Struggle with Depression

Posted on April 5, 2012 by jenny

(Written in September 2010)
Lynelle said she had a good visit with her friend Diane, who she hasn’t seen for a while.  She said Diane had lost both breasts, but was glad to be alive.  Lynelle said she had a great attitude.  I came back here feeling very ashamed.  I’m cowardly and whine to all my friends about what I’m up against, because I don’t want them to judge me for not getting things done.
So this morning I’m feeling pretty bummed out.  Really not seeing a good reason for keeping going.  I’m having waves of that totally hopeless feeling where even something like cooking rice, which I have to do regularly, feels like an awful chore.
Then I think I’m NOT glad to be alive.  Diane is lucky.  She had a big scare and it brought home to her how precious life is.  But she can enjoy it.  I’m up against brain chemistry.  I’m not glad to be alive.  I’m going along putting one foot in front of the other — why?  why keep going?  I’m not facing something open and obvious, like breast cancer, or the death of a loved one.  I’m up against this nightmare invisible destroyer that takes the color out of everything.
Can I love this person who’s having such a hard time?  Who’s whiny & cowardly?  No, she’s not whiny & cowardly, she’s just having a very hard time in a way that most people don’t understand.  Can I think of anything good about her?  She does feel compassion for anyone who’s having a hard time.  She works to bring compassion to any situation where it doesn’t naturally arise in her.  She loves the world, the world of nature, and wants to see it used with reverence and respect.  She loves the human community when it is creative and celebratory and honest and perceptive.  She gets angry when people contribute to the ongoing disaster, through making money the bottom line, and not caring what damage their actions do as long as it’s far enough away so they can ignore it.  I don’t hate those people, most of the time I feel compassion for them because I know they’ve been badly damaged.  Is this enough?  Is it good enough reason to go on living?  I don’t know.  I keep asking god to tell me what he/she/it/they want me to do with my life, but I haven’t got any answers.  God, if you want me to keep going you’ve got to show me a way to change this brain chemistry.  PLEASE!!

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Guidance

Posted on April 4, 2012 by jenny

(Written in December 2010)
Dear Guides & Guardians, I’m feeling a little blue.
    There, there, Little Jenny, it’s right to mourn that so much of your life’s energy was wasted — at first just trying to survive, then trying unsuccessfully to heal from wounds that were deeper and more complex than you had any idea of.  It’s right to mourn that so much of your creative energy went into starting projects that never got finished — not because you are lazy, or unable to persist — but because you got derailed by PTSD.  But you did in fact push through on a number of projects: your book, Neskaya, your house.  And you have done major healing of your wounds.  Dear Little Jenny, I’m so grateful for your creativity and persistence.  Though it’s right to mourn that so much got lost along the way, it’s important to remember that the main purpose of your life is healing and you have been doing that.  Your creative projects are part of your healing process.  The many things that did not get finished are like the seeds that get scattered and never sprout.  The energy that created them is not wasted.

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Small Scale Diversity is Healthier than Huge Monocultures

Posted on March 29, 2012 by jenny

I’ve been rereading EarthDance, and I also picked up the Nature Conservancy’s magazine.  I read about a project in Northern Australia (Fish River Station) where they are giving a big chunk of land back to the Aboriginal people to manage.  Before the European settlers came, the Aboriginal people created a patchwork of small controllable fires on the open grassland.  This mosaic burning produces a landscape that is resistant to big fires because the burned areas create firebreaks.  The following year, the burned place is rejuvenated, providing food for a variety of wildlife.  When the European settlers came, they created huge “Stations” (Fish River Station is 700 sq mi) where they planned to graze large herds of animals.  But because the harsh climate alternates between lots of rain and then no rain at all for months, this system didn’t thrive.  It’s very similar to monocultures which are vulnerable to unusual weather or large numbers of pests, versus diversity planting which has strength and sustainability.  It also makes me think of the way women in India preserve the forests through a system of learning about the trees in great detail, going in to harvest only what they need for food, fuel and medicine.  This knowledge has been passed down from generation to generation.  The result is a forest that is sustainable instead of the flooding and erosion caused by clear-cutting.  A similar story is of farmland that’s irrigated by a system of small ditches and earth dams that can be created or removed by one person with a shovel.  Again, the people need to understand how the system works in great detail, so they will know exactly how long to water a particular patch under a variety of conditions, and also how to adjust things so the water is distributed evenly in a way that works for the whole community.  (I couldn’t find my original source for this information so I Googled, found one such system in Bali, also the entry in Wikipedia is somewhat helpful.  Very frustrating. It’s probably in some book I read, about some entirely different subject. Sorry folks.)

