Sacrament of the Present Moment

Shinkyo (Sacred Bridge), Nikko, Japan, a photo by Paul Mannix on Flickr.

'Some Catholics have a concept I much admire: the Sacrament of the Present Moment. It suggests that every moment of our lives is sacred, and that we should make of each moment a sacrament. Were we to do this we would think of the entire world as diffused with holiness. Wherever we might be would be a holy place for us, and we would see the holy, even sainthood, in everyone we encounter.'

from In Search of Stones, p. 71
by M. Scott Peck
1995 Simon & Schuster, London.

Serotonin

Matalascañas (Huelva), a photo by sky_hlv on Flickr.

p. 165

'Then someone stands up and says the alarming and predictable thing: "Well, if van Gogh had medication, we wouldn't have all those masterpieces, would we?"
     
I can't help but reply, "I think we'd have a lot more of them."
    
Which, I guess, is a way of saying that a little serotonin reuptake inhibitor seems to have saved my life. It became clear, in those dire days of dragging myself to the library, that I couldn't get out of the slump by myself. And truly I don't care if this is the placebo effect at work or not, the moment when suddenly I feel a change: I'm standing at an intersection on Eighth Avenue, waiting for the WALK sign, and I feel a shiver up my spine, and the sudden impulse to hold my head up, to stand up straight - how long has it been? and something within me looks around at the world and says, "Oh, right, here I am."'

Mark Doty, Dog Years, 2008

Jonathan Cape, London.
http://www.markdoty.org/

Mark Doty - 'Dog Years'

000412B, a photo by Lateral Support on Flickr.

p. 154

'Despair is, in a way, an appropriate response to the world; how else to face the corrosive power of time, how else to accommodate the brevity and frailty of the self?

Life without an element of despair in it would seem an empty enterprise, a shallow little song-and-dance on the surface of experience. Despair has about it a bracing sense of actuality. Emily Dickinson says, darkly:
  
   I like a look of Agony,
   Because I know it's true -

   ...

But despair and depression, of course, are not the same thing. 

Depression is nearly always the consequence of despair, a despair one cannot feel one's way through in order to emerge from the other side, a despair that will not be moved. 

Sometimes such pain - perhaps especially when it has been known for a long time, and all one's resources are used up, depleted - takes hold in the self; it becomes the climate in which we operate, a daily weather. 

Depression - simply the state of being exhausted by despair? - takes up residence in the desk drawer, the pile of shoes at the bottom of the closet, last night's unwashed dishes tumbled in the sink. 

Despair is sharp, definite, forceful; it is a respose to experience. 

Depression accumulates, pools, sighs, settles in; it is the absence of a response. It does not makes things move. Consider our tropes for it: a cloud, a shadow, a weight. It lingers, broods, sits heavily; it replaces the sharpness of grief (which no one can bear to feel for very long) with the muffling emptiness of fog.'

Mark Doty