There is nothing fun about a mental illness.
But I have found that there are gifts to be mined out of the suffering, gold to be spun from the lies our brain chemistry spins for us.
There is nothing quite like the clarity when the anxiety breaks and the fog lifts. And in that moment I see the world more clearly than I ever did before. In those moments there is no way to miss the divinity shot through the trees, the squirrels, the rocks, you, and yes, me. Then I can see that one of my favorite philosophers was right when she said: “we are star stuff; we are the universe figuring itself out.” (Delenn, Babylon 5).
In the moments when my cells settle out of their panicked hum into the same vibration as the rest of the universe then it all becomes so clear. Then the scatter of red and gold leaves wind tumbled across the pavement is a movement of the symphony that is everything, then glory leaks from around the edges of every moss frond, weathers out of the rocks, sizzles in your eyes and dances across the corners of your smile.
And I stand wonder struck, giddy with the knowledge that the sap rising in the trees, the blood running through our veins, the gasses spinning off into space from raging solar storms across a hundred thousand million suns, and the spaces between these things are all over-full of Holiness. That there is nothing, including the nothing, that is not more than we could guess; that is not shot through with, overflowing with, Divinity.
And I might never have noticed, if it weren’t for the times something goes wrong inside, and I skip sideways out of the everyday world into the jangling wrongness that is a brain misfiring. It is that step out of the ordinary that lets me see, when I finally settle back in like a sigh, that this whole magical Universe is wonder, is so achingly good no wonder it hurts to lose step with it.
And that does not, for a moment, mean I do not look in those moments and not see what is wrong. But with the clarity anxiety brings I can see it is not the world that is wrong, not even the people in it, it is the moments when we are skipped out of rhythm by greed, bigotry, a need for control, fear, cruelty, or hatred; when these things drag some singing crystal soul out of synch with the ringing beauty that Is. The jangle of that wrongness we feel and know; evil.
There is a fundamental difference between those different ways of slipping out of the stream of the Universe. Between those things we can chose, and those things beyond our control. But my own experience tells me that when we have found ourselves out of step with what is Good and Beautiful we can come back.
And when we do, it is sweeter than had we never left.
