Depression isn't about feeling sorry for myself

Depression

1.
My other mind
the one that I'm out of
sometimes
plays tricks on me
scribbling catastrophe
and conspiracy
in every fold of gray matter
until I can't fight It anymore
and I begin to believe
the unreasonable.

2.In this home,
not my home
resides the bear,
who is I, but not me
filled with stone-cold
polar resentment.
Fiercely caged in
an infrastructural landscape.
Is it the bars
or the space between
that lodges me,
a paws length away
from freedom?

There's No Place Like Home

I'm currently teaching poetry once a week to fifth graders who were affected by the immigration ICE Raids in our town. Tomorrow's topic is home. What is it? Where do we find it? How can we define it wherever we are? Many of these children and/or their families face deportation in the next few months. They are, for sure afraid and the message I want to leave with them is by Rumi: “Fear is the cheapest room in the house – I’d like to see you in better living conditions.”

I started thinking about metaphors for home, my own writing about home. Here are two examples:

Single Person Dwelling

I am many roomed
and every year there are fewer corners,
less closets, softer lighting, and ceilings that vault and vault.
Songs whisper through my walls:
cotton lullabies that rock me to sleep,
velvet green ballads, safe in their loneliness, and sometimes
the floors quake with a Barbra Streisand sing-along.

Laughter surrounds my walls
like tree frogs in the garden. Someday, soon, I will open
the back door and those leggy frogs will spring into the kitchen,
fill the sink and we will all croak and chuckle contagiously.
But for now I am content in knowing they are just outside the window.

A formal entrance, the front door, opens to an orderly white.
Exacting angle of an ottoman and precise tilt
of the picture frames may cause you to pause and ask,
“Unapproachable? Cool? Elegant, but stiff?”
Do not hesitate.
Do not pause. Please, come in.
Turn my rooms upside down.
Leave your garden footprints on the China Silk carpet.

Yes, the toothpaste is neatly rolled from the bottom up.
Yes, spices and books are alphabetized, magazines fanned
on the coffee table, and socks color-coded in their drawer.
But, poems fly across rooms in random chaotic scribbles.
Furniture is shoved aside when the need to dance arrives.
Passions stack up for the weekend
when a mere word like “mellifluous” can extend the day
into a ‘never get out of my bathrobe’ flurry,
a tigerlily tangle, an elegant mess.

Orchids bloom in steamy bathrooms, but die on precious shelves.
Can you smell the wet carnations, vanilla, violets, and bread?
Do you notice the ladybug on the light switch -- in my many rooms?

In my many rooms there is moonlight that slides in
through partially opened blinds; moonlight like memory
that lays in blue-white streams over elbows, wrists, and fingertips—
moonlight like memory that cannot be held.

On Writing

"The goal of writing is to keep a beleaguered line of understanding which has movement from breaking down and becoming a hole into which we sink decoratively to rest."

~ William Carlos Williams

Where Does the Poetry Come From?

On a Sunday morning

after coffee in bed

and a book

and a word like mellifluous

tickles my ears and tongue.

I do not know this word,

this mystery,

so I explore the dictionary

then think of honey

and remember

those Bit-O-Honey candy bars

that we kids bought with dimes

from the general store at Balsam Lake.

I remember

those northern lakes

many years later

when I went skinny-dipping with a lover

I think of bitter honey

and I write it down.

Honey

Mellifluous memories
harden like taffy candy
Cracked on the sidewalk
Bit ‘o Honey
Shattered bit ‘o love

Tongue the edge
hot lick saliva
Seal you back
soften in my belly hold
Barely

Lurid butter-yellow pieces
trapped in paper folds
Wrapper cracks
and barely holds

I long for the wholeness
that never was
But you were bought, already
already
broken

Reflection onf Thich Nhat Hanh and Negative Seeds

Between My Neighbors and Me

I begin with me,
my garden, my internal landscape.
It's all I can do
with these autumn leaves
that bluster over neighboring fences and walls,
leaves of anger, resentment, jealousy, and fear.
Walls that raise more walls,
fences that separate us
from our humanity.

It's all I can do
to try, keep trying every day,
every way I know how
to blow those rotting
leaves away
in this season before death.
And yet,
damned if those leaves
don't just drift right back,
silently in the night,
to my side of the fence,
while I sleep,
not trying so hard,
not trying at all to resist the wall
or rake away the leaves.

It's the walls, really
that must come down,
the fences between us,
that divide us.
It's not the leaves of emotion
that spread seeds of negativity.
It is the walls
that must come down
so we can gather all those leaves,
the leaves that make us
who we are,
into one bountiful pile.
Then and only then
can we leap, weep
and laugh together
beneath our shared oak tree.


-Wendy Thompson, 9/15/2007

September 11 and six years of still breathing

Today I decided to fast in memory of 9/11 and also to support the forgiveness of debt. I've also been studying Thich Nhat Hahn's practices and Buddhist breathing practice of breathing in the negative and out the positive.

I inhale
debts of the world.
How can we owe anyone anything?
I exhale the generosity of God, who has
given all.

One of Hahn's Gathas I've chosen for the week is:
"Waking up this morning, I smile.
Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.
I vow to live fully in each moment
and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion."

It is so hard for me to do this, both wake up smiling and live fully in the moment. I am such a planner and spend much time in memories, and my depression makes waking difficult.

Know I
am breathing in
reluctant wakefulness
of morning. Know I
am breathing
out dreams.

Know I
am breathing in
latte's chicory scent
I am breathing out today's
long fast.

Staying present and noticing on the drive to work is difficult and actually dangerous:

I lean
softly into the curve
of highway 405. I am easy
easy like Sunday morning that plays on FM103.
Drive time.

An organic
produce truck rumbles overhead.
I am present and aware of the barreling
Swift Movers and police sirens coming from behind
my exit.

I am
nearly cut off because
I drifted into memories of MayDay
and turning away from my intended 6th Avenue
destination, work;

and instead
turned onto North Burnside
to meet my lover for kisses.
How do I stay present between the past
and future?

Breathe in ~
purpose in the office.
Yet, work isn't all there is.
So I breathe out freedom to just be
simply me.