Imbolc Woodpecker Moon
In what is, I suppose, a good sign, I’m getting fed up with this latest round of melancholy. As I tried to do my Latin today, my ability to focus just wasn’t there. The holding of one idea in my head while tracking down another seemed too hard. I shook my head–ridding it of the annoyance I felt–and went upstairs for lunch.
I have begun a look back and now find that my melancholic episodes probably started in high school and have continued, largely unnoticed, until now. I say unnoticed because they were usually not incapacitating, though in one instance around 1975 I can recall sitting in a chair for days on end, unable to stop unraveling the patterns in the wallpaper.
I believe I have experienced them as periods of slowing, waning interest or perhaps an unusual run of irritability, but not as episodes cycling through my life, a constant dysthymic hum, sometimes in the background and other times dominant, changing the course of things in my day to day world.
Of course, these cycles interlaced with my drinking, my failed marriages, my occasional angry outbursts. Perhaps they only reinforced these troubled times or, perhaps, they created some of them. I don’t know.
If this is right, and I’m pretty sure it is, it also means that I dealt with the death of my mother in 1964 influenced by these cycles. It is my belief now that the charged, dark feelings of that difficult time still come along for the ride, packed in a baggage car as the melancholy train pulls into the station.
These complicated threads make these cyclic turns difficult to sort out, place in perspective. It also makes them difficult, as a direct result, to get any particular treatment for.
Anyhow, out there, tomorrow or maybe the next day or if not then soon, the heaviness will lift and I’ll be able to get back to the incredible lightness of being.
