My feet on the ground

When I read Parker Palmer's reflection on his depression, I wrote in the margin "WTF." If you are reading this and don't know what that means, then I encourage you to find a teenager and ask them. Let me share that quote with you.

After hours of careful listening, my therapist offered an image that helped me eventually reclaim my life. "You seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you," he said. "Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend, pressing you down to ground on which it is safe to stand?"

Let Your Life Speak, 66

WTF right? That's what pulled Palmer out of an eight year depression? It's counter intuitive to think of depression as a friend. Depression is something that we fight. It's something that we medicate to get rid of. It's not something that we embrace. It's not something that call a friend.

Yet somehow when Palmer finally embraced this idea, he was freed. It's bizarre to me, but there is some heartfelt sense to it as well. He goes on to explain.

Depression was, indeed, the hand of a friend trying to press me down to ground on which it was safe to stand - the ground of my own truth, my own nature, with its complex mix of limits and gifts, liabilities and assets, darkness and light.

67.

There is some real danger in these words that should not be taken lightly. I don't think that depression is something that we ought to seek out in our lives in order to ground them. Still, Palmer's genuineness about this makes me stop to consider things for a moment. What if depression is a friend? What if it's a signal that they way we are living our lives are somehow incongruent? Though this need not be everybody's experience, it certainly rang true in Palmer's own struggle.

He writes

The figure calling me all those years was, I believe, what Thomas Merton calls "true self." ... True self is true friend. On ignores or reects such a friendship only at one's peril.

68

In that place, down at the bottom of being is our true selves. Not up through the stratosphere of expectations that we have, but down through the woods, the dark places, the muck and all of the sin in our lives. That is where we find ourselves.

I'll finish this entry with this quote from Palmer,

When I was finally able to turn around and ask, "What do you want?" the answer was clear: I want you to embrace this descent into hell as a journey toward selfhood - and a journey toward God...I had to be forced underground before I could understand that thew way to God is not up but down.

69