Finn’s Lorica of Brighid

For me, prayer is an important and powerful connection to deity. Perhaps it is a remnant of my Christian upbringing, but I have never had any doubt that when I close my eyes and speak with my heart the gods are listening. Prayer is communication with deity; most often, we pray in appeal to the gods, but often, I find myself just speaking to Brighid, saying hello, good night, asking her what she thinks of a particular idea. And sometimes I hear her, especially when I find myself on the other side of irony. Her laugh is a sparkling chime in the morning.

These days, I certainly appeal to her more often than anything else–I always turn to Brighid to bring me back to myself when I find myself sinking into personal darkness. Brighid is the light that guides me back.

But mostly, I pray to her, I speak to Brighid, as a protective, energizing and strengthening act of devotion. By the act of daily invoking her, and her relationship to me, and my part in her plans, I ground myself in a true spiritual reality and purpose.

Every morning, as I place my Brighid pendant around my neck, I say this prayer, based in large part on the famous “Deer’s Cry,” or Lorica of St. Patrick. 

 

I rise today

Through sun on spring,

Through wind in the forest,

Through song of the mountain.

 

I rise today

With poetry on my lips,

With healing in my hands,

With strength in my heart.

 

I rise today a poet of Brighid;

I walk today on her path.

 

May she always guide me further, and I never wander.

 

Absent Again

Life gets in the way of things all too often. However, in this case, it is more like un-life that got in the way of my posting here. Depression makes everything unbearable, but for me, it makes writing, and writing anything of substance, absolutely agonizing. It’s responsible for my not winning this year’s NaNoWriMo, for missing posting in both of my blogs for far too long, and for making a mess of most of the fiction I had to write for a class.

But I did write, and I suppose that’s the important thing. A writer who is not writing, a storyteller who is not telling a story, is absolutely miserable, and empty. The more I write, however painful it is to begin or to go back and redo, the more sane I am. The more I write, the more solid I am. I am no longer a zombie or a drifting, hungry ghost; I am creating something of substance. I am creating my own body, and my own life.

Depression also sucks away my attention to read anything for very long, or to sit still. Depression makes me restless and scared, like an animal trapped in a cage who fitfully paces for weeks and then collapses from sheer exhaustion. But the more I read, the more stories I hear, the less hungry I am. The more still I become. Words ground me, fill me. Even if I remain a ghost, I am a ghost carrying something. I have something to hang on to.

I am slowly getting back into my enjoyment of reading and long, quiet hours of stillness.

I hope to be more devoted in both my spiritual practice (which includes updating this blog) and my daily life. I hope they will one day become one and the same, and no longer divided. Slowly, day by day, I hope to become myself again.

 

The Dark Night of the Soul

From the same-titled poem by St. John of the Cross, translated and introduced by Mirabai Starr:

 

“The dark night is not an abstract notion on some list of spiritual experiences every seeker is supposed to have. The dark night descends on a soul only when everything else has failed. When you are no longer the best meditator in the class because your meditation produces absolutely nothing. When prayer evaporates on your tongue and you have nothing left to say to God. When you are not even tempted to return to a life of worldly pleasure because the world has proven empty and yet taking another step through the void of the spiritual life feels futile because you are no longer good at it and it seems that God has given up on you, anyway.”

“The emptiness of the dark night is a yielding emptiness. It is an emptiness that gives way to the fullness of all possibility, which manifest as limitless diversity, which circles back to emptiness. It is the impossible-to-translate sunyata of Buddhism. It is the living substratum of all reality. It is rooted in quiet. “God spoke only one word for all eternity and he spoke it in silence,” says John, “and it is in eternal silence that we hear it.”

 

I said somewhere once that I was afraid my depression would be turned, by other parties, into a spiritual disease instead of a medical one. I’m still afraid of it now, because I realize now that there can be a spiritual element to this disease as much as there is a medical one. 

I write my Story through my own suffering–I write myself through my own lack of self.

 

Reaching Out

I know I’ve been writing a lot about my dealing with depression in here lately, and I don’t want people to think this is all about that. It’s not–it’s a blog about my spiritual journey, but that inevitably means depression, and dealing with it, is going to be a subject frequently mentioned.

Don’t worry, I hope to start getting into more philosophy soon–I think I’m going to be reading Montaigne or Hume next, and that should provide lots of heady thoughts.

But first, I’d like to talk about what it means to reach out.

 

Signs From Above (?)

Lately, it seems that the insect world has been trying to help me through my depression, mainly because lately, my depression has been very bad. 

But it seems that someone’s looking out for me. The other day, after I had a particularly bad day, I went to the window in frustration, and nearly had a heart attack when I saw a firefly drifting outside of my window, blinking slowly.

Fireflies are not as rare in the city where I live as the city I grew up in; but they are rarely seen in the parks, let alone on a busy street. And yet, here was one right outside my window. Its neon-yellow light flickered lazily, and it too drifted lazily around the window, as though it were waiting for me. It drifted up and up towards the dark night sky, blinking softly, and then it was gone.

I couldn’t speak, or think. I was captured by this swift, lightning-bolt (har har) beauty–a pure moment out of a day of so many muddled ones. I had been feeling so alone that day, so alone right up to that very moment, and instead, was surprised by a light blinking in the dark, lonely, but not alone.

It is true, and I tend to be skeptical of omens anyway, that the firefly was very probably pure coincidence. But the sight of it filled me with joy, and hope, and that alone is enough to accept it as an omen, and to at least have faith in beauty.

