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FOR THE SOUL, DEPRESSION IS INITIATION
SOUL AND DEPRESSION
For the soul,
depression is an initiation, a rite of passage, a trek deeper with richer meaning than clinical care connotes. Melancholy or sadness are not pathological terms treating depression as a problem.
Melancholy invites imagination in the stirrings of the
soul - that in-between state that is neither matter nor spirt.
Six hundred years ago, melancholy or sadness was identified with the Roman god, Saturn. To be depressed was to be "in Saturn." Saturn was called the black sun, for in Saturn's darkness there is brilliance, distilled by depression's gift of melancholy.
Pausing to ponder points of despair, doubt, depression
helps touch the sadness, coldness, dark shiver of sorts.
Shrines - imagined or real - are sites where one can light a candle even in the Black Sun of Saturn's brilliant sliver of light or cold splash of iced sadness. Illuminatng one's issue, problem, desolation with a candle dims less the overwhelming sense of sad feelings.
Withdrawing - I can only afford an hour of down moments with a holy hour to reflect in illumination and a candle lit - invites me to my soul, my center. Consolation covers me then, gradually growing.
Depressing moments move me away from the center of architecture's circle or square where community forms and gathers. Your depressing, or my own funk, seeks an outpost, a garden, a Shrine, a place for passage that is away from the center. There, in my solitude, on the fringes of the central post, others, myself, look at sadness.
The Black Sun shines.
PAIN IS PART OF LIFE - BUT MISERY IS A CHOICE.
l. m. ventline
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