Pathetic Fallacy
But there are times when this expression becomes both actual and accurate, particularly in the comparison between the rhythms of nature and those of the mind.
Before this starts to meander towards its very own lit. crit. pretentiousness, the context is that I am back in Kashmir, working with our team here again. In earlier posts (Disaster, So what about…, When the trauma takes over) I wrote of the floods that devastated so much of the Kashmir Valley early last September, a disaster that once again heaped misery on the people here.
A flood has the qualities of a mental breakdown, in the pathetic fallacy sense. Something of vast proportion takes over, rendering everything impossible, destroying all functioning systems and drowning so much as it sweeps all before it—just as it feels in mental breakdown.
When a flood finally begins to recede, it seems that everything has been destroyed. Where contaminated flood water remains, stagnating, often for weeks on end, it seems as though all life has been destroyed. Colour has been stripped out or sucked away, all that was green seems poisoned with the lifeless grey of flood silt.
Existing in breakdown feels this way too—lifeless, all colour sucked away, every hour without hope.
Paddy field psychology
I have been away from Kashmir for five months and though this battered place still barely counts as being walking wounded, one thing is abundantly clear; both nature and man march on, regardless.
A farmer whose paddy fields were drowned under feet upon feet of stinking silt has been going out each day, with his family, and each day they have filled bucket after bucket with silt, trudging to the edge of their fields, piling it up into putrid mounds.
If the rice farmer had thought of how much he was going to have to move he would not been able to step out on that first morning, bucket in hand, setting out for his sunken fields.
Now I drive past the mounds of silt beside these fields, and still the farmers are wading, thigh high in the filth, digging, digging, not looking up, or too far ahead. Heads down on the next bucket to be filled. And they have uncovered whole fields again.
Where they have cleared, the wild green of the paddy is coming up.
If someone examines the enormity of how deep they are in the midst of a breakdown they will never be able to swim back up. But if they can find a way to trust that they must just show up every day, to swim just a few strokes, even if sometimes it is only one, or even half of a stroke, they will still be ascending. Eventually they will break the surface, just as the hugely alive green of the rice shoots stab through once-drowned land, just as the farmer goes on digging through the silt.
Each stroke, or half stroke, up through the drowning sense of breakdown is faith in a routine, a system—the farmer with his bucket, the powerful revival of nature in spite of all, the power of ritual, of respecting yourself enough every day to breathe, get up, move, wash, eat, even though it feels pointless, hopeless in the face of the flood of despair.
Ignoring nature
There is such endless chat about how important it is for us to reconnect to the natural world, to tap into its rhythms and systems so that we can soothe our modern world woes. Yet all the while we tap-tap away at it. Many ‘natural disasters’ are anything but—they are manmade tragedies, manifestations of how poorly we replenish and respect the land from which we so freely take. This is not an eco-lecture, but to point out that amidst all of the ranting about nature, and what we are doing or not doing to it, we seem to miss one of the most obvious aspects—that we too are created with a natural rhythm, one that closely mirrors that of natural order.
We seem so set on ignoring this that we drive ourselves mad, expecting to have the consistent level of energy, beyond those of nature and what is natural.
No wonder we break down. We create our own unnatural disasters.
We too have a winter, the time of withdrawal, of lower levels of mental and physical energy. Then comes spring, revival, regrowth, and renewed energy. We have our summer, the season of rich growth, expansiveness, bright colour and experimentation. And then comes autumn, the harvesting of our experience from those times of rich growth and high energy.
We also have our night and day, times primordially designed for the waking and alert state, and also for rest, digestion and healing.
When someone comes to work with us in a state of mental breakdown, we try and establish how far they have moved away from a natural rhythm of sleeping, waking, eating, moving, and resting. Their first stage of recovery is closely based around re-establishing a natural rhythm, just as replenishing destroyed land means finding again the natural balance of the soil so that it can sustain life.
Just as our minds and bodies are inextricably linked, so too are we aligned with the cycle of nature. Whether you are in the spring or autumn of your year, or on the edge of the hot season, consider please, how your mind and body reflect this, and please consider respecting this connection.