Happy Poem [olivia]

I haven’t written much poetry
But it’s all been pretty dark
Mostly death of people and dreams
Paranoid, I stopped and thought about it
To check my own pulse

Yup, still alive

A life full of family and love and ideas
Of surprise endings and setbacks and shortcuts
Of bandaged knees and battered books
Of make-believe and beef stroganoff
Of coaching, correcting, and collecting
Of really weak push-ups and persistent hiccups
Of flossing, forgiving, and forecast-checking
Of budgeting for propane and pot roast
Of spur-of-the-moment cocktails named after PBS programs
Of debating facts and forgetting debates
Of risks, rejection, and redemption
Of yelling for my team and whispering to stuffed animals
Of singing, snipping, slathering, soaking, surgery, and sock matching

But those things don’t seem to make the cut
They don’t stop me in my tracks
Squeeze my heart and lungs
Knock me on my butt
Make me write it out
The way death does

So I’ll affix my name to this poem
My happy poem
And use a pen-name for the rest

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Story Recall [jana]

It’s only when I start singing a song word-for-word from a movie I watched when I was young, or recall a commercial I saw as a child that I realize now and then just how much pop culture has impacted my thinking. I don’t regret these influences, for the most part; I think the redeeming beauty of artistic endeavor has in many ways been a huge part of my own salvation walk. Now it seems that “taste” in stories can polarize us faster than most other conversational material, but I want to go back and re-discover what I loved about the stories I remember most, what caught my attention and why.

Reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time began changing my thinking about story. I was sixteen, and was sick of the sappy romantic fare that the library mostly had in stock in the teen section. I would seek through the section for something new and interesting, but then invariably end up back in the Children’s section with my old friends L. Frank Baum, L.M. Montgomery, Marguerite Henry, Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis. I started making forays into the Adult fiction section, some of which were met with success, some not. It was like a treasure hunt, sorting through the stacks for stories that caught my interest, reading book jackets, flipping through to read excerpts…Finally I found what I was looking for in the “Fantasy” section. Fairy tales, my native language, but with complexity and beauty. Having loved Roverandom, Tolkein’s children’s story about a little dog who travels to the moon, I spotted the familiar name on the spine of a book I had never heard of; The Fellowship of the Ring.

Nowadays, it’s impossible for a 16-year-old to not have heard of the story. But a triple-threat combination of homeschooling, small-town living, and a conservative background in which anything smacking of “magic ” except for the mildest of children’s stories was kept far away allowed me to discover the books on my own (incidentally, I wouldn’t have it any other way). After reading the back (catching C.S. Lewis’ name on the cover convinced me) of the hardcover with a rune symbol pressed on the front and filled with gold leaf, I took it to the front to check it out.

“Have you ever read this one?” The Librarian gushed. I shook my head, and her eyes popped. She came around the counter and marched me back to the fantasy section to check out the Two Towers and the Return of the King. “You’ll thank me later,” she said, then told me, “Read it with Celtic music in the background.” She twittered back to the desk with me and my stack of books in her wake, somewhat bewildered. What kind of Celtic-music-loving situation was I getting myself into? I had disappeared into stories other times in my life, but this was absolutely and totally absorbing. I think I read until 3:00am that morning. Years later, in a Fantasy Literature class in college, as I read George MacDonald’s Phantastes for the first time, I also read C.S. Lewis’s description of first reading it as a “baptism of the imagination” that set Lewis on his long and winding road to his eventual Spiritual baptism. This idea of baptism of the imagination fully resonated with me because of how I felt about reading Tolkien’s masterpiece.

During my first year in college, I did a lot of discovering pop culture I had never had occasion to explore before. I watched ‘Friends’ and ‘Survivor’ now and then, with a gathering of faithful fans in the downstairs lounge on Thursday nights…I saw ‘The Sixth Sense,’ ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,’ and ‘Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion.’ My roommate was a rugby player, but she was also a choral singer and loved music. She played “Tears in Heaven” on her classical guitar when she felt especially meditative. While I was still listing the Newsboys and Amy Grant among my favorite bands, Anna introduced me to new music. Dave Matthews Band, a music sountrack from the TV show ‘Mad About You’, Sarah MacLachlan, the Newfie band Great Big Sea, Eric Clapton, the Barenaked Ladies, plenty of choral music, and the last and most influential, the Canadian Broadway Cast soundtrack of The Phantom of the Opera. One night when Anna was gone, I dug through her CD collection to find something inspiring to listen to while working on a final project for my drawing class. Anna came back to the room around midnight to find that my project—four head studies at different angles—had become a study on masks, and me working feverishly with charcoal and tears smudging my face.

