Well it’s back to the battle today

“It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.” —Dr. Maria Montessori

we try out some Montessori

I’ve been reading a lot about Dr. Maria Montessori (Italy, ca. 1900) and Montessori-based education. I’ve written about it here before. Although it can feel overwhelming, this sense that an entire child’s future rests on my ability to do parenting “right.” I read an article recently that questioned that thinking, that said that we should be thinking of educating children more as being a gardener, rather than being a carpenter. Basically: not worrying about it so much. Not thinking of parenting as a verb, as something that you do, but as a relationship. We shepherd our children, we cultivate the ground they grow in, but we’re not actually trying to shape them, as we would a board, into a specific design.

Yet: my struggle is that I feel like there are many things being done wrong by parents today. There’s this sense in the article that most parents do things more or less right, and that most children end up more or less okay. This assertion I question. I, myself, have struggled for a long time with something I hesitate to call mental illness, because it feels more common than that. It feels literally ubiquitous, in the sense that this cosmic unease—or angst, or a kind of low-level anxiety—is everywhere. Everyone has it. I’ve written about my struggles with depression, and I’ve written about my struggles with disordered eating.

It is, of course, that eternal question of nature versus nurture. When things go wrong with our children we want to blame nature, but when things go well, we think we’re doing a great job.

And I feel like many things are going wrong with children these days, and not just children, because children grow up to be adults, and adults and children together make society. There is much I see wrong with our society right now, much I believe needs to change. Maybe if we focused a little bit more on our children, on the ways in which their needs are and are not being met (or maybe I say so because I happen to have a preschooler) we might see some changes at a larger societal level.

I just hunted online for my possibly apocryphal article (which, I believe, really did make the case that the kids were going to turn out okay), and it turns out that the research is actually from a book by Alison Gopnik titled The Gardener and the Carpenter.  Maybe I heard about it on my new favorite (that’s a stretch—I have so many favorite podcasts right—but I wish to God they’d do an episode about Carl Jung) podcast, “Hidden Brain.”

It turns out that Alison Gopnik makes exactly the point I’m trying to make, much better than I could, about the problems with the carpentry method, and the gardening method that she supports is akin to Montessori.

Referring to the carpentry model, she says: “the main harm is that it makes the process -- the life of being a parent -- anxious and difficult and tense and unhappy in all sorts of ways that are unnecessary. And I think it makes it that way for parents, and it makes it that way for children… the carpentry story is one where you're so concerned that the child come out that you're not giving the child the freedom to take risks and explore and be autonomous.”

Even though children of carpenters can be considered more successful: “in some ways, they're doing much better. They're achieving more, they're less likely to take risks, they are less likely to get pregnant or to use drugs. But that goes with a kind of anxiety -- high levels of anxiety, high levels of fear …that is what you would predict from the carpentry story.”

So, Montessori. Although whenever I mention the word, especially to another mother, I find my listener’s eyes immediately shut down: already they’re hearing, “You’re doing it wrong. Do it this way instead.”

Which, in short, is what I am saying. But I’m not saying: worry more about how you’re parenting. I’m saying: trust your children to follow their own path. Prepare their environment, make it safe, and then get out of their way. Don’t worry about whether or not they’re doing the right thing, but trust that what they’re doing meets their current developmental need, whatever that is.

I find it so difficult to put this essential Montessori principle into words. It is, as Dr. Montessori wrote herself, the “secret of childhood,” but the more I learn about it the more I see these principles borne out by research again, again, and again, not just for children, and not in work that uses Montessori terminology. It seems to be not just the secret of childhood, but the secret to happiness, to contentment, to joy.

#

Take, for instance, the idea of focus. That particular intense concentration that children use in order to grow, to explore, to learn to do the things that they need to do in order to be complete human beings. The focus that a baby has when she is learning to crawl, or walk. It is one of the things that initially drew me to the practice, all the blogs with moms showing pictures of their children with what I now call Montessori face: a look of intense focus. Of inner drive and determination.

independent baking

"We cannot know the consequences of suppressing a child’s spontaneity when he is just beginning to be active. We may even suffocate life itself. That humanity which is revealed in all its intellectual splendor during the sweet and tender age of childhood should be respected with a kind of religious veneration. It is like the sun which appears at dawn or a flower just beginning to bloom. Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life.”  --Dr. Maria Montessori

I’ve begun to think of those moments when my daughter is in deep focus as sacred. To interrupt her, to ask her if she needs to drink some water, or to teach her how to construct a tower, or to say we’re leaving for the library— any of these things interrupt the neural pathways that she is building, the pathways that she will use for the rest of her life when she is deeply immersed in something invaluable to her.

In short, it is flow. I take for granted that you’ve read Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow? Or that, even if you haven’t, you know what I mean? Flow is that right-brained state an artist enters into when he is painting, or a writer when she is writing, or a violinist when he is practicing. Full immersion into a timeless eternal state, where one may as well not be in one’s body. Again and again, in study after study, in book after book, I read about flow as being the one essential element to happiness. People are happy in their jobs when they can find flow. In their lives, when they have a hobby that allows them to slip into that state. That old saw “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is about flow. I keep reading self-help books, and they constantly refer to the concept of flow, and how essential it is to recover true contentment. (Designing Your Life is the book I read most recently that mentioned the concept.)

We say what we most want for our children is happiness, but really we deprive our children of the concentration that brings it, every chance we get. When they’re born we immediately pack their playrooms with every possible brightly colored electronic gadget that sings and dances, with rotund jovial cartoon animals that never occur in life, with screens and noise and color and sensation—anything to distract them from the horror of life— that must be what we really believe, right?—and then we wonder why they’re unable to put their own toys away, why they can’t sleep, why they’re having tantrums, why they’re so upset. All they need is a calm, safe place to discover the world and all we offer them is distraction.

#

Take, for another, the Montessori idea of self-reliance.

Or self-trust, self-motivation, self-esteem — whatever you call it. The idea that I can know myself, deeply, intimately, and believe, at an intuitive level, that I know what is right for myself. I have come back to this self-reliance in my own life as I’ve begun intuitive eating, learning that my own body’s fullness and hunger signals can be trusted. Again, it is something that reoccurs in my reading so often, especially on the self-help websites I frequent: the number one predictor of happiness is intrinsic motivation.  (Like here!  Link: "Self-Reliance Is the Secret Sauce to Consistent Happiness")

Anyone can be shamed into doing anything. It’s a method of force, like physical pain. As soon as no one’s looking, though, we’re going to go back to the thing that we really wanted. When we become ashamed of ourselves, we lose our ability to trust our inner intuition. For a child, self-trust depends on learning that the way I want to play the blocks is a manifestation of my own imagination, and of no one else’s. It means teaching children that their desires can be trusted, and followed, and that they lead where they should go.

