Waking at Mount Bonnell Covert Park
Perspective.
Some mornings you wake up ready to conquer.
Some you hit snooze.
This morning, snooze, and now as I sit here wondering where my typing fingers will lead, I want to cower. We're talking about mental illness this morning as the sun rises, something that hits really really close to home.
Maybe we're all sitting in the dark, and we're just waiting for those bursts of light to show us the way. Maybe those bursts of light are people or books or a song, something, as Kafka says to "Break the frozen sea inside of us." Maybe that darkness is what society calls mental illness, masking as so many names we don't know and maybe we'll never know or fully understand.
When I hear that word, "mental illness" I immediately think "padded cell". I think oh my gosh these people need to be locked up and who are they and how are they creeping around in our society and we don't know who is really crazy and... then I remind myself that mere depression is a mental illness and attempting suicide is caused by mental illness... and who defines mental illness anyway... and when and why has it ever been a word associated with padded cell and not something that is conquerable,
beyond medicine.
For these things are in my blood because what happens to our family members happens to us, it's a part of our dna. So we must ask ourselves then, are these things not conquerable? Are we destined? Are we mere subjects of destiny? Are we victims of the events, the people our ancestors have become? Will we become them? Are we them?
Do we control our fate? Are we victims of failed collaborations or events for which we might even be unaware?
Are we nature?
I find it so fascinating that Jesus says to the people who are about to stone the harlot woman "Let him who is without sin, cast the first stone." Perhaps a man could only say that if he first understood the gravity in those words.
We are human.
I am no psychologist but I know this...
We are born into this world in circumstances beyond our control.
If this is truth, and the only thing we have control over in this lifetime is our actions to those events, then...
Perhaps mental illness in our society today that is diagnosed with pills and more pills and more pills and more pills ~that we don't even know how they are really affecting us~ is a mere lack of willingness or understanding to look at the cause and not the symptoms of a bigger problem. Maybe we're looking at a tree that is warped that has wrapped itself so perfectly around a fence, but we're all blind to that fence. We just see this marred and mangled tree... and that invisible fucking fence is so prevalent to the person who has become that tree that because of circumstances beyond their control they have had to grown around, so to speak, things they have been perhaps forced to deal with, but hey-- they're still alive and that fence has become a part of their story.
We all have our demons. We have secrets. We have our fences that we have been forced to grow around, to grow through, to become one with. So many of us still, have been blessed to lead lives where those life-defining events are fewer. Thank the Universe for this.
Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone.
Next time we're looking at something we don't understand, let's hold up that mirror, that great big beautiful mirror that you are human and I am human and there is only this lifetime to ask questions.
Let us ask so many questions. To the doctors and nurses that shape who we are based on a mere few words scribed on a page for mind-altering, life-altering prescriptions. To the restaurant owners that create menus that fill our bellies that become fuel for our thoughts and actions and ultimately feelings. To the mothers and fathers that don't just make love but create a life with their actions,
that raise a generation that won't just accept the status quo rather
show them
how
to be
curious.
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars." - Jack Kerouac
