The World is Too Much With Us



The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

 William Wordsworth

Blindness to the mystical beauty of the world. Deafness to the sounds of our natural souls crying in desperate need. God! At least the pagan is suckled. Poor stupid Americans (OH, poor stupid me). So impoverished, and so unaware. Piling up mounds of things and sitting on top, alone, declaring how great we are and how everyone should be like us, while our children and neighbors are dying at the base of our sordid heaps, all for the lack of love, poetry, and the ability to perceive the beauty of natural life.

Too many of us, I guess. Too many magazines, and tvs telling us that we aren't good enough, unless we buy, buy, buy their products.

But that isn't why I am depressed. I am depressed because my involvement in the world of getting and spending is smothering me and I rarely even notice. Only when I look back at what I have just said or done and realize how false, how shallow. The only strength I have is the strength to see and tell the truth. If I lose that I am just another drone. Just another money worshipping capitalist selling her soul and integrity for cash.

You can interact in the real world and preserve the Pagan within. But it is risky. You lose your soul a little bit at a time, and each time you give up a piece of it you think, "well it is only a small part, and I still have more left" until there is nothing left at all.

But....this soul, for want of a better term, is renewable, you can be so far down in the depths that you can't see the dark for the dark, when a glimmer, just a ripple in the texture of the darkness will remind you the light on the waves and you can find again the feeling of standing at the feet of nature open to all that pours in and humbled by your tiny part in creation and exalted by being in nature at all.

Tarot Card for the day-An imaginative and otherworldly dreamer, selfless and empathetic. Inner duality, balancing loving tolerance and righteous anger. Kindness and compassion resulting from dedicated introspection. Mysticism and uncanny intuition.

Why do I get these depressions? Chemicals, heredity, chronic emotional stress, powerful events that happened to me long before I was able to understand or cope with them, all of this, none of this? At least now I know what is coming. At least I can recognize the signs. One of which is a much more acute sensitivity to poetry and a preference for the really melancholy poems.

When I was in my thirties, following the premature and mysterious death of my mother, I entered a depression I couldn't get out of. I would have gone on forever, or found some way to kill myself, when the stupid cycle of self destruction was broken by a word from a teacher. The teacher was my son's, his word was "depressed". He said that he recognized in my son the signs of depression.

Intolerable thought! I could extinguish myself, but I could not allow my son to be hurt. This pushed me into curing myself, because I knew from experience that Mothers often try to cure their children of diseases their children don't have. I mean to say that depressed mothers take their children to the doctors for cures to diseases that don't lie in the children but in the parents. Do you understand? Children are so dependent on their parents. Is it any surprise that the parents illness is reflected in the child's behavior?

So I thought. And so I entered the mental health system and persisted despite all of the temptations to give up. Until one day someone finally talked me into taking Prozac and everything changed.

I can remember sitting up in bed one morning completely surprised because I didn't feel like dying. I felt ...happy? hopeful? ready for anything? I found resilience that I hadn't had ever in my life. I found peace. I found energy. I was converted. I never wanted to go back. I bored my siblings, children, nieces, and husband with my constant amazement at the transformation.

But nothing stays good forever, it wouldn't be natural, and I have always wanted to be natural. So I usually stop taking the medication, eventually. This time it is Wellbuterin, and I don't know why I stopped. I don't experience side effects from Wellbuterin and it leaves me with a self discipline I don't normally have. And it doesn't interfere with my dreams or sexual response. But I did stop.

It isn't too bad. I will start again. Be sure to work out regularly, get enough sleep, don't drink and someday soon, maybe next week, I will wake up a feel like my soul is reborn and christ has risen and the green man looks down upon the Spring. 

--
Reposted by dovie devine to Feeding the Baby at 4/08/2006 08:43:00 AM

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