One of the poems that means most to me is Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.” I remember when I first read it, years ago, I felt moved and inspired—and then wondered, “How does she dare?” The message remains revolutionary.
As I resist being swept into another emotional drama, I’ve just re-read “Wild Geese” and these lines have new meaning and urgency for me:
“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
Are moving across the landscapes…”
Deeply depressed people are not able to notice that the world goes on. Like the princess closed up in her tower, they are sealed inside their dark mood.
Something else is happening here. Depression, it seems to me, is a particular affliction of entitled white men. This does not mean it is not real; the suffering is extreme and can be life-threatening. But it would be instructive to see a study (which will probably never be done) of how class- and gender-oriented depression is.
It does depend on a certain kind of leisure, a certain kind of aimlessness that less privileged people may find they just don’t have enough time and energy to notice. A woman struggling with raising children and holding down a job, or any of the millions unable to make do with minimum wage may be consumed with anxiety and even rage—but to be sealed in depression, unable to get up and go to work, is not an option.
Years ago white middle-class white housewives suffered an epidemic of depression; its cure was reading of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and especially her chapter on “The Problem That Has No Name.” There she wrote about women who “have everything,” whose misery aroused no empathy or understanding—and still doesn’t for understandable reasons.
Their lives lacked meaning. Consuming is not an occupation on which some degree of satisfaction can be built. Prevented by convention from developing a political awareness, we were without power of any kind in our comfortable suburban world, except the power to buy.
And so depression, even to the point of despair.
The re-enlivened women’s movement of the 1970’s saved me and I think it may have saved many other women caught in the stalemate of privilege. Getting rid of depression meant stepping up, stepping out, speaking up, descending from the enclosed tower of privilege to notice that the world does still go on.
Yesterday while I was fending off an assault from my over-developed and inappropriate sense of responsibility, I was standing on a porch here in Kentucky in view of a small pond. It’s shrunk with ongoing droubt, devoured by weeds, but still a flock of five Canada Geese came in as I watched, landing in formation on its shallow water.
I remembered lines from another poem of Olver’s, “The Journey“:
“One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and
began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
“Mend my life!”
Each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop…determined to do
The only thing you could do—
determined to save
The only life you could
save.”
How many of us, I wonder, have the courage to follow Oliver’s daunting advice?
Oscar Wilde is quoted for this aperçu: ” Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.”
I am thinking that Wilde had it backwards, in that IMO women have largely achieved the victory of mind over matter. Oliver’s poem suggests to me that women become saviors of their lives by always focusing their minds on what in a material way is the necessity of the here and now.
IMO, serving God is not always an easy undertaking—but there do seem to be cycles of contentment in which most burdens are not only easier, but even joyous.