While I love stories of any kind, movies combine stories with a visual experience that reaches me at a different level altogether. Significant experiences with movies include the first movie I ever cried at with girlfriends (The Land Before Time, on my 9th birthday!) The first movie I ever cried at in theaters (the Robin Williams/Bill Cosby/Diane Lane/Jennifer Lopez tearjerker Jack). We all sat in the food court and sobbed 15-year-old tears over our French fries while talking about it. While my friends and I adopted mostly our favorite rom-coms for movie nights (While You Were Sleeping, That Thing You Do, You’ve Got Mail, The Princess Bride), varying to some touching drama (Life is Beautiful, all things Austen), I remember clearly watching a movie that was something different. It starred Hugh Grant, so it wasn’t a real indie, but it really was a small-market movie which addressed some real, human issues. The characters were all flawed, and circumstances and emotions were addressed in a very real, very human way. We picked About a Boy off the shelf at the grocery store because Hugh Grant was on the cover, but it surprised us with its depths of humanity; sorrow, fear, and loneliness were real, but so were humor, love, and that element of ridiculousness that rings true for all of us, aided by music from the UK band Badly Drawn Boy. We were all under 20 years old at the time, but this was one of the first films I can remember clearly which made me realize the connection between the drama and the comedy of life.

These are some of the stories which have defined me and taught me, set me on the road to write and learn my own story.

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Spiral [vanessa]

Creation...
Man, woman
Enjoying life together
Hearts beating as one
Pure

Exposure...
Raw, vulnerable
Soul peels inward
Engulfed in quick sand
Shame

Naked...
Not ashamed
Grace being received
Tears mingled with beauty
Free

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Twenty Four [annie o]

It is the count between
measures of sun: again
crescendo, again hush,
expecting the repeat.

It is the tomb, still sod
and soil, uninformed
of flesh and coffin
coming with a shovel.

Or silence who, mindless
of thunder’s clap, startles
at the sudden knock from
sound, the slow traveler.

It is the monk, patient,
gardening curséd earth,
though reaping fruit heavy
on branches in Eden.

Or the wedding: the groom
and guests await the bride’s
approach. She, elsewhere, veiled
and shaking starts to walk.

The white sea floods the plain,
not baring that summer
wheat will ripple as waves
across the thawed sea bed.

So the revolutions
continue, the unknown
awaited thing, coming
soon, has been accomplished.

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A Letter [jessi g]

Note: the following is written to a fictional person. Any resemblance it bears to the reader is unintended. Many people close to me have struggled with depression, and my response has not always been healthy, helpful, or compassionate. I hope you’ll forgive some of the cluelessness expressed in this piece, and see it as honest processing from a friend struggling in the dark.

a letter:

I know you’re struggling to cope with every morning. You lay in bed watching the light filter in through the window shades, and it’s impossible to consider facing the day.

Of course, you know I’m a fixer, and I’d love nothing more than to take whatever’s broken or unhappy in your life and make it better. To ease your troubles.

The anti-depression medication commercial that plays on the radio informs me that you can’t “just snap out of it”, but that’s not what I was expecting, anyway. I’ve had my own down times. But they have been short seasons, not like the epic battles you face, day in and day out. You don’t believe me when I tell you I know how to put myself in your shoes.

Your response is to roll your eyes and say, “well alright for you”, which is really just another way of writing me off. After all, reasonably happy people couldn’t possibly have any insight to your experience.

And while we’re on that topic, I hate that sense of superiority I get from you. You’re using depression as a reason to feel different or special. I could give you a hundred reasons to feel so, and none of them involve shutting the world out and refusing to cope. Things like your deep compassion, especially for those who are hurting; your sunny smile, which I have not seen in months; your sharp wit and your insight into other people.

I hate watching you give up on yourself, especially when it’s such a false limitation. There’s no reason in the world that you can’t be or do everything you once wanted, except that you’ve hit this glass ceiling--a barrier visible only to you. You feel stuck, and can’t move forward. “I can’t meet you for lunch today,” you text me. “It’s my depression again.” Your depression. You call it that like it’s a pet, or a child. Like the school called again and asked you to come get it because it was acting up in class, and the teacher sent it to the principal’s office. I wonder what would happen if one day, you decided not to answer the call.

Sometimes I wonder if you’re faking it. Like you need to have some kind of drama in your life to seem worthwhile to yourself. If you don’t have two guys fighting over you, or co-workers lying about you to your boss, or trouble with your family, you’re not important enough for people to pay attention to. You can’t blame me too much for asking--is it possible you’re blind to that pattern? I swear each of your relationships last about as long as a menstrual cycle. A giggling flirtatious peak followed abruptly by a week of tears and chocolate.

I know it’s not that simple. There are forces at work in your life--things that have happened to you that weren’t in your control. I know, too, that when a beast like depression gets hold of you, all of your perspective disappears, and you can only see how big and insurmountable the mountains in your life are. I know you feel ringed in and overwhelmed.

I wish you could hear from me right now, because what you really need to know is, nothing you feel is true. Like an addict, you feel inexorably drawn to the thing that’s killing you. Maybe there’s a sick, self-sabotaging element to your behavior—like you somehow deserve less goodness or happiness than the rest of us, and so you’re going to keep yourself locked in the same abusive cycle.

You and I both know that most of the shit in your life didn’t just happen to you--you chose it. It’s a sickening realization, one you’re tempted to run from. I can hear you asking, “Am I really that f*cked up?” But I hope, once you get over the shock of it, that it brings you to a shining conclusion: that you do have a choice.

Every breath you take is a conscious decision to keep living, and on some level if you’re doing that, you must believe that this can’t last forever. Please believe that it can’t last forever.

I never give up hoping that, if you can’t hear this from me, maybe you’ll someday be able to take it from someone. And when you do, I hope it provides you with a glimpse of the way out.

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