It’s one of the things I’ve read about early-childhood education that has the most data to back it up: this understanding that saying “good job” actually subverts children’s sense of self, because it takes away their ability to rely on their own intuition and motivation.  Link:  "How Not to Talk to Your Kids," by Po Bronson

"In short, 'good job!' doesn’t reassure children; ultimately, it makes them feel less secure." --"Five Reasons To Stop Saying Good Job," by Alfie Kohn

"Excess praise can be damaging to our children's intrinsic motivation (working just for the pure pleasure of it -- not to please anyone else)." --"Break the Good Job Habit" by Aubrey Hargis

It’s so counter-intuitive, right? Because we’re saying that what the child is doing is good! We’re supporting him! We’re telling her she SHOULD trust herself! Aye, there’s the rub: US adults, from the outside, telling children what to do, what’s good, what’s bad, instead of allowing them to discover the world for themselves.

The reason we don’t say good job is not because we don’t think our children are doing a good job. It’s because we don’t want them to be reliant on other people to think that they’re doing a good job. We want that sense of satisfaction to come from inside, rather than from outside.

"Lest there be any misunderstanding, the point here is not to call into question the importance of supporting and encouraging children, the need to love them and hug them and help them feel good about themselves. Praise, however, is a different story entirely."  --Alfie Kohn

I continue to struggle with praise as an adult, as a writer. All I want as a writer is external validation. In the form of publication, or an agent or an editor telling me that my words are worthy of reproduction. In the form of money. In the form of an audience, of you, reading these words. It’s not enough for me simply to write them, to produce them for the joy they give me, the sense I have of order coalescing as I organize my sentences. I want you, reader, to tell me “good job.” Preferably in the comments.

So. Is it any surprise that I want something different for my daughter? Something different than what was given to us by our parents, and what I’ve consistently watched other people give their children: shame, and guilt, and constant reliance on external validation.

A brief story: we toured a Montessori school (Bridgeview Montessori) and the director said that she’d sent her daughter to Montessori preschool, but then to kindergarten at a traditional school. When she and her husband figured out that it wasn’t working for their daughter, they brought her back into Montessori school.  Even in that one brief year, she had unlearned this ability to trust her own intuition, her reliance on intrinsic motivation, her own inner sense of self. The girl would bring her drawings up to the teacher and say: isn’t this good? Is this what you wanted? Is this how it should be colored?

The Montessori-trained teacher would have to answer: what do YOU think? Is it good for you? Is that how you wanted your drawing to come out? Can you talk to me about it?

That’s after one year. Only one year of traditional school.

“...it's particularly ironic because school was actually designed as part of trying to get people trained for an industrial world. In a sense, school was designed to make robots, in that it gave people skills that now robots are capable of doing. And in a post-industrial world, exactly the skills that we need -- innovation, creativity, risk-taking -- are exactly the ones that we're not encouraging.”  --Alison Gopnik

When I say I want this self-trust for myself, I mean that I’m thinking of starting remedial Montessori workshops for adults. Because I have 41 years of that kind of programming to counteract. It’s why yoga has been my heart-song for the last however many years. In yoga, the teacher says: allow your body to be what it is today. Listen to your body, the same way in Montessori we say: follow the child. In yoga, the lights are off and I’m on my mat myself, no one to impress, no teacher to show off for. Even though 99 percent of the time, I’m thinking: did that impress her? Or: oh no, I’m not doing it right.

The other crazy thing about Montessori is how it actually works. Every principle that I’ve taken seriously and implemented consistently has had unforeseen benefits and astonishing success. It works.

The irony is that articles about teenagers all essentially say the same things. Have good boundaries and agreed-upon limits with your children. (Montessori: freedom within limits.) Teach them how to do things themselves rather than doing them for them. Give them autonomy and responsibility rather than helicoptering all over the place. It seems like so much of what we’ve done with the millennial generation, all the evils that are blamed on them, is exactly the opposite: our fault. The boomers, the Karens. We’ve given them no freedom--not to go outdoors, or to get jobs, or to hang out with their friends--and instead have given them limitless addictive technology that may literally be killing their brains.  ("God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” says Sean Parker, Facebook's first president.)

"...that parent can take on the most important role of parenting, that of teaching the child to take care of himself by demonstrating how it is done."  --"When It's Time for Them To Get a Life," by Jim Fay

"An emerging adult who takes the time to deeply reflect and raise their own self-awareness about their innermost desires can be guided by them if they have at least some clues from listening to who they are and what they value.”  --"How To Help My Young Adult Find Their Purpose," by Jennifer Miller

"While some parents may think that they are helping their children to make better decisions and to fix the consequences of their actions, research has shown that parental codependency may alienate children from their own feelings and distance them from self-determination. Ultimately, parents may want to consider setting up boundaries for their children, and also for themselves."  --"Failure to Launch," by Mark Banschick

I become more and more frustrated because not everyone shares this view. The first two essential parts of Montessori education are prepared caregivers and a prepared environment, and I fear I am giving my daughter neither. I do my best, but I’ve been taught to be a voiceless people-pleaser my whole life, and despite my attempts to the contrary, I am not always finding the courage to speak up in favor of autonomy, and joy, and creative freedom, for her or for myself. Plus, these things are effing expensive. I applied for financial aid at a local Montessori school and was told that their financial aid maxes out at 30 percent, meaning if we were to qualify for the maximum, and send Sagan to school part-time for three days a week, school would still cost $5000 a year. This, despite Dr. Maria Montessori explicitly designing the method for poor children.

Then I read the data about how important Montessori is, and how it’s even more effective when children come from disadvantaged or impoverished backgrounds.  It can erase differences between income levels.  “The difference in academic achievement between lower income Montessori and higher income conventionally schooled children was smaller at each time point, and was not (statistically speaking) significantly different at the end of the study," says the National Institutes of Health.  "The Montessori Method is not only superior to all alternatives, but categorically so," says America Magazine, in this article.  "The scientific link between executive function and school success couldn’t be clearer, but the real opportunity lies in taking that science out of the lab and putting it into practice inside the homes and classrooms of our youngest learners," says Mind in the Making, a nonprofit founded by Jeff Bezos (himself a Montessori alum).  

Still, despite the evidence of these and many other studies, education in this country is not based on science. Nothing in our country is based on actual scientific data, least of all the precious minds of our most vulnerable. As a country, we continue to use outmoded, outdated, hundreds-of-years-old traditional pedagogy.