On another day, I found my faith in beauty again. While reading in the park, a butterfly, a Red Admiral in fact, landed on the book of my page just as I was thinking again about how miserable it would be to go home again. He landed on the page of my book, and stayed there for a good five minutes. I nearly stopped breathing: another omen, in a very short amount of time? We just stared at one another. I accidentally flicked a page, and he was gone again. My heart was completely lifted out of the dark place it was in.

I spent much of the evening there, watching out for him. He landed by me again–three times on my page. I couldn’t take my eyes off him and I couldn’t help it–I teared up. I was amazed by such beauty.

After a while, he swooped and flittered around the area of the bench, going further and further away, like he was trying to get my attention. Finally, he landed on the bench again on the opposite arm, and I took it as a sign to leave.

Later, I discover that these butterflies are quite social, particularly in the mating season, and tend to choose territories to flutter in while waiting for a potential mate. This is confirmed when, on another day, I find him fluttering around a group of tourists who are sitting on the bench. He even landed on someone’s head, causing nearly everyone to squeal and take pictures.

But I still went back and tried to sit on his bench because even if he is no omen, or an animal messenger, he lifts my spirits, and brings me joy. He landed on my book again several times, and once more, later, on my knee. I was always overjoyed to see him, The last time I saw him while leaving, I saw him dancing in the air with another–a female perhaps. This vision, and his visits with me before (random coincidence or not) continues to remind me that we are never alone in this world, no matter what we may think.

Berlioz, as I named him for my own amusement, was yet another powerful, though gentle reminder of just how blessed I really am. Butterflies, and fireflies, may or may not be traditional symbols of Brighid, nor could my experience have been legitimate visitations from messengers, but I know that whenever I see one now, I will feel Her there with me–a sign that I am never alone.

 

Mysteries of Fire and Water

The mystery of fire and water, as I have mentioned before, is a prime mystery of Brighid, and one which I work with often and find a great deal of resonance with, particularly when it comes to dealing with my own depression, for very often, my depression manifests itself with both “fiery” and “watery” associations (and stories), and both of them are mixed together.

The fires of emotions very often first rise up through me as anger, as fear, as anxiety and as an “active” despair. It is often said that depression is really a numb anger. I agree there is a significant element of repressed or unmotivated anger in depression, just as there is anxiety and what I call active despair, but I don’t agree that anger is the root and soul of depression.

For the waters of numbness, lethargy, profound melancholy and passive despair flow through me and rob me of any emotions at all, including anger. This is the point of the darkest depression, the one that is very often internalized, hidden from the rest of the world. It is more difficult to hide, but I hide it with more fervor than I try to hide my anger or my anxiety because I fear what happens to me.

I fear this water more than I fear the fire, for the fires can be put out. But the water waits there always, and I know that it sits down, down inside me, deep, dark and silent, and I know that no matter how happy I will ever be, the water will always be there inside me.

If depression is caused by a mixture of biological and environmental events, perhaps the fiery emotions I feel are a transformed response to those external events beyond me, while the watery despair I inevitably succumb to are rooted deep in my own biology. Taken separately, these two manifestations of my mind and body provide no real answers, or relief, from the disease. Acting upon anger or anxiety, or working only to release those emotions and externalizing them instead of internalizing them, may provide temporary relief, but do nothing to address the heart of the problem. And working to address the heart of the problem, the psychology and biology of the depression without working to address the very real pain of depression and not working to relieve it is a dangerous catalyst into even worse depression. You may discover the “root of the problem” but you have nothing in place to help you deal with the actual problem itself.

 

 

Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy

Another quote post, though brief–despite being able to write several books about it, about how it relates to me, and so on, I’ll save commentary for later. I’ll also probably be posting something later tomorrow about my grandmother’s visit this past weekend, but for now, I leave you with this:

From Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy by Eric G. Wilson

“Melancholia pushes against the easy “either/or” of the status quo. It thrives in unexplored middle ground between oppositions, in the “both/and.” It fosters fresh insights into relationships between oppositions, especially that great polarity life and death. It encourages new ways of conceiving and naming the mysterious connections between antinomies. It returns us to innocence, to irony, that ability, temporary, to play in potential without being constrained to the actual. Such respites form causality refresh our relationship to the world, grant us beautiful vistas, energize our hearts and our minds.”

“Suffering the gloom, inevitable as breath, we must further accept this fact that the world hates: we are forever incomplete, but fragments of some ungraspable whole. Our unfinished natures–we are never pure actualities but always vague potentials–make life a constant struggle, a bout with the persistent unknown. But this extension into the abyss is also our salvation. To be but a fragment is always to strive for something beyond oneself, something transcendent–an unexplored possibility, an unmapped avenue. This striving is always an act of freedom, of choosing one road instead of another. Though this labor is arduous–it requires constant attention to our mysterious and shifting interiors–it is also ecstatic, an almost infinite sounding of the exquisite riddles of Being.

To be against happiness, to avert contentment, is to be close to joy, to embrace ecstasy. Incompleteness is the call to life. Fragmentation is freedom. The exhilaration of never knowing anything fully is that you can perpetually imagine sublimities beyond reason. On the margins of the known is the agile edge of existence. This is the elation of circumference. This is the rapture, burning slow, of finishing a book that can never be completed, a flawed and conflicted text, vexed as twilight.”