Fish on Friday and trying to get intouch with a creative dream I had where I awoke depressed. A place one avoids wrongly; as it has to be faced and gone through.

Good day to you one and all from sunny Luton. Where although its sunny outside,I have had a few dark nights of the soul. 
What keeps me going is knowing primarily, my two teenage sons would be devastated if I was to pass from this world by my own intention and I am sure many other people would be sad. Also my faith in an almighty everlasting power of love gives me hope to hang on in here a tad longer.
So I am sticking on at the moment and am here to share my art and such with you!

I am going to try hard over the next goodness knows how long, to get in touch with the feelings of depression and grief which I keep buried deep down. 

While I am composing this blog I am listening to the sounds which I hope you may be able to get that I list below this sentence.
 http://youtu.be/oXptjz9kfhw

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 Depression comes from fear of confronting yourself for your past. Healing comes from self-confrontation.

 “The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

 I have two favourites. The first was said by a charge nurse in a hospital I favoured with my presence for some time. He said, "When you are going through hell - keep going!" The second is a very old saying, simple, but effective. "When you turn to the sunshine, your shadows fall behind," particularly apt for people recovering from depression!
The above brought tears to my eyes and drew my mind to my beloved late wife Tracy, who`s suicide incidentally ( or accidentally ) left me with a brain injury from carbon monoxide poisoning. 

 “Some friends don't understand this. They don't understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you're wonderful just the way you are. They don't understand that I can't remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about If you loved me you would.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation 
I used to encourage my late wife to take her prozac, little did I know that it may have contributed to her feelings of wretchedness. Not till long after she was dead did I go to spain and up a mountain pray to a God I couldnt be sure existed.
Now though I am some days more sure of God than I am myself. He blessed me with two wonderful sons, the youngest of which seems to have won his battle against Leukemia. His elder brother has also gone through some tough times and has recently got a bit of relief from his mother kicking his step dad out of their house.

The thing I like about abstract art - amongst many others - is the viewer may get a myriad of different things from it than the artist does. Our last priest upon retiring, commissioned a painting from me and yet some of the congregation just dont get the point of abstract art. Different strokes for different folks I suppose!      

 “Perfume was first created to mask the stench of foul and offensive odors...
Spices and bold flavorings were created to mask the taste of putrid and rotting meat...
What then was music created for?
Was it to drown out the voices of others, or the voices within ourselves?
I think I know.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

"I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy." –Franz Kafka, in his journal

—Guest michaelangelica

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zwMVXVwi3iI
I dont know how many of you will be able to watch this one, but I like it.

During those "black days", friends often try to rouse me from my self-imposed "house arrest". Often a line from a Woody Allen film pops to mind, when Diane Keaton was trying to convince Woody to join a Manhattan tennis club. Woody's response: " Why would I want to join a club, that would accept someone LIKE ME as a member?" When I inevitably laugh at that, I feel better already! If not, then WHY not, right?

—Kaapenaar

 

 

 "Creativity is the antithesis of depression. It is a way of saying that what I think and feel matters...Depression is not just an illness, but a failure of creativity. We all face the problem of creating meaning in our lives. When we're depressed, we've lost hope for meaning. We all need to make a delberate effort to make the self fertile; for the depressive, that effort is essential to life." Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression

 “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats  Oh I  really like this one.

"Depression is..."

"...rage turned inward." A clinical psychologist told me that once. It makes sense in my particular situation.

—SheltieMan

 "Listen, someone’s screaming in agony—fortunately I speak it fluently." –Spike Milligan, in The Goon Show
 This one above has also garnered some tears from me. I taste one on my tongue and I will not say it was sweet, but it was not as salty as I had expected.

 "I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy." –Franz Kafka, in his journal.

What is it then I wonder about us creative types. I am though not as myopic, if tats the right word, as Franz Kafka.  I get the a true feeling of myself when say like the times my sons were born, or I am so impressed with a painting I enjoy looking at, that I find it a bit hard to believe it came into being through me.  

 “I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.”
― Sylvia Plath

 “I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.”
― Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins  I have watched Henry on youtube and enjoy his humour. Or for any Americans reading this; humor.

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Once again my brothers and sisters, that which I pasted above has a resonance with me. Like hearing a tuning fork and making a sound which enjoins them as one.

 عادة ما أشعر انى خفيفة قادرة على ان أطير وأنا مستقرة فى مقعد أقرأ رواية ممتعة. حين أشعر بنفسى ثقيلة أعرف أنى على مشارف نوبة جديدة من الاكتئاب”
― رضوى عاشور, فرج

  I have no idea what the above says, but God told me to include it for someone I do not know where to read.

 

“In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant… My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known — no wonder, then, that I return the love.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

 Have a good day and think good thoughts, speak good words and do good deeds. Remember if anyone wants to contact me or send me any pictures then do so at petgkimb@gmail.com  Know that you are loved and feel love. Your bro Peter.