There are a lot of reasons, good ones, nowadays to feel blue, but there are ways to escape that dismal emotion. We’ve been told by many authorities to get outside and walk, but how many of us do it every day, especially here in Northern New Mexico where the temperature is going to drop later today to five degrees and the winds will pick up to sixty miles an hour? And yet my pond is always waiting under its cap of snow and ice, the big gold, yellow and spotted Koi tucked in comfortably at the bottom.
It’s harder to get outside since Pip died last July. With him, there was no choice. He needed his twice-a-day hikes or walks, and I could never resist the appeal in his dark brown eyes: “Get up from the computer and lets go out!” I’m planning to visit the Santa Fe Animal Shelter, where I found him nine years ago, to see if there’s a dog with whom I can form a similar bond. Of course it won’t be Pip, and it’s hard to imagine that any dog will be as compatible as he was—but who knows?
Another surefire cure for the blues is poetry. One of my favorites is Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese. I remember how the first line astonished me when I read it years ago:
You do not have to be good.”
Really?
And she goes on with the same outrageous confidence and courage:
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on…
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
Are heading home again…
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination…”
I also recite in a loud voice the poems I memorized growing up:
It is an ancient mariner who stoppeth one of three…”
And
A chieftain to the Highlands bound…”
(My note reads, “I lernt it”)
And
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is yet a-flying…”
And then there’s the power in singing, anytime, anywhere with any kind of voice. I sing every day, mixing the old Irish Scottish tunes with the Appalachian ditties I learned as a child:
In Scotland town where I was born there was a fair maid dwelling…”
And
She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.
She’ll be driving six white horses when she comes…”
With those hymns many of us learned years ago:
Rock of Ages, cleft for me…”
The Old Rugged Cross…”
And add a prayer for those struggling in California.
Do you feel better now?
Additionally, a basic stretching routine to increase range of motion makes me feel better.
Oh to be like a tree or a lotus blossom.