Through the Eyes of Depression

I found this image in the bark of a favorite tree.

 

It is precisely this perspective of anguish that gives birth to new consciousness.

as the poet, Roethke, so eloquently states:

 

In a Dark Time, The Eye Begins to See.

 

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;

I hear my echo in the echoing wood--

A lord of nature weeping to a tree,

I live between the heron and the wren,

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

 

What's madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,

That place among the rocks--is it a cave,

Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

 

 

A steady storm of correspondences!

A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,

And in broad day the midnight come again!

A man goes far to find out what he is--

Death of the self in a long, tearless night,

All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

 

 

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.

My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,

Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

 

The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke,

New York: Anchor Books, 1975, p.231.

 

 

 

Done