 

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Elisabet Sahtouris

Posted on March 28, 2012 by jenny

Elisabet Sahtouris is one of my heroes, along with Vandana Shiva and Wangari Matthai.  I have a large picture of her face, copied from a magazine, on my refrigerator.  It’s been there for years.  People often ask me who she is. 

She’s a systems biologist who taught at places like MIT, but left academia and went to live on a small Greek island to study nature directly.
She wrote a book called EarthDance, which tells the story of life on our planet from the first one-celled animals to our current adolescent crisis.  (Will we commit suicide, killed by our own waste?  or mature into responsible stewards of our living planet?)

Elisabet is able to discuss complex topics in clear, simple language.  Did you know that the first great pollution disaster on our planet was the oxygen crisis?  The early atmosphere was probably made up of methane, ammonia, and carbon dioxide.  The first one-celled creatures used CO2 as an energy source, oxygen was the byproduct, the waste.  As more and more oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere, it was lethal to the one-celled creatures, who died off in great numbers, or hid from the toxic atmosphere by living underwater or in mud.  And that would have been the end, except that the one-celled animals had the capacity to evolve rapidly under stress.  Some evolved to use oxygen as an energy source, and it’s so much more efficient that they could do new things, like make elaborate shells.  The shells accumulated on the bottom of the ocean, were pressed down by later sediments, and then finally hardened and were lifted above the ocean to become the mark for the first geologic age, the Cambrian.  As a geology student, I knew that the Cambrian started with the first fossils, that is when early soft-bodies creatures began to make hard parts (shells, bones, etc.)  No one told me about the oxygen crisis.

Because these early creatures have retained the capacity to evolve under stress bacteria rapidly develop resistance to our antibiotics.  It’s also why, ultimately, genetically modified organisms will fail, possibly taking us with them.  (This is already happening, but you aren’t told about it in the corporation-owned media.)  Nature is far more intelligent than we are.  We don’t see it because we are blinded by the 5000 year old Patriarchal myth that the earth is dead raw material and meant to be exploited by men (women being included as part of the earth to be exploited.)
There is so much from her story that I would love to share, but I’m only going to do the beginning, and refer you to the webpage:

LESSONS IN LEARNING TO LIVE IN THE FLOW:
Sarah James, enduring the heat of Brazil, was beating her huge caribou-skin drum to punctuate her own words as she told us about her Gwich’in Indian culture in the northernmost inhabited village of Alaska. I’d met her in Oregon the year before; this time she had made the trip to Rio de Janeiro for the Earth Summit of 1992. She described her people’s lives before contact with the white man. Their relationship with the caribou was sacred and they were endlessly grateful for this wonderful animal that gave them everything they needed and wanted: food, bone and skin houses, boats, snowshoes, utensils, tools, clothing, drums, flutes. Their lives were rich– rich with family and community, warm homes and clothing, plentiful food, much time for ceremony, music, dance, story telling and laughter, much reason for celebration and thanksgiving for their bounty. But when the white man came to them, he saw people living in 40-deg.-below-zero weather with only caribou to provide for their meager sustenance. He called them poor “savages.” Sarah beat her caribou skin drum, sang her welcoming skin hut dance song, and smiled broadly as she shouted, “Well, then let’s keep Alaska savage!”

