I despair.

It’s not that anything major is wrong. My health is relatively good. My family is mostly happy. I have what I need. My car works.

All the things that would constitute a crisis are going ok. I can’t say great—who can say great with any sense of security or certainty—because there are things that are wrong. My wife’s health has a seemingly unsolvable problem of pain. There is random tension in the home between my wife and I when our stress doesn’t have another release valve. And we are navigating a special needs child and a teenager. My car’s check engine light remains lit.

So, things aren’t great, but they are good. They remain good. And they get better as much as they get worse.

But still, I despair.

All the little things seem to coordinate their army of necessity to work and plot against me in ways that drive me to distraction, worry, anxiety, and concern.

I pace my home. I drink too much coffee. I want too much alcohol. I snap at the ones I love. I forget to eat. I spend too much time talking about myself.

Maybe it’s not possible to articulate what is coalescing to bring about my despair. To speak something is to name it, to give it shape, to define it, catalog it, understand it.

God spoke and the logos—that final first word that holds everything together, sustained, living—brought the cosmos in to being. That word (logos) became shit and sand sprinkled with stardust and dwelt among us.

That incarnation is the definitive shape of the cosmic god that gave definition to the cosmos. All by a spoken work.

So, when I can’t give words to the cause of my despair, I cannot incarnate something to tame. Instead, I am left feeling these feelings in a maelstrom that is absolutely bigger than it absolutely is.

Without the definition of a name, this despair remains a boogie man, a specter, a wraith made of darkness and blind shapes. I am overwhelmed by the sheer Unknown-ness of it all. Large and looming, I am enveloped in the shapeless void, and so I despair.

There is no way to conquer that which is the darkness that swallows the very night. 

How can one breathe when every gasp is a drowning in the nameless, faceless, shapeless void?

***

A poem called Anxiety.

I have nightmares every day;
 visions of clipped cars, car crashes
 buses rear-ending small Toyotas.

I have to pace when I wait,
 shaking hands into motionless buzz
 of frenzy.

They say it’s nervous energy.
 I tell you the truth:
 it’s thousands upon millions
 of memories pushing to exit me

I must contain them.
 I am Pandora’s Box.
 I keep monsters in my head.
 I am full of the stuff
 under the bed of the world
 where Adam first slept with Eve.
 I am the Beast stalking the corners
 of my closet.

The thing you hope is
 last week’s laundry your
 amygdala wants to run from.
 Reptilian minds understand.

Visions dance in my eyes:
 children choking,
 fire burning its dread path from a fry pan,
 dog bites,
 small talk.

Shudder and shake.

Move to keep moss from growing on a stone body sinking in a tepid
 lake where mobsters of the mind
 decide the ripples of your decent
 would be perfect to skip rocks over
 and over and over.

Reticulate me
 until I must slumber
 to recover
 to prepare
 for the next wave,
                          thought,
                          fear
 when the phone rings,
 and I stand on a large, tall place
 I want to vomit,
 to barf up my dread insides
 and show them dreams are all
 a thing of the mind we fear will

swallow us.

I began writing this poem in my head while I was riding a bus in downtown Portland.

The tight turns against lines of parked cars, the stop and go, no flow of traffic, the constant blind spots I had sitting in the back of the bus. These were the things that reminded me there were reasons for the anxiety that rose every time I sat down on public transit, reasons I felt terror with every turn, dread with every vision of tragedy, worry about what could happen.

It’s important that I began this in my head rather than on paper. I began reciting the first few lines, getting a feel and a rhythm for what was to follow. In reality though, I wasn’t trying to write a poem—as if a poem comes to anyone if they only sit down and try. I wasn’t trying to be literary or poetic. I was trying to name my fear.

I was trying to get a handle on the emotions coursing and cursing their way through my nervous system. Things felt so overwhelming and large that they threatened to take me down with them into the inky blackness of the depths of fear. So, I tried to name the beast, name the thing, name the fight.

Naming something makes it smaller than it is when there are no boundaries. When I can name whatever it is that sit’s on the chair in the corner of my room as “laundry,” I can fathom what exactly it is and take the sting out of it’s being there. Naming the fear, the anxiety, the fight gives my amygdala a rest from the over working fight against the maw of the unknown.

This poem functions best as a naming thing, something that gives shape and boundary to the “dread insides” and allows the monsters in my head to become real things that I can comprehend.

Comprehension breeds oxygen.

What I mean to say is that when I can comprehend, understand, fathom what this is in front of me, I can breathe through the experience I am having with it. So, when I despair, when I fear, when the little things coalesce into the big thing conspiring to kill me, if I can give it a name, I rob it of the power that nameless terror has. I can survive that which I know because it has an end, a limit. If it has a name, it is finite. Whatever terror–and terror comes in all shapes and sizes, wearing all sorts of name tags—comes, if I know it has an end, I know that it will pass eventually.

If I know what it is, I know there is an end, and if I know there is an end, I know I won’t drown.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

-Emily Dickenson, “Hope” is a thing with feathers – (314)

Hope needs to be named as well.

I name despair to tame it, to form it, to give it edges and boundaries. I name hope to pull it out of the ether. I name hope so that I have something to hope in. I name hope so that I can touch the substance of that hope and picture it as a real thing.

While despair looms larger than it actually is when it is unnamed, hope when unnamed dissipates and remains elusive, foreign, escapable. With out a name, hope is small, often too small to find. It is a ghost that I catch glimmers and glimpses of out of the corner of our eyes but can never be sure that what I saw was real. I must summon hope, speak its name like a lost, loyal dog that comes running when its best friend calls.

Am I really implying that hope is off chasing an errant tennis ball or a wild eyed squirrel and all we need to do is name it to have it return? Could it be that simple?

It is, if I have the courage to hope.

Drowning in despair is easy. Becoming overwhelmed by an over worked brain that knows what wrong on top of what could go wrong is almost my default setting. Losing hope, that’s the easy part. The hard part, the courageous part, is summoning the will to hope again in the face of the named and unnamed fears and terrors that we know are there. When I choose to hope, when I summon that courage, I am making a choice to live. I am deciding—maybe it’s out of spite or stubborn hardheadedness—to not capitulate to death.

And here I find the core of breathing under the tumultuous waters of despair: I choose to keep going.

Christ chose to keep going in the garden of Gethsemane. There, he made the ultimate choice: to escape suffering and pain or to follow kenosis to its conclusion and gain victory over power structures, systemic sin, and oppressive systems by proving they couldn’t get him to capitulate to their ways.

Jesus entered into the center of the suffering of all humanity by choice. He didn’t let the terror of death—even death on a cross—deter him or deviate his trajectory. He chose to keep going, even knowing it was going to hurt.

Suffering isn’t something I can circumvent and hope for the same result. When suffering touches me and I despair, it is then that I move to the cusp of transformation, transfiguration, resurrection. When the little things coalesce and threaten to pull me under, this is when I am faced with he choice to give in, give up, to suffer in meaningless ways even as I try to run from it—as if I was Jonah running from God. Or to suffer with the dignity that comes from the knowledge that I have chosen to remain and even though my body may die—it probably won’t die from despair even though it feels every inch like death to my physiological self—I remain as something truer than the suffering.

I name the suffering, and thereby give it shape and limitations. I name hope to conjure the strength to last the fullness of suffering, knowing that it cannot take from me what I don’t give it.

All this is a long way to say that even when I despair, I know I can choose to hope, choose to remain, choose to endure knowing that it will not be forever.

Death in all its shapes and sizes comes for us all. No one gets out alive.

But death in all its shapes and sizes doesn’t get the final word. We will all live, and it will be glorious.

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