Meanwhile, I’m watching the elementary school in our community be torn down and rebuilt with a $90 million state grant. Money that would pay for 1400 teachers, or to retrofit our public school into a Montessori one, as this low-income school in rural South Carolina did.  (Link:  "Public School Makes the Case for Montessori for All.) It feels like a purposeful attempt to ignore the reality of what is involved in good education for all children. Because a well-educated populace would mean that people have the courage to become active. They wouldn’t be consumed by anxiety and diseases of despair, cocooned inside their houses and their devices. Freedom means the courage to take action: against climate change, against racism, against children’s concentration camps.

“How can we speak of Democracy or Freedom when from the very beginning of life we mould the child to undergo tyranny, to obey a dictator? How can we expect democracy when we have reared slaves? Real freedom begins at the beginning of life, not at the adult stage. These people who have been diminished in their powers, made short-sighted, devitalized by mental fatigue, whose bodies have become distorted, whose wills have been broken by elders who say: 'your will must disappear and mine prevail!'—how can we expect them, when school-life is finished, to accept and use the rights of freedom?”  --Dr. Maria Montessori, Education for a New World

I’ve been drifting along in the same stale shoes

Today I continue to struggle with the inadequacy of everything I have to say. On the other hand I continue to SAY it. It’s the human impulse, to spurt out our innermost selves, to have them validated by the other, even a fictional other that may or may not exist. You, dear reader.

Paul Simon sang: “Sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears.”

Bob Dylan sang, angry:
“Who killed Davey Moore? Why and what’s the reason for?
It was destiny, it was fate, it was God’s will.”

Isaiah said: “Sing, barren woman, you who never bore a child; burst into song, shout for joy, you who were never in labor.”

And Jesus said: “Woe is the child-bearing woman, the woman with a baby at her breast.” (Matthew 24:19)

Why? Because in loving others we always open ourselves up to disappointment, death, grief?

“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55)

Here, here. In my heart.

I find it easier and more comforting sometimes to believe that we are all just animals, and animals live and die by chance, by fate, by the exigencies of mutant DNA. Like I am driven forward inexorably not by my own force of will but by biology. Involuntarily, without a choice. Only characters in fiction can say no their biology. Us living creatures, as neurobiology increasingly suggests, are driven forward by the cortical response in our amygdala, forcing us to eat, to sleep, to mourn, to procreate despite the woes of procreation.

I feel this cloying need for other people’s approval and validation and love, but only people I deem worthy, and when I receive it I no longer deem them worthy, like Woody Allen not wanting to be a member of any club that’d let him join. This endless neediness makes human relationships so hard, and my neediness itself seems another trick of my maladaptive evolutionary brain, an evolutionary need for a troglodytic tribe, a community, oxytocin. It’s easiest to think of it that way, that I am a slightly more complex monkey, 99 percent the same as a chimpanzee, pounding away on my cosmic keyboard. My overdeveloped consciousness yet another trick of mother evolution.

Betsy Scholl, Maine poet laureate and my friend, says in her poem “Bass Flute”:
“No talk here of Meaning,
it’s all ing,
raw urge that nudges the wall between
music and noise.”

It is so, so much easier and more comforting to believe that nothing means anything. I used to question how pure materialists survived, because if I stopped believing in God and Holy Spirit and the noumenal I’d immediately off myself, because then what reason is there not to? But there is a reason, naturally, again—sheer biology. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower also drives me away from death, towards survival, all my ancestors, the force of their genetics driving me to live, live, breed, live, breathe my last breath far, far away from here.

It is so comforting that I cannot believe it. It’s too easy. Another trick of the devil, convincing me he doesn’t exist, that he doesn’t live inside of us, inside of me, in my brain, in my head, in my endless rounds of self-recrimination, self-doubt, self-consciousness.

“For the Lord has not given us a spirit of fear; but of love, and of power, and of a sound mind.”

God is here, in the love Karl and I have for each other. In the love I have for my sister, distant in grief and space and time. In the love I have for those who have died.

Today also I make bread, as I do often in winter. Mixed dry ingredients sit atop my fridge awaiting water, kneading, my careful hands. Also awaiting gluten, a needed ingredient for a primarily whole-wheat recipe I’m trying, which requires additional gluten to obtain a light, airy crumb, as opposed to the dense, doughy breads enriched with oatmeal and eggs and milk I tend to bake. It’s funny to me with all the hype about gluten-free that I’m waiting to make bread till I can find a place to buy extra gluten, which is, after all, just the protein in wheat. My mom used to always add an extra tablespoonful to her bread-machine recipes. Sonia and I used to joke around, when we went to the vegan cafe near her house, that we’d order our squash mac-and-cheese “with extra gluten,” but here I am, waiting around for extra gluten.

The gluten is the protein that forms the architecture of the bread, inside which the yeast bubbles are able to solidify, grow, lift. The gluten is in the flour, milled from grain, grown from seed that each summer again sprouts. Winter turns to summer, snow melts to rain, the green fuse drives the germ to awake, to send forth its budding head. Jesus, of course, is our bread, the bread of life, and perhaps the Spirit is his gluten, allowing the God who lives within to bubble and grow.

Each day layers on the next. Again I grieve. Again I surrender. Again I pray: give me today my daily bread.

Ice dance

My baby nephew Stephen Andrew Henry died seven weeks ago today, after ten weeks of life.  I have been fighting the urge to use words to reconcile myself to his death because his death is irreconcilable.  Writing about it feels futile, as does everything else.  Words are become powerless.

“It’s all one,” said Keats.  “We keep on breathing.”  Or we don’t.  Keats didn’t, at 26.

My nephew didn’t, at 71 days.

Someday I won’t anymore, you won’t.  It’s not just the knowledge of the surety of death that this has brought home to me, but how asinine are most of my pursuits.  I want to hold on to that crystal clarity I found in the days following his death, the purity of love I felt then, in honor of him.

My intention to live only with hope from that moment on.

But it infects everything I do and write now, how God allows bad things to happen to good people, how the problem of evil is the only problem that matters, how death is a living breathing presence behind each of our backs.  And that makes all my inanity seem less important, all the ephemeral photographs of a New England summer.

“A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted.”

All that’s left is an empty shape, an outline, a blank space, and if we heal then that ragged hole will be gone too and we’ll have nothing left of him.  But words are the only weapon I have with which to fight the darkness.

Art Spiegelman, Maus

Riverside

A picture from the archives, February 2012 in Aroostook County, during a beautiful winter walk

The cold descends.  Today the high is not forty degrees, which is all right.  I keep thinking about my quest, in college, to believe that all weather is beautiful.  In its own way, of course.  When I think about that first year, 1995-96, my first winter since I was three, and one of the coldest on record in Chicago—trekking a mile across a wind-bitten campus through ice to send an email in the computer lab to my parents, twelve time zones away, in tropical sunshine—maybe believing that all weather is beautiful was my one defense.