Sarah was making a clear statement of preference for her traditional life of simplicity over the modern world that brought her people real poverty along with the terrible dependencies of debt, alcoholism and the glue-sniffing that has destroyed her own son’s brain. She was also making the point that wealth is a matter of perception and priorities.

The story I’m going to tell here about my ever-transformative lifestyle has two threads interwoven: one is my decreasing dependence on material possessions and all that their acquisition and maintenance implies, the other is my increasing dependence on inner guidance and more generally on my spiritual life, without which the first would be neither fun nor rewarding. And having fun is a very important and central part of my life!

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Invalidation can be Devastating

Posted on March 25, 2012 by jenny

(Written in January 2010)
I’ve decided to post this entire story, hoping it will help people understand how to really be helpful to a challenged friend.  It illustrates the danger of well-meaning people who have their own agenda, and aren’t really paying attention to the person they are trying to help.  At the time this happened, the idea that I was getting too much nurturing and not being challenged, was unbelievably ridiculous.  I was emotionally and psychologically an infant who had been badly hurt.  I was totally challenged just surviving the day. The danger of suicide was real.  Notice that it took two therapists and two knowledgeable friends to help me out of it.

Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, I’m feeling pretty bummed out.  I asked Paula for help — I really need to do some grief work — but she took it upon herself to tell me that I should get out of this house that’s full of depression energy, and go see people, etc etc.  When I tried to tell her what I needed she kept making me wrong.  At the moment I just want to die.  I just can’t do whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing.  Please help me.
    Dear Jenny, it’s really unfortunate that Paula chose to do that.  You were right about needing to do grief work and she was not helpful at all.  That’s very painful when you are still having to work at reaching out for help.  Of course an experience like that will make you feel like not trying again.  But the truth is that you need more help than you currently have.  And you do need to keep reaching out.  Call Beverly Decker and invite yourself for lunch.  Make some choices.

next day:
Woke up feeling bummed out.  I had asked Paula to help me by listening to me read.  But she arrived with an agenda — she’d decided I was getting too much nurturing and not being challenged.  So she started in saying why did I stay in this depressed house and not get out & be with people.  Well, that might make sense if I’d been in the house for a month, but I had been out quite a bit, twice to Neskaya recently.  When I tried to explain what I needed and what worked for me, she made everything I said wrong.  Her attacks were actually quite stupid, sort of generic, didn’t really address what I had just said, or perhaps intentionally misunderstood, because she’d also shift the ground.  I got angry and she was delighted, but in fact it wasn’t the kind of anger that helps.  I wish I’d thought to ask her if she’d be willing to tell me what she heard me say.  I’m not going to play that game again.  I realize I was vulnerable because there was a recent time when she did listen to me read from Resource and validated what I said and I came out feeling much better.
Fortunately I had a telephone appointment with Karen.  I told her what had happened, and she validated my side of it.  Then I read some pieces out of resource and cried and she validated me.  Later I called Beverly and had a similar conversation.  I think Karen and Beverly helped me from going way down into the pit, but the rest of the day was tough.  The thought “I really don’t want to live much longer” went through my head a number of times.

third day:
Woke scared.  What Paula did really devastated me.  I’ve been wanting to die a lot.

I had a good talk with Elizabeth.  Can’t remember now what we talked about.  I did tell her about Paula and she validated my distress, and I read her the passage from my journal about the work with Ingrid.  She said my voice changed, got fuller.  It was fun to get in touch with that anger.
The session with Caryn was very painful.  I was feeling frustrated and discouraged.  I cried a lot, and wanted to smash things, I hit my leg with my fist, I wanted to smash my head against the wall and feel the bone break.  Caryn kept telling me to slow down, to titrate the energy.  She stayed with me and kept a hand on me so I’d know I wasn’t alone. At one point, when I was still angry, I wanted to kill Paula.  Caryn said that my “whole being” had resisted Paula’s invalidation.  That’s when I could feel that “whole being” reconstituting itself.  She said just as we build the resource incrementally, so we rebuild the structure of the self after such devastation. I finally wanted to hide so I curled up on the floor and held the cushion in front of me.  Then I was finally able to relax, and everything shifted.  My body got softer.   I spent the last half hour on the table.  I could feel a shift in my feet and Caryn said the whole body expands and contracts.
This very painful session with Caryn at least turned it around.  I was feeling better when I left, but by the time I got home I was wanting to die again.
Fortunately, Lynelle came in late in the evening to tell me why what Paula did was so damaging.  She said because of that time when Paula stayed here and cooked for me, she was very much in a mothering role, so she has a mother’s power in my psyche.  So when she invalidates me like that, the result is devastating.  No wonder I was wanting to die.  Lynelle pointing this out helped enormously.  I stopped wanting to die and have shifted to an adult comforting a frightened — actually traumatized — baby.

