in the small things and quiet places

I changed most of the posts on The Unicycle to draft before I said goodbye the last time a couple years ago.

But after making an effort to write The Unicycle again, and in an effort to get some inspiration, I decided to check out some of my past posts and drafts. Seems like I'm always depressed. That's the one thread that holds everything together. 

It seems I'm always depressed and have always been depressed. I cannot think of a time in my life when I was not, to some degree, depressed.

It is tedious living like this, and I can only imagine that it's tedious reading about someone living like this. 

Maybe that's why I can't think of anything to write about. 

My recent major depressive episode was severe and though I now find myself sort of able to cope I still carry with me the weight. It's a lighter burden, no doubt about it, a lighter weight, but it's still draped over my shoulders like a heavy wet wool shawl. It's a weighs on me. If I think about it, it irritates me. I'm uncomfortable.

I'm so tired of it. 

I'm tired of writing about it. 

Here's a little haiku like poem I've been thinking about for a while. It doesn't conform to the usual 5/7/5 and at this point I don't care. I still think it's pretty.

the slope of mountains

birches bent

curve over curve

I wrote recently that poetry is a little like photography. There is a moment in time captured, it's the now of the past held still to experience in the now of the future. HUH? What the fuck. I'm a fucking loon.

And skipping along in my own little brain, I'm suddenly, for some reason, thinking about "God". Who knows how brains work. Nobody, that's who. I'm just going with it. Hang on. 

I've been a non-believer for most of my life. I believed in a sort of God-like being as a little kid. I was raised by a parent who did not believe in the usual God.

She lost patience with all that when she was a Catholic mom trying to attend church with a small baby and was told children did not belong in the sanctuary. She thought, in her way, fuck that shit. I am sure she would not have put it in those exact words, but the spirit of the words would have been at the heart of it all. 

I remember taking a walk together with my mother. I asked about God and she said with her hand on the trunk of a young maple tree, God lives here. I knew she didn't mean just that one tree. I knew what she meant, because I felt God in the trees in the woods behind our house, and I felt God in the big rock, and in the clover, and the dew on the clover. I felt that God must be a very nice fellow, and if he lived everywhere, everyplace must be a nice place.

As I got older I called myself an Agnostic. Who was I to say if there was a God or not?

Then time went by and I grew more aware of the horrors that happen every day, and I became cynical. Bad things happened, and there is no justice. Eventually I thought, nothing matters. I felt if God was real and let bad things happen and God was an omnipotent God then God was an asshole.

I felt that if God had no control over the horrors of the world, then God was not an all powerful God but rather a hapless god, a powerless god.  I liked the second choice better, but then I wondered, why do humans put so much faith in a powerless deity?

I started thinking about the world in a more logical and scientific way and there just was no place for a mysterious god-like entity. It didn't make rational sense. I called myself an Atheist. Being a good human and being an Atheist actually makes a lot of sense to me. Many of the most decent people I know are Atheists. People who do good not because of a heavenly reward but just because it's the RIGHT thing to do.

Throughout all this, I suffered bout after bout of depression, and basically life always hurt.

So time went by and I got oldish, and once again, I became inconsolably depressed. Being a living human was UNBEARABLE. I didn't think I was going to make it.

I know that people with faith in God are happier than the rest of us, but I chalk that up to a sort of a disengagement with reality, no offence. It's easy to be happy if you think there is a reason for suffering and that you'll get your good reward in heaven and everyone who doesn't think like you will be burning for eternity in hell.

But what sort of loving god sends people to hell? And why would I be cool worshiping a god who damned some people while letting assholes who could pray their sins away on Sunday go to heaven? And what good purpose is there for fascism, brutality, murder, if that bullshit is "God's will", fuck him. Why not just make people good? If you could, why wouldn't you?

Anyhoo....

Recently, I ran into a nice community of people who all have some notion of spirituality. Not necessarily the God of the Bible, but whatever that notion of a "higher power"' means to them, whatever in their hearts feels like the right good thing, and I thought, for fuck's sake, I've tried every other damn thing, even though I don't believe in ANYTHING, I'm going to pretend I do.

I'm going to conceive of my own god. I get to choose what that god is all about, and then I'm going to believe in it without any evidence or proof. Logically, this argument is bologna. People do this ALL THE TIME, and sometimes bad things happen when they do. Some terrible person can say, "My god told me to..."fill in the blank with any number of heinous crimes people have committed using "God" as an excuse. 

But I'm a trustworthy sort, and so out of desperation, I thought, give it a whirl.

I still don't and never will believe in an all powerful God, I still think of myself as an atheist, but for me, maybe there's room for a flawed and compassionate god who says, "Yes, life is a sucking shit hole. I feel ya. I am discouraged too. I wish there was something more I could do to help but here's a cute little dog, here's a pretty flower, here are some mountains, here are some trees. I know it doesn't fix anything, but maybe it can take the edge off." 

The god of small things and quiet places consoles me.