If nothing else, the weather here is alien.  As an adolescent I was bewildered by the joke that one could always talk about the weather.  In Southeast Asia, there’s nothing to talk about.  Here, in Massachusetts, in New England, the weather is a constant threat, a constant source of anxiety, an endless well for conversation.

I hate it.  I hate having to think about the weather when discussing how far to drive on a certain day, to think of adventure and excursions as being limited by condition of roads, to think about sun in connection to laundry.  I don’t want to make a decision based on weather.  By contrast, in Thailand, in paradise, it is ninety degrees and sunny every day.  The sun rises at six and sets at six, with brutal regularity.  There is no need to carry a coat, nor even own a coat to carry.

So all weather has its own beauty.  The dense fog lifting off the orange-brown of a Plymouth County field.  The cold shuddering from a sleet-filled sky.  The four o’clock late afternoon sun on a brisk fall day.

One too many mornings

A big part of me doesn’t believe, still, that “depression” exists.  According to the New Yorker:

There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it…  There is suspicion that the pharmaceutical industry is cooking the studies that prove that antidepressant drugs are safe and effective, and that the industry’s direct-to-consumer advertising is encouraging people to demand pills to cure conditions that are not diseases (like shyness) or to get through ordinary life problems (like being laid off).

Louis Menand’s article, a review of Gary Greenberg’s book, “Manufacturing Depression,” continues:

Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it’s all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains—that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one. Greenberg is critical of psychopharmacology, but he is even more critical of cognitive-behavioral therapy, or C.B.T., a form of talk therapy that helps patients build coping strategies, and does not rely on medication. He calls C.B.T. “a method of indoctrination into the pieties of American optimism, an ideology as much as a medical treatment."

In other words, “depression is not a mental illness. It’s a sane response to a crazy world.”

According to Wikipedia:

The term "depression" is used in a number of different ways. It is often used to mean major depressive disorder but may refer to other mood disorders or simply to a low mood…  The diagnosis of major depressive disorder is based on the patient's self-reported experiences, behavior reported by relatives or friends, and a mental status examination. There is no laboratory test for major depression.

Essentially, it doesn’t exist, right?  But then there are days I wake up when I am unable to move.  Not literally, of course—I can roll over in bed, wiggle my fingers—but I don’t.  I lie there and I don’t move.  I think of all of the reasons I should move, or the things I could do that’d make me feel better, but I don’t do them.  I can’t bring myself to.  I rehearse a list of things I know to do, things I know help—heat, light, reading, baking, sitting in the sun, yoga, taking a long hot bath or a shower, going to a cafe or a library—but all of them, even the thought of them, even the first step towards them, feels like dust in my mouth.  I can’t move.  I don’t even pee when I need to pee because it requires too much energy to move to the bathroom.

In an earlier New Yorker article, “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” Andrew Solomon writes about his experience with his depression:  “My vision began to close.  It was like trying to watch TV through terrible static, where you can’t distinguish faces, where nothing has edges.  The air, too, seemed thick and resistant, as though it were full of mushed-up bread.”

I know that feeling.  For me the air feels resistant like mud, or like trying to swim against a current.  Motivation is a central problem.  I can think of a lot of things that make me feel better (writing, sunlight, a walk) but it is impossible to motivate myself to do them.  Or it’s possible but I can never do it.  Or I can do it sometimes, just not when I’m in the darkness.  In the hole, the bottomless pit, that Townes Van Zandt sings about above, so effortlessly.  The old lady catches me.

“Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?” asks the Psalmist.

When I’m in the pit, pulling myself out is like trying to find pull myself from quicksand, use my own body as leverage.  It’s impossible to find any purchase.

Of course I can get out of bed.  It is possible.  It is not impossible.  And yet I don’t.  I lie in bed for hours—literally—not moving, thinking about doing something and not doing it.  Some days I can.  Some days I get up and take arms against the sea of troubles, even when it feels like moving through molasses.  Like swimming while drowning in a sea of mud.  Other days it is impossible.

In the wake of Robin Williams’s death, everyone is talking about depression, but not many people are saying anything useful.  Several times I’ve heard commentators say:  “just so we’re clear, ‘depression’ is a mental illness, not ordinary sadness or ‘feeling blue.’”  And I think:  oh, so what I have is just ordinary sadness.  Even when I’m not feeling sad at all.  Even when I’m feeling nothing inside but darkness, and heat and pain inside my head without actually experiencing heat or pain.

I’m sure Robin Williams and David Foster Wallace and everyone all thought they had ordinary sadness right up till the end.  How can we tell the difference when we’re in the middle of it?

Even Solomon writes, as he recovers, with the help of a vast pharmacopeia:  “I have felt blue sometimes, and on some days I have chosen not to work on this difficult subject…”  But how does he tell the difference?

I find it challenging to talk about, not because I feel guilty or ashamed, but because I don’t believe it exists.  I do feel guilty about my coping mechanisms—computer games and television and food—all things that other people assist me in feeling guilty about.  I feel guilty about my presence on the planet, about myself as a waste of space.  I feel “all the typical symptoms—hatred, anguish, guilt, self-loathing.”  But I don’t feel ashamed of the presence of the miasma itself because I don’t believe in it.

It’s also difficult to talk about because there’s nothing anyone can do to help.  Antidepressants don’t work.  Talking to other people just spreads the disease, if it exists.  Depression is contagious.  Why should I drag anyone down inside the pit with me?  I hate reaching out for help because then I have to admit that the only thing inside is an echo because all that exists in there is a big black hole and I can’t tell anyone without dragging them down too.

I’ve been feeling this way for twenty years, if not longer.  I wept the night before I turned ten because I realized my childhood was over.  Oh, wait—I was just feeling blue, right?  Even as a child, I felt something like nostalgia, a deep eternal grief at the passage of time.  I remember learning the word “melancholy,” and the idea that someone could be a “melancholic.”  I remember thinking, oh, so that’s what I am.  I developed obsessions that I treasured close to my chest, and when I shared them, carefully, and was rejected, I plunged into despair.  I lay in bed crying, before the age of eleven, telling my mother and sister that I had people who loved me, but no one who liked me.  How could they?  I remember listening to Puff the Magic Dragon and weeping:  Jackie Paper came no more!  Therein lay the essence of life’s tragedy!

Some days I wake up okay.  Other days I wake up unable to move.  Everyone blames negative thoughts, as proponents of CBT, and the power of positive thinking, believers in the pieties of American optimism, do:  change your thinking, change your life.

