Writing Trouble

I’m always looking for advice on how to deal with the dark days, and here’s a quote from the title essay of Barbara Kingsolver’s essay collection, High Tide in Tucson, that I especially like:

“In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.”

Of course, for me, writing about the paralysis of depression, finding the words to describe it and the coming out of it, would be part of my way back. The creativity of putting words together is generative, life-affirming. I’m still here. A little glow in the dark.