There is a book called “How to be a Help Instead of a Nuisance” by Karen Kissel Wegela, which I highly recommend.  It talks about the importance of really being aware of what’s going on for you. In a nutshell: “We want to remove suffering when we see it, but our desire to remove suffering is mixed up with our desire to be comfortable and not bothered by someone else’s pain.” p80  This is exactly what was happening for Paula when she was trying to help me.  It just got too uncomfortable being around my pain, she needed me to get better faster, so she made me wrong for being in pain.  Because I was in a baby state, I had no adult resources to deal with what was happening, my only resource was to want to cease to exist.

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Gaviotas: a Village to Reinvent the World

Posted on March 23, 2012 by jenny

“Gaviotas is a village of about 200 people in Colombia, South America. For three decades, Gaviotans – peasants, scientists, artists, and former street kids – have struggled to build an oasis of imagination and sustainability in the remote, barren savannas of eastern Colombia, an area ravaged by political terror. They have planted millions of trees, thus regenerating an indigenous rainforest. They farm organically and use wind and solar power. Every family enjoys free housing, community meals, and schooling. There are no weapons, no police, no jail. There is no mayor.

“The United Nations named the village a model of sustainable development. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called founder Paolo Lugari the ‘inventor of the world.'”

These words are from the website of the Friends of Gaviotas.  When I first read the book, which was published in 1995, I had a great surge of hope.  The book made it clear that this is how people were designed to live together.  It ended for me any belief that people were naturally warlike.  One of the things I like best, the book doesn’t talk about it at all, but I detect the presence of Spirit. They first planted the Caribbean Pine trees because they were the only thing that would grow in the impoverished and almost toxic soil of the savanna, the huge eastern plain of Colombia.  The trees grew well, but didn’t reproduce themselves which was a point in their favor.  Years later, when the oil crisis was forgotten and no government agency was funding projects for solar pumps, electricity, etc. the Gaviotans had to find a way to make the necessary money to keep going.  It turned out that the pine trees exuded a resin that was in demand for paints and varnishes.  They had not weeded the trees which had been recommended, and found that their trees began producing sap earlier and in greater abundance than in other resin farms.  One of my favorite parts in the book was the massive effort, 24 hours a day for 24 days to plant a million trees.  Gaviotas continued to thrive, and one day someone went back to the earliest plantation and found that the original rainforest was regenerating under the trees.

Chelsea Green Publishing has released a 10th anniversary edition of  Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World with an afterword by author Alan Weisman

