healthy.  Of course, friends of only one of us can easily become friends of the marriage.  That happens all the time.  But if one person doesn't want their friend who is the same sex as their spouse to be the friend of both, if he or she raises some obstacle, that it itself is tell-tale. 

I've been reading the memoir of a friend of our marriage.  A friend who lives in South Africa, was important in the struggle against apartheid, and who is now a widower (watch for the publication of I Beg to Differ by Peter Storey).  He has written about his marriage, 

     "No marriage is without struggles; the law of self-disclosure makes it  impossible to hide our self-truths no matter how adept we think we are at disguising them.  But much depends on whether the frailties thus exposed are grasped as opportunities to find 'a more perfect union' or as reasons to cut and run.  I won't traverse the sore places which I, more than [my wife] created, except to stand in awe of how much more ready she was to learn and grow from them."

Ah, do not we all want to have and to be such a spouse?  Would not our lives be easier, more God-pleasing, more honest and sincere if we used every opportunity for a more perfect union? I am drawn to the statement, "The law of self-disclosure makes it impossible to hide our self-truths no matter how adept we think we are at disguising them." My husband and I have been working on that.  Not surprisingly, it makes for some amazingly wonderful times.  I want to thank God for those.  Thank you, God.  Nina Naomi