Andrew Solomon writes:

Once upon a time, depression was generally seen as a purely psychological disturbance;  these days, people are likely to think of it as a tidy biological syndrome.  In fact, it’s hard to make sense of the distinction.  Most depressive disorders are now thought to involve a mixture of reactive and internal factors;  depression is seldom a simple genetic disease or a simple response to external troubles.  Resolving the biological and psychological understanding of depression is as difficult as reconciling predestination and free will.  If you remember the beginning of this paragraph well enough to make sense of the end of it, that is a chemical process;  love, faith, and despair all have chemical manifestations, and chemistry can make you feel things.  Treatments have to accommodate this binary structure—the interplay between vulnerability and external events.

Vulnerability need not be genetic.  Ellen Frank says, "Experiences in childhood can scar the brain and leave on vulnerable to depression."  As with asthma, predisposition and environment conspire.  Syndrome and symptom cause each other:  loneliness is depressing, but depression causes loneliness.

For me, negative thinking is merely a symptom.  If I feel like things are hopeless I find a reason for why things are hopeless and I can find plenty.  But the hopeless feeling comes before the negative thoughts.  Sometimes the negative thinking catches me in a cycle and drags me deeper into the hole, but it’s almost worse when I feel nothing but emptiness and just like there’s nothing inside, not even negative thoughts.  And I can’t convince myself to do anything.

Since I was a child I’ve felt like suicide is a brave move, a way of using actual physical weapons against the sea of troubles, as Hamlet is the first to suggest.  “The ultimate hallmark of depression,” an “obsession with suicide.”  I think of those who have—Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith, David Foster Wallace, Aaron Swartz, Vincent Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf—as secret brothers and sisters.  On bad days I pore over their Wikipedia pages.  Those who had the courage to tell the truth to an empty, hopeless world.

Solomon:

…the particular kind of depression I had undergone has a higher morbidity rate than heart disease or any cancer.  According to a recent study by researchers at Harvard and the World Health Organization, only respiratory infections, diarrhea, and newborn infections cost more years of useful life than major depression.  It is projected that by the year 2020 depression could claim more years than war and AIDS put together.  Ant its incidence is rising fast.  Between six and ten per cent of all Americans now living are battling some form of this illness;  one study indicates that nearly fifty per cent have experienced at least one psychiatric disorder in their lifetime.  Treatments are proliferating, but only twenty-eight per cent of all people who have a major depression seek help from a specialist;  fifteen per cent of hospitalized patients succeed in killing themselves.

Watching Robin Williams movies helps.  It’s odd to me how many of them deal intimately and sensitively with depression and suicide. My favorite movie as a teenager, and maybe still, is "Dead Poets Society," and I was powerfully affected by two of his other movies, not as well known:  "What Dreams May Come" and "World’s Greatest Dad."

In “World’s Greatest Dad” Robin’s character writes a suicide note and then gets to see what happens afterward—in some ways, it’s a suicide’s watching of his own funeral, a fantasy wish fulfillment.  He says, presciently and half-sarcastic:  “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”  But what if the problem’s not so temporary? 

In “What Dreams May Come” we get to see what happens after a suicide, too.  But this time from the other perspective.  From below the ground.

“What Dreams May Come” was horribly reviewed when it came out and still has a 44% rating on Metacritic.  I beg to differ with the reviewers.  Many parts of it terrified and entranced me when I originally saw it—joyful jumps through big messy wet swaths of color in heaven, walking on the disembodied faces of those in purgatory who don’t realize they’re there.  Since Robin’s suicide, I can’t stop thinking about the part when he dives down from heaven into hell, through an increasingly creepy and macabre dreamscape, where finally, at its very bottom, he finds his wife, who committed suicide.  She’s been sent to hell not because of her suicide but because of her own tendency to create “nightmare” worlds, the same tendency that led her to suicide to begin with.  She’s all alone, in darkness, living in a twisted version of their house, visibly tortured by her surroundings.

That part stays with me.  Because it’s what depression is.  When I’m there, I’m all alone, and nothing anyone could say could help or change anything.  Suicide and depression are really the same thing, because depression is already hell.

Jane Kenyon, a depressive and a poet, writes:  “Unholy ghost, you are certain to come again… and turn me into someone who can’t take the trouble to speak;  someone who can’t sleep, or who does nothing but sleep;  can’t read, or call for an appointment for help.  There is nothing I can do against your coming.”

In “Brothers Karamazov” Dostoevsky posits that heaven and hell are now, determined only by our frame of reference.  We are not condemned to hell in some future time;  if we are condemned to hell, we live there now.  The same with heaven.  Christ Jesus said:  “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.”  Here, now.

Dostoevsky:

“That life is heaven,” he said to me suddenly, “that I have long been thinking about;” and all at once he added, “I think of nothing else indeed…  Heaven,” he went on, “lies hidden within all of us—here it lies hidden in me now… we are all responsible to all for all, apart from our own sins, you were quite right in thinking that, and it is wonderful how you could comprehend it in all its significance at once. And in very truth, so soon as men understand that, the Kingdom of Heaven will be for them not a dream, but a living reality.”

Spoken by a character who committed murder, a murder he’s been hiding:  “I know it will be heaven for me, heaven, the moment I confess. Fourteen years I've been in hell.”

And here are words spoken by Father Zosima a prophet, a poet, a priest—someone who echoes both Christ and Buddha for me:

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending…  I ponder, “What is hell?” I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love...  there are some fearful ones who have given themselves over to Satan and his proud spirit entirely. For such, hell is voluntary and ever consuming; they are tortured by their own choice. For they have cursed themselves, cursing God and life.

Those "fearful ones" stay with me. “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a Spirit of love, of power, and of a strong mind.”  2 Timothy 1:7

I love that trinity.  Love, power, and a strong mind.  If I can have love and power and a strong mind, then I live already in the kingdom of heaven.  If I fear, then I live in an ever-consuming and voluntary hell.

But I fear so much, all of the time.  As Solomon writes:  "It’s possible to distinguish between anxiety and depression, but according to... a leading expert on anxiety, 'they’re fraternal twins.'"

A quote from Tina Berger:

I often explain it this way. If you go and visit a Western-trained psychologist for seemingly inexplicable anxiety, he or she will most likely ask you about your life and your job and your family of origin. You may receive a diagnosis and plan of treatment. The treatment will likely involve relaxation and stress reduction, perhaps some additional talk therapy to address past emotional wounding, and you may be referred to a psychiatrist for medical treatment with anti-anxiety medication. You may or may not find the source of your anxiety. Whatever the recommended course of treatment, unexplained anxiety is generally seen as a pathology here in the West. If you have anxiety and you can’t source it to an immediate and direct problem in your life, the general assumption is: something is wrong with you.

