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Yesterday I had a bad day.  I hurt.  All day.  And while I don’t know exactly why yesterday was one of my pretty-bad-days, I do know that what I suffered from is most commonly called an attack of ‘major depression’.  The thing is, those feelings that overwhelmed me yesterday are very real.  They FEEL like something.  And the best I can tell is that ‘something’ was pain.

Pain.  Here came that Substance P again (if this link goes dormant Google search “stopthestorm substance p”).  Pain.  I could name it sadness, but that’s exactly what my sadness is – PAIN.  Pain-full.  Pain-filled.  A very sad, painful day.

What was it about yesterday that dropped me squarely into that mire?  I don’t know.  And my not knowing scares me because it tells me nothing about what I can do differently TODAY to keep that pain away.

I DO remember that pain filled sadness, though.  Now that I have spent the time re-searching my own self, my own body, my own life, I can directly connect those feelings I had yesterday to how I felt every single day of my abusive childhood.

“Slow,” is what my Borderline mother called me.  “There’s Linda again, slow as always.  There’s Linda again being slow ON PURPOSE to irritate me, to drive me mad.”

My mother was mad all right, but her madness NEVER had a single thing to do with me, no matter how she labored night and day to convince the entire universe that everything, every solitary thing that was wrong in her life, wrong in my father’s life, wrong in my siblings’ life was my fault.

Wrong.

So first she built this terrible sadness into me with her terrible abuse of me, and then she punished me more and more and more ALSO because I was so sad – which manifested in my little growing body as SLOW.

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There have been times when I have super sad days and nights that I wonder if I am ‘picking up on’ or ‘tuned into’ the sadness of the world.  Heaven knows there is plenty of sadness in the world today, showing its signs nearly everywhere a person turns to look at it.  Might a sensitive person be able to feel something in their body with the knowledge that fully one billion human beings are starving to death while there’s plenty of food on the planet that lies out of their reach?  Might a person feel sad if they pay attention to all sorts of troubles that afflict all species on our glorious planet right now?

Yes, I do believe that humans can feel one another’s pain and sadness.  We are designed so that we are supposed to feel it – so we can in our caring compassion do something to help.  But not on a day like I had yesterday.  Simply surviving those days takes all I have within me – all of my personal resources I can find.

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Because since I was a little girl I have always had an affinity to plants, I think today as I prepare to go out to work on my garden about how much the plants love the morning’s east light.  I am just learning that.  I couldn’t figure it out at first.  Sunlight is sunlight.  How could EAST light be better than light streaming from any other direction?

Well, it is.  And evidently – especially here in the high desert – west light and south light past noon taxes the plants, stresses them out, demands of them that they use their resources not for growth and ‘flourishment’ – but rather they have to use their resources in anything other than the east light simply to survive the heat of those other kinds of light itself.

So whatever triggered my deeper levels of pain filled sadness (‘depression’) yesterday, I would avoid today if I knew what it was.  The only thing I can think of is that perhaps it is my blog writing itself that sometimes awakens feelings within me that just plain don’t fit the reality of my current life in its mainstream.  Yes, that tempts me not to write!  And as readers can tell there are periods of time when I fully back myself away from my keyboard and simply go spend my time in my own world’s east light.

There are other days when the writing IS connected to the east light.  Knowing when to approach and when to stay away is part of health, part of the health I strive for all of the time.  East light is the gentle light.  East light is the awakening growing sustaining light.   I can’t argue with that fact.  Neither can the plants.

It’s just that recognizing the quality of light I stand in isn’t always quite as simple for me to do as it is for a plant.  That’s OK.  That’s part of what my gardening will always be about — learning from the plant kingdom what promotes life and health and what does not.  So out I go today to learn some more — in the hopes that this day will be a gentle one for me.

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