the small lake at my local park, from my February dreamboard.

We recently passed the one year mark of life here in Copenhagen. Baring lay-offs, we have a mandatory two-year assignment. But given Paul’s ship cycle, and what he needs to do for and with his team, we’re looking down the barrel of being here at least three years. … Can you tell by my metaphor how I am feeling about this?

For a long time I thought I would get used to being in Denmark. I was eager to live abroad, and I knew from experience that I like learning and living in cultures that are not my own. Plus, my graduate school was very international, and I enjoyed that mixed-culture experience very much. So I’ve been surprised at my inability to adjust to life abroad.

For the past year I’ve been on the “accentuate the positive” bandwagon most days– listing all the things I like about living here and trying to embrace the bits that I enjoy. But the reality is, while I like living outside of the U.S., DK is not the best fit for me.

February in northern winters is by far the hardest month. So much so that at my Seattle college our advisors told the freshmen to “never change your boyfriend, your haircut, or your major in February.” Nonetheless, February is when it struck me that maybe I am not going to come to terms with it. Maybe this is never going to fit right, to become my community, to feel like home.

I was listening to a story on This American Life recently in which the narrator was describing a heated debate between two political opponents. He noticed that the only time the crowd seemed to be experiencing something as a joint experience was when photos of the war were put up on a screen. When that happened stillness filled the room. What he said about this still space was this:

“Forget all the arguments. Let’s just sit by this lake, and try to figure out its name.”

At first I didn’t understand why this phrase was capturing my heart. Then Jena pointed out that the whole story was using the language of struggle and that I have been living in midst of two great struggles: the struggle to live cross-culturally; and the struggle to live with chronic pain. For a long time I’ve thought that there were only two choices about how to respond to these struggles: “Stand and Fight,” or “Lay Down and Die.” But what if there is a third way? What if it involves sitting in the place where stillness pools. What if it involves turning around, looking into the face of loneliness, and saying, “Okay, so you’re here now. Have a seat.” What if it involves—not a frantic search for meaning—but just sitting on a park bench and waiting to see what happens. What if? What if?

I want to step out of the struggle. I want to stop trying to like it here. I want to stop trying to be brave about being