Heartsickness & Transcendence
What can we hold up as evidence of meaning and value in a person’s life? What can we point to and say, “Here! Here is something worthy, something important, something with inherent value” — ?
I spent the day yesterday embroiled in various states of depression and profound sadness. I kept wondering what the point was of my life, what the point was about striving so much for this or that level of excellence, what the point was of caring so much. No matter how much I care, I can’t shake off this intense feeling of loneliness which is existential in its crux. I guess my time of being a hermit is coming to a close? Am I supposed to move toward this society now, the one that appears so savage and insane? People seem like cartoons to me, as if they are not really real, but shadows or props, like actors, maybe, in an elaborate TV show that’s all around us. People seem fake, their lives seem fake to me. And this gets me wondering — is my life fake, too? Are we all just holograms pretending to be alive? Pretending to have emotions we can’t deal with and relationships that are impossibly human, too human to bear? How long can we say, “we’re only human” in response to the casual savagery that defines our species?
Just as I wrote this last sentence, I thought of this little old lady who sits on her porch in my neighborhood. She has her hair coiffed in the old style and she’s really nice. She smiles at me and Georgie when we go on our morning walks and always says hello in a very pleasant manner. I think this memory popped up as if to remind me that there are genuinely kind people in the world and that I should remember that side of the story, as well. And I do. I really do. In fact, I don’t think I could bear to stay alive any longer if it weren’t for these truly random moments of transcendent beauty that pop up (with the sweet flourish of a highly adept candy-gram girl) to push me out of my depressive lethargy and remind me that a smile is enough to lighten up the heart and give it a moment of respite.
But the question remains: why should my heart, or yours, require respite? What is inside the heart that’s making it so heavy? This is the million-dollar question, isn’t it? This is why millions of people are on drugs, or overweight, or in therapy. In a recent course on Ecopsychology that I helped teach, the big question under scrutiny was the question of place. Where are we now, what lands are we occupying, where do we stand, and why are we there? The question of place and the question of personal identity seemed to be linked and the course was helping white people, especially, to come to terms with an ancestral heritage of savage inequity in place and identity. The logic was that if we were connected spiritually to the land we stand upon, if we acknowledged the history of the land and the peoples to which it once belonged, the land would then perhaps support our being on a deeper, more mysterious level so that when it came to carrying around the burdens of the heart, we would have the assistance of the ground beneath our feet. The earth itself would help us to bear the heavy burdens of life, which are often so strange and so uncertain, that only the trees can understand them.
It sometimes feels to me like too many of us are lost in these holographic lives, floating above the surface of the land, barely touching the earth, barely touching the deeper dimensions of the soul and feeling as a result unmoored, drifting around like ghosts, chasing after meaning and value but not finding either and therefore accompanied continuously by a pervasive sense of depression and angst. This is precisely the condition that Zen Buddhism describes in many texts. The apparent reason is that the ghostly wandering and the sense of being separated from the reality of life is generated by the never-ending thoughts of the “mind road.” The mind is like an engine that produces thoughts all day long and consciousness is drawn to these thoughts and mistakes them for real life, for blood and torrid smells and the blowing wind in the leaves of high oak trees.
I’m noticing how this kind of reflection is having an abating effect on my depressive anxiety. Indeed, my depressive anxiety looks like a little kid hearing an inspiring bedtime story while sucking her thumb, safely tucked in bed under the starry lights of one of those kid projectors. “So there is a way out of this?” she’s thinking. The way out is to cut off the mind road and merge with the reality of life which is made of bones and blood, of wind and rain, of starlight and savage wars, and the ephemera of the transcendent beyond. It’s all real and it’s all smeared with blood. There is not one inch of land on this planet that has not been drenched with blood at some point in its history. Our own bodies are swimming in blood. There’s blood in the bone marrow, even. There’s blood in the trees and in the way the wind blows through the leaves helping to tell windy tales about the history of the land they both stand upon.
Maybe if I was less ambitious I could be satisfied with the wind and with the blood. Isn’t it enough that the wind blows and the blood flows? What else must there be for me to feel satisfied? What makes me think that a heavy heart is not a naturally occurring human inheritance, one that we all get, wrapped up in a bow, on our fiftieth birthdays? I’ll let Edgar Allen Poe explain why all the world to me seems on the verge of coming undone:
“To one entering the room, they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities; but upon further advance, this appearance gradually departed; and step by step, as the visitor moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong current of wind behind the draperies — giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.”