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The Shipwreck Principle

Posted on March 22, 2012 by jenny

Yesterday’s post reminded me of another event where an angel came to my rescue.  It was my senior year at Wellesley College.  Three friends and I decided to take a canoe trip down the Charles River to see our friends at Harvard in Cambridge.  We rented the canoes at a place that was just upstream from a dam.  One of us had scoped out the scene earlier, and found that we could carry the canoes around the dam easily.  So we started paddling down the river, off on our great adventure.  I can’t remember what we took for food, probably fruit and sandwiches, perhaps even beer.  But alas, no one had looked at a map.  The Charles River is probably the longest way you could take from Wellesley to Cambridge.  The Charles had many meander bends between Wellesley and Dedham.  We spent all our time wandering back and forth.  Occasionally we’d go under a bridge and see a town sign.  The first one said “Needham”, the second “Dedham.”  Great!  we were advancing on our goal.  But then we saw one that said “Needham” again.  Consternation!  At first we had traveled between green banks, where the back yards of expensive houses extended down to the river and trees hung over it.  Later, as the meanders became quite constricted, we found ourselves turning back and forth in a large meadow of ripe grasses.  They were a beautiful golden brown in the hot afternoon sun, but we hadn’t seen a house for a long time.  It seemed like we spent hours paddling one way and then the other.  Time was going by and we were nowhere near Cambridge.  Finally we came to a place where there were small houses near the water, even a dock sticking out with a small boy on it.  We paddled over and asked him where we were.  He shook his head and started up toward one of the houses.  An older man came down, looked at four hot and tired Wellesley girls in two canoes, and said, with a twinkle in his eye, “Shipwrecked?  I’ve been shipwrecked too.  I’ll help you out.”
So the question is: what can you do to thank the person who helped you besides a hearty “Thank you!”  Usually, someone who is able to come to the rescue is further along the path, bigger or richer or with more resources, what can you give them?  What you do is help the next person you come across who’s shipwrecked — if in fact you do have the resources to help.  If you don’t, you can just sit with them, or find somebody who can help.
Our rescuer loaded the canoes onto his trailer, and allowed us to call our friends who came and got us.  The man who rented us the canoes was so happy to see them he didn’t give us any trouble.

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Tuesday’s Angel

Posted on March 21, 2012 by jenny

I put on my BOGS knowing the trail would be muddy, and set out with Bella for the Fox Hill trail.

The entrance to the parking lot was so muddy I got stuck.  So I locked the car, put Bella on her leash, and ventured forth to find someone at home who would let me use their phone to call AAA.  Across the street was a trailer with two trucks in front of it. I went around them and saw a young man on the porch.  I told him I was looking for help, my car was stuck in the mud.  He said he’d be glad to help me, and invited me into the trailer while he washed the grease off his hands.  He apologized for the mess (but it was the mess of construction, not of laziness or depression) and explained that he had just bought the trailer and was fixing it up.  While he was washing his hands he told me he was medically retired, that a boiler had fallen on him, broke a number of vertebrae and blew out the discs.  He managed to heave it off him (“I was bigger then, I could bench press 300 pounds”) and crawl to a phone (of course his legs were paralyzed).  They said he wouldn’t be able to walk, but here he is.  I congratulated him on his courage and persistence.  He poo-poohed “courage”.  He pointed out that he had re-done the floor with beautiful reddish wood.  He also had to show me the bathroom which he’s completely re-done and was clearly proud of.  Of course I exclaimed.  He said his son had helped him with some of the work, and that his mom & stepfather lived 2 trailers away.  He moved here so he could help out as they got older.  He had shortish red hair with lots of body, was wearing a cross dangling from his left ear, and had a cross around his neck of semi-precious stones.  He said “God’s been good to us.”  Then he went to get the tow rope and it took him a while.  He really moved very slowly.  He said it was the medication.  Finally he found the tow rope, backed his truck up close to my car and attached it.  Told me to drive in reverse and we went out very sweetly.  I honked twice and we both stopped.  I was able to back the rest of the way on my own, and parked on the side of the road.  I thanked him & started getting ready to take Bella for a walk.  He came running back — “I want to give you something” — and handed me a metal oval with a cross cut into it.  I said “Thank you!  You were my angel today.”  He said “Yes, there are angels all around.”