An ecopsychology-based perspective takes a much bigger picture view of anxiety, considering questions like, “How sane is it, to have no anxiety as such beautiful species of plants and animals disappear from the planet one by one?” “How sane is it to have no anxiety when we know children are dying unnecessarily from starvation in many parts of the world?” “How sane is it that we work such long hours to continue acquiring so many things that we will throw away in less than a year?”

How sane am I?  Not very.

One last Solomon quote:

At a cocktail party in London, I saw an acquaintance and mentioned to her that I was writing this article. 

"I had terrible depression,’ she said. 

I asked her what she had done about it.  

"I didn’t like the idea of medication,’ she said.  "My problem was stress-related.  So I decided to eliminate all the stresses in my life."  She counted off on her fingers.  "I quit my job," she said.  "I broke up with my boyfriend and never really looked for another one.  I gave up my roommate and moved to a smaller place.  I stopped going to parties that run late.  I dropped most of my friends.  I gave up, pretty much, on makeup and clothes."  I was looking at her in bewilderment.  "It may sound bad, but I’m much less afraid than before," she went on, and she looked proud.  "I’m in perfect health, really, and I did it without pills."

Someone who was standing in our group grabbed her by the arm. 

"That’s completely crazy.  That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.  You must be crazy to be doing that to your life," he said. 

Is it crazy to avoid the behaviors that make you crazy?

Jane Kenyon writes, of emerging from a devastating depression:  “With the wonder and bitterness of someone pardoned for a crime she did not commit I come back to marriage and friends…  to my desk, books, and chair.”  She writes, of ordinary contentment:  “What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment?  How I love the small, swiftly beating heart of the bird singing in the great maples;  its bright, unequivocal eye.”

So I make plans for a half-suicidal foray across the Atlantic.  Or I make sense of the world through art, as Townes van Zandt, the patron singer of depressives, did.  He also drank himself to death aged 53. Ernest Hemingway, with his shotgun, beat him by nine years.  Robin Williams beat him by ten.

Marion, Massachusetts

Family

Coming back to the United States of America has meant a lot of change.  Some things I am happy about:  drinking water from the tap, paper towels in bathrooms, the fourth of July, cooking for myself, guacamole, cheese.  Being able to flush toilet paper down toilets without worrying about it.  Best of all:  pointing my feet at people without being rude.  Things I have not missed:  socks.  hoodies.  coats.  long underwear.  cold. 

I’ve been traveling a lot since I returned to America, and I am alleged to be writing about travel, and yet somehow travel within these United States feels less deserving of catalog.  But that is my own stingy prejudice, I know.  I spent two weeks in Chicagoland and a week in Ann Arbor—sampling local cuisine, attending local cultural events, and visiting local farms—all of which I would be proud to advertise if it were in Vietnam or Laos.  Why not here?

So.  On we go.

Sophia examines her trophy in private

On my third day after arrival I attended my niece’s championship baseball game, during which she scored the winning run, in the bottom of the ninth inning, thus winning the entire season after losing to the opposing team the previous night.  Too good to make up.  We sat in the rain to watch her, all five of us—my entire immediate family.  Do we resemble each other?

Beautiful sister

Then there are these interesting signs, still hand-painted, at Pan’s in Oak Park.  It’s a local grocer where my friend Amy used to shop when she lived down the street, when I lived several more blocks down, for three years.  We used to walk here and to the Avenue Ale House, our local, and the Mexican restaurant across the street.  It’s now something else, maybe high-end Mexican, next to the gastropub where this time I enjoyed Chicago gin and a burger made of local ingredients.  House-made ketchup.  Farm-to-table greens.

Fresh in the husk

In Ann Arbor, I visited a farm where we fed pigs corn.  I felt less bad about eating them after I saw them, in a farm’s usual way of hardening one against life’s cold realities.  I saw where they brewed their beer, and met co-op workers, who travel and freely work for room and board, at farms around the country.  This farm, Mulberry Hill, which runs a CSA (community-supported agriculture), also just held its own Ann Arbor version of Burning Man.

Ann Arbor farm

Although I complain about eating meat, I feel better about eating pigs after spending some time with them.

Cucumber and beans being prepared for CSA delivery

Sonia and I went for lunch at a vegan restaurant with vertical gardens.  We envisioned our own life of pro-gluten tee-shirts.  “Ask me about my gluten deficiency.”  I had vegetarian and organic mac and cheese, with local butternut squash in the sauce.  It was nutty and delicious.  We wanted to ask for extra gluten in our meals, but did not.

Vertical gardens, although it's hard to tell

My sister and I made paleo Thai food.  What, you say?  You didn’t know cavemen harvested rice kernels as they hunted and gathered?  That they pounded palm kernels together for sugar?  Well, now you do.

We also started quilting.  I am addicted, now, to patchwork, in all forms.  I bought a book on it, at an Ann Arbor book sale.  With pictures of the Baltimore album quilts, of which I'd never heard.

A quilt at the American Museum, not my photograph

And then I started searching online finding things like this:

Knitted patchwork, not my photograph

Or this:

Called a scrap-buster, but my favorites are the crazy quilts that use randomness as an organizing principle
(not my photograph)

Or this:

Something called domino knitting, where each block leads into the next--again, randomness, and I love it
(not my photograph)

Now I’m back in Marion, working on another boat project.  No travel, but future posts about teak and mahogany, the joys of hand sanding with 200-grit.  I slowly slip back on my socks.  The fan goes quiet.

Spirit, under construction

Here, too, I photograph beaches made of marble.  Regatta races in the fog.  I wrap my Thai fabric around my shoulders.  I want to be in two places at once.

Beach made of marble

Regatta in fog

Here, too, I am grieving, grieving and miserable.  My ability to speak and read and write Thai has been put in suspended animation, somewhere below consciousness, somewhere I can’t access.  I fall down body-image rabbit holes, something that didn’t happen as much in Thailand.  There is was normal for me to be bigger than an average person.  Here Americans look at me with cold scorn.  I photograph the surface of the water in Marion harbor, wearing my Bangkok tie-dyed clothes.  People stare.  Men.  I look at them and smile and they don’t smile back.  I wish I’d been brave enough to dye and dread-lock my hair, too.

I’m hungry all of the time because of no more Thai food.  Meal here consist of meat.  Bread.  Cheese.  I’ve eaten my last moo daeng, pad Thai, pad see eu, curry, som tahm, gai yahng.  I’m already forgetting how great it is to hear Thai, see Thai, speak Thai—food, language, people.

