The Call to Beyond Your Limits

Via Molly Fisk's Facebook, I have found an interesting website, Inward/Outward. This post is a list of ways we sabotage our lives, our callings, with distractions and excuses. These lists abound. There are whole books on getting over yourself and getting to what you want. This one is special. Here's the introduction:

"It makes perfect sense that we should be called to go beyond our limits, because the One that calls us is beyond all limits. I suspect that all the energy we have bound up in resisting our own potential is more energy than we'll need to reach it. It takes as much energy to fail as it does to succeed. The strategies are legion."

I am always looking for names for God, and I like this one: the One who calls us to go beyond our limits, because the One is beyond all limits. 

Inward/Outward describe themselves like this:

"inward/outward grows out of The Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., where at the heart of being church is learning how to be on an authentic journey with others---inward toward our true selves rooted in Love---outward toward some part of the world's deepest joy and greatest pain."

Here are several (and very old) names for God: Love, Journey, Learning.The more you look, the more amazing communities there are -- out there -- and in me -- where people are searching for something they call God.

"They Leave Me And I Cannot Stop Them"

I have been a lifelong fan of Maurice Sendak. His little book A Hole Is To Dig was a gift from my godmother when I was small, in the 1960s. Of course many many people love him and his work now, and when he died last year, we grieved. This story, again via Andrew Sullivan, points to a video created in memory of Mr. Sendak, made from a audio clip on his last interview with Terry Gross. (That's such a sandwich of references -- just read the article and listen to the clip and watch the video.) I was lucky enough to hear the interview on the radio live, and now I am lucky enough to have it captured in video/audio eternity.

The statement "I am in love with the world" will capture any one who has struggled with loss, with depression, with anger, with love. The explanation of his frequent crying, because "they leave me and I cannot stop them" is what triggered my desire to re-blog this post. I will write poems because they leave me and I cannot stop them. It seems a better choice than walking around with a book on my head.What will you do? Wave a tree branch, instead.

 

The Noonday Demon and A Christmas Letter

I've begun reading Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon. It's a bit overwhelming, sort of like depression itself. Confusing and long -- attempting to organize itself over and over according to the idea of the day. Several reviews are enlightening. Joyce Carol Oats picks up on the author's love of his own depression,  a phenomenon I have noticed in myself.

Yet paradoxically, and here is where the foreignness of mental illness is most pointed, those afflicted with depression are often ambivalent about it, as no one is ambivalent about physical illness: ''It was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul,'' Solomon declares. And, even more rhapsodically, in the concluding pages of the book's final chapter, ''Hope'': 

''Curiously enough, I love my depression. I do not love experiencing my depression, but I love the depression itself. I love who I am in the wake of it. . . . I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It's a precious discovery.''

 
I could write my own depression a song that would strangely resemble an advertisement for bologna. "My depression has a first name," which is unfortunately the same as that of my husband's boss, and (thankfully) also the name of a spectacular painting by Jay DeFeo, "The Verónica."

Here's a link to a slightly brighter photo of the painting, on Flickr. It's a staggering painting, tall and thin. Dodie Bellamy, in her 2010 post on SFMOMA's  Open Space blog, talks about the queasy feeling the painting inspires. "In its prettiness The Veronica is more subversive than Incision, which announces something deeper, intense is going on. The Veronica’s creepiness sneaks up on you. Femininity flails its pretty neck and grows monstrous, out of control." (She also elaborates on St. Veronica, who wiped the perspiration off the face of Jesus as he walked to the cross, and how the image of his face appeared on the cloth thereafter. Definitely a mind trick.)

But I digress.

Every year I write a holiday letter. I should call it a Christmas Letter, because that's the genre. But I want to include, and celebrate, and certainly I don't want to exclude, so I say Happy New Year (!) instead. But I am a devotee of the Christmas Letter form, and that's what it is. This year's needs to be short and I'm considering mentioning that I've been struggling with what Solomon calls "the noonday demon."  Depression has been my constant (if fickle) companion for over two years now, but I am not sure this reference belongs in a celebration of light and new. We'll see what the husband says. 

I'm going to be reading Solomon's book for a while. In the meantime, my own personal Veronica has left the building. Or, at least, seems to have her hand on the Exit.