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Guidance

Posted on March 15, 2012 by jenny

Dear Guides & Guardian Spirits, I’m pretty bummed out and VERY TIRED.  I don’t know if I’m tired because I’m depressed, or depressed because I’m tired.  Just getting through the day feels like a chore that takes everything I’ve got.  Please help me.
    Dear Jenny, we love you.  We love you a lot and we are sorry to see you having such a hard time.  We remind you that you are still holding a vision: of peace, justice, sustainability, even as you go through the day working to get out of bed, working to cook breakfast.  Feeling so tired does not stop you from doing the important work which is invisible.  It’s true that when you have more energy you can “get things done” and feel the satisfaction from that.  Do NOT look at yourself with judgment and imagine that if you only pushed yourself harder…   No.  You are truly tired.  It doesn’t matter why.  You are doing the very best that you can, except when you try to push yourself to do more than is possible.  You are truly a person with a very good heart who wants to do what she can to make life better for everyone.  And you are doing this, even as you go through your day: hauling firewood, paying bills, washing dishes.  Yes, it would be much easier if you were living in community, but as things are now this is not an option.  This is not your fault.  It’s one of the major dysfunctions in American culture at the present time.  Relax, dear.  It’s OK.  You don’t need to do more than you’re already doing.  Remember that deep within you is a seed of goodness that wants a healthy happy life for everyone.  This seed of goodness is in direct connection with the creator of the universe.  It’s very much OK to rest.  Remember that we love you very much.

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The War on Women

Posted on March 14, 2012 by jenny

Spent a lot of yesterday reading At the Root of this Longing; reconciling a spiritual hunger and a feminist thirst, by Carol Lee Flinders.  Horrified by being reminded of one mechanism that keeps patriarchy in place: that sociopaths kill women and girls they don’t even know.  They are a kind of “police function” that keeps the rest of us women “in our place”, keeps us from feeling safe in a strange place at night.  We’re seeing this more openly than usual in the Republican War on Women.  Women who dare to speak out, take charge of their own sexual lives, protest the ongoing war, speak up for children…  are being insulted and marginalized by presidential candidates.  Furthermore, it’s the idea that women and the earth are not sacred and to be respected that allows us to destroy the natural environment.
Flinders quotes “a traditional Sanscrit teaching …   That is a well-governed state where women, adorned with all dress and ornaments, unaccompanied by men, can move freely and fearlessly in its roads and lanes.” (p196)  (from the Epilogue to the Great Indian Saga, the Mahabharata.)  By this standard, it’s been a very long time, perhaps several millennia, since any of the countries in Europe could be called “well-governed.”

Before Flinders started writing At the Root of this Longing, a young girl in her community was kidnapped, raped and murdered.  As a result, both she and her husband, who was teaching fifth grade in the same community, struggled with outrage and grief. Tim Flinders, looking at his students, suddenly had the horrifying thought that the victim could have been one of his students.  Then he had the even more horrifying realization that the murderer could have been one of his own too.  “As a teacher, he knew firsthand that ‘Richard Allen Davis is sitting right now in fifth-grade classrooms all across the country, alienated, abused, angry, helpless, with little sense of right and wrong, and with nothing to lose.’” (p213)
He goes on to say that Davis was not the very unusual case we would like to believe.  “He is part of a male culture … that bolstered his feelings, however bent they might have been, however distorted or self-serving or even irrational.  At the center of that culture, driving it, is the understanding that sex is domination and that women want it to be.  And whenever any man tells a lurid joke or rents a pornographic video or brags about last night’s conquest, we’ve done our little bit to perpetuate it.”  (p214)

Carol Flinders also quotes Mike Messner, a sociologist, who believes that boys and young men learn a “sexual script” that starts with “objectification of a woman,” reducing her to “a manipulated object.”  “Importantly, the sexual act is most erotically salient for the young man in terms of his status vis-á-vis his male peers — not in relation to his actual sexual partner.  Though she is physically present, the girl or woman, as a thinking, choosing partner, is obliterated.”  Flinders p215.  She gives the reference: Michael Messner and Donald Sabo, Sex  Violence and Power in Sports: Rethinking Masculinity (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1994) p67.
To me this sounds a lot like the psychological mechanism that allowed the Nazis to de-humanize the Jews, that allows all the so-called “ethnic cleansing” that has gone on, including the United States driving the Cherokee out of their ancient homeland.  It also sounds like a lot of the Republican candidates for government, or already in government, have been trained in the same “sexual script.”

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