Moo daeng (red pork--okay, it doesn't look like I'm protein-starved based on this bowl)

Late lamented pad Thai

I even miss the smell the Argentine kid at Bluefin complained about, saying, on his first day in Asia, wrinkling his nose:  what I didn’t expect was the smell.

Every so often I catch a whiff of it here, in this air that smells like nothing, a whiff of the dank, fetid, rich smell of something rotten and it remains me of home.  What I wrote in my journal the first morning in Bangkok was:

It smells the same.  The humid air.  That eucalyptus and incense smell in the morning.  The mildewed bathrooms.

Is it the lack of light and vitamin D that brings me depression here?  Is it the meat-heavy diet?  My brother attributes the exponential rise of depression in modern America to the toxic hormones in our factory-farmed meat, animals that live and die in trauma, and the stress hormones in their bodies that go into ours.  In Thailand I lived on vegetables and rice and oil.  I ate fragments of egg and meat in almost every meal, but barely more than fragments.  When I bought a chicken skewer at the market I wolfed it, protein-starved.

Or am I deluding myself?  I had plenty of anxiety and depression in Thailand, too—fear of locals, fear of strangers, days when I just wanted to speak English and order pizza and stay in my room.

Or is it just aimlessness now that I’m back, not knowing what or where I want next?

Bangkok, Thailand

Home (among the many)

So I'm in an airport hotel and I'm heading home, I suppose, from another home, of sorts.  I've spent the last three weeks in Bangkok, down this small soi, in a room with a fan and a desk--reading, writing, hanging out with friends, just living.  I forget how much what I really want out of Bangkok, out of Thailand, out of Asia--is life--simply life--spicy somtahm in a sunlit kitchen, conversation into the evenings in the humid dark, Thai chatter on the streets.

I wanted to do all sorts of things with these last few weeks, forever forgetting to decide, and then just settling in the same place, deciding that maybe that's what I wanted anyway.  What I wanted about living in Bangkok was living in Bangkok, and all I could allow myself of that in this constant mess of travel is three peaceful weeks.  I sat beneath the fan and opened manuscripts I haven't looked at in years, sweat gluing my forearms to the table.  I walked to the market twice a day.  I talked Thai.  I made friends, finally meeting a Thai student of English willing to trade lessons with me on my very last week.

Always guilt haunts me.  Guilt about the Buddhism post I've been trying to write (and have now posted), about doing "nothing" with these last three weeks--when maybe nothing is what I've needed.  Maybe I've needed to lose the pressure to always be moving, roving, sightseeing.

What you want, in living someplace, are mellow afternoons when laziness swallows you, or the internet dissolves you, or you lose yourself in conversation.  What living someplace also means is the freedom to stay still, to get to know one street corner, one neighborhood's habits, its mangy dogs.  It means freedom to spend a Saturday afternoon in your pajamas, eating coconut bread and drinking coffee, listening to podcasts.  You know.  Home.

So guilt about the three weeks I allowed myself of Bangkok as home, and now guilt at how I squandered those weeks now that I'm leaving.  Never enough, never enough, I say.  I want more:  weeks, months, years in Thailand.

All the Thai people ask:  when are you coming back?

I don't know how to answer.  I'm not sure when I'm coming back, I say.

I think, but don't say:  Last time it took me fifteen years. 

Aroostook County, Maine

I came back home to find a house infested with fleas. It's our fault, really—not for the fleas but for the mice, and not really for them either but for the cat, which was left out to become feral and live in a truck. Which didn't work to keep the mice away. Mice are the reason we adopted him in the first place, less than a year ago. It's the reason why, catless, we had fleas last summer—we'd catch one mouse, and the next would move in, bringing with it its own troop of fleas.

So I was unsurprised to find a mouse dead between layers of crocheted afghan on my second day back. It was big, too, bigger than the tiny field mice with tails as twice as long as their bodies, the ones that generally move in. I thought it was dead because of the clouds of methoprene I'd sprayed on everything for the swarming fleas. I kid you not. I could see them squirming on the kitchen floor.

The mouse was big, with a big belly, and the next night the cat caught three baby mice in a row, in the same spot, and ate them all, nose to tail. I was told, later, that I should have snatched them away and bashed their heads in. I was cowering in horror in the back part of the house. However strong my fear of being a girly girl, I hate mice.

So the fleas are driving me to depression, and new appreciation for the quotidiana of medieval life. One day, I thought to myself: if they're like that here now, we're going to have to start preparing for black plague. (One should assume by now that I will correlate any entomological shift to climate change.) That same day, driving to the store for yet another chemical (I'm on my fifth), I heard there's a case in Kyrgystan. Black plague. The first in twenty years. Probably from fleas.

Fleas also bring a form of shame. It's not the shame that comes with bedbugs or lice, but it's pretty close. It's the same feeling as when you find mouse turds in your condo--everyone leaves bread in the bread box, fruit on the counter, dry pasta in the cupboard—but suddenly your doing so is a condemnation: you! You there! You're not clean enough! Do you see the way you live? It's disgusting.

And that empty popcorn bowl that you leave for morning becomes a scarlet badge.

So the last week has been a bit depressing for me. But the fleas—and grief about the things I have lost, still—and grief at leaving this place for an uncertain expanse of time--and leaving now, with summer's end in full bloom, giant crickets jumping away from the weeds around the back step, echinacea with drooping purple heads, yellow jerusalem artichoke named for the sun and smelling of honey and love, burdock beginning to tangle, and sugar maple beginning to turn—all of it is breaking my heart.

From Aroostook County, Maine, to Newburyport, Massachusetts, and back again

I have awaited long the day when I could announce with a drumroll that I am again Casting Off, not merely metaphorically, but actually. I thought I'd be able to say that last month, when K. signed on the dotted line for our new boat, a 36' Mao Ta cutter, Spirit, Secret's successor. She's a blue-water cruiser, a double-ender, an ocean crosser. We are, or will be soon, at last Casting Off. Here she is:

Three feet longer than Secret, but wider, beamier, bigger in every dimension. Already I am in love. So this post was intended as triumphant, as with Caesar's armies returning from Sparta, or wherever—but instead I have chaos and disaster and loss to report—although also their underbelly, their paired twin: hope and light and freedom. Here's how it went.

It's our second day on the boat, August 1, and there's a grand festival going on in swanky Newburyport, our current hailing port. The Yankee Homecoming, of all things, featuring live music all week, dinghies piled up on dock, fireworks, fried dough and clam chowder in the streets. The whole nine yards. We come to town to buy a guidebook and charts and an Eldridge for tides plus to stock up on groceries and water. We drop $350 among West Marine and Home Depot and Market Basket. I send out my money-earning email at the library. Then we wait at a bench beside the dinghy dock as the RIBs motor drunkenly away, and the band cleans up, and the teenagers engage in elaborate mating rituals.

We await the turning tide so we can cruise gleefully back to the boat with nary an oar stroke. Two days before we'd been unable to row against the outgoing current on the Merrimac River. This time there's almost a full moon, and we use the oars more to steer than to row. We get back to Spirit briskly and tie up. K. hefts a few bags on deck but leaves more bags below to steady the dinghy while I clamber aboard.

Then the fatal flaw of hubris. We don't drop the teak ladder. I don't ask for it, and it isn't offered. Both of us think I can make it over the freeboard (far higher from the water than was Secret's) without assistance. After all, I did it more or less effortlessly two days before.

I don't. You can see what's coming, but I couldn't. It's just like when people talk about car accidents. All I remember are brief snapshots, everything happening at once. I remember having one foot on deck and the other back in the dinghy, and feeling spreadeagled, like I wasn't going to make it. I remember looking back at the dinghy and seeing water coming over the side. I remember floating away, with the blue-colored paper bag from West Marine floating away in front of me, and thinking: that's $100!

K. yelled after me to grab the next mooring ball. (Moorings, for the uninitiated, are like anchors permanently affixed to the bottom of the harbor, to protect the ecosystem and to aid the mariner.) I tried, but was unable to. It was then I realized what a fix I was in. The current was sweeping by at a rate of at least six knots. I realized I had to swim, and swim hard. The next mooring was the last before the open Atlantic. The water was cold. The tide had already swept off one of my shoes, and was threatening to carry away my flannel.

I swam hard. I caught the mooring ball. And then I realized I was in a deeper fix. Could he see me? Would he know I was safe and not swept out to sea? How long would it take for someone to find me? How long could I hold on? How long before hypothermia set in?

I didn't know then what I know now: that the dinghy had completely overturned. That everything in it was lost. That my partner in crime managed to hold on, barely, and pull himself on deck to immediately radio the Coast Guard. When I thought of my backpack, containing my computer and my camera and my purse—everything of value I'd brought with me onto the boat—I assumed K. would have rescued it first thing. I just worried about my computer getting wet.

I used my yoga breath. I took turns with my arms, holding on with one side, then the other. Even then, I realized how quickly I'd become tired. I thought about letting myself drift back, thinking that maybe I could hoist myself onto the stranger's boat and find a way to get warm and to radio my location. But then I stopped that line of thought: if I let go, there was almost no way I'd be able to grab onto anything again. My body was carried back in a straight line by the current, parallel to the boat's waterline.

Then I saw the Coast Guard light up its boat. I started to yell for help, worried that they'd go out to sea rather than see me at the mooring two boats down. They heard me, and minutes later I was wrapped in a blanket and safe. I can testify that the major emotion one feels on being rescued by the Coast Guard is embarrassment. I couldn't believe that I'd made such a fool of myself. If only I'd been skinnier, stronger, more limber, I could have made it over the freeboard. If only I'd been humble enough to ask for the ladder. If only I could be a responsible human being, for once in my life.

As I expressed my humiliation, my apology, they were resolutely affirmative: “It happens all the time. There's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's our job.”

Thank God for the US Coast Guard and George Washington who established them, lo those many years ago, at this very port, Newburyport on the Merrimac River, for exactly this reason—wicked tidal currents and related carnage.

After I was warm and safe and drinking hot tea, I began to worry about my computer. Had K. put it on deck? Of course he had. It would have been his first priority. It had to be safe.

But of course it wasn't. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde by way of Dave Eggers: to lose two computers is a tragedy. To lose three seems careless.

These are the things I've had to think about over the last three weeks, as I've begun to process not just the loss of $2500 worth of gear, but also a five-year-old Moleskin, almost full of story ideas, my dream journal, my everyday journal, my legal pad with assorted yoga notes and boat lists. I am attempting faux Buddhism about it: they are just things, after all. It's just money. The important ideas I'll remember.

And in another universe, if the abstract mathematicians are to be believed, I am dead. In another universe, the computer is salvaged and we are just pissed at each other. In yet another, we're still looking for the perfect boat. In another, we have never met.

In the last universe: I didn't lose my data when I bought a computer two years ago. I didn't institute a rigorous weekly backup process. I didn't recover everything despite myself, as a result of my own insane persistence. I'm not typing right now into a file recovered from my Aroostook backup, on a program recovered from the backup, listening to music recovered from the backup, using settings recovered from the backup.

All this to say: nothing was lost except some money, ephemeral ideas, and my pride. God has his reasons when we don't understand his reasons. If you'd told me that when I was beating my breast over my computer data loss two years ago, I'd probably have hit you. But you would have been right.

So maybe now, in my 35^th year, halfway to 70, I'm starting to learn some things. I'm learning that the life I've chosen is one of risk. I haven't lost three computers because I'm careless, but because I've chosen to risk valuable things in order to achieve a higher goal. To some sheer adventure as a cause celebre is insufficient—especially maybe to our families, our parents. But we've chosen this life because it's the one we want, even if it means losing things. Losing money. Losing health, whether by hypothermia or by shoulder bursitis from too much backpack-carrying. Losing dreams, and ideas, and the stories that may have been borne from them.

That's our tax on the life we've chosen. The life we continue to choose. So all hail Spirit, our new vehicle of destruction and rebirth. We live in Spirit while Spirit lives in us.

Number 29

 Moon 

I swear the best chunk of work I do all day is between midnight and 2am. Everyone else already is in bed, even the dog, asleep with his back against the hallway wall. Internet is fast. I'm alone in my office with the light (compact florescent) burning, just me and iTunes on shuffle, a blanket over my knees, no sunlight across my left shoulder to taunt me.

I used to condemn myself for it. Some days I still do, especially when I wake after noon, with sun already half-burned. I love sun. I could be a devotee of Amon-Ra.

Here, in winter, light of any kind is in short supply, and giving up half a day's sun to be a nightdweller appears perverse foolishness. I said once, half in jest, that I was a vampire, that all of us are vampires. I said that if this log is anything it is a log of depression. As anyone who's read the trail journals can attest, grief and guilt are conditions that oppress me, whether during Aroostook winter or adventure travel.

Do I bring grief on myself with my affinity for night? I write my record of battle at two in the morning, alone, my Shadow in the hall and my knees beneath my desk, keeping myself from the light that cures. A hermit, I carry my lantern before me as I walk in the bleak wilderness. All of us walk alone through the valley of the shadow of dark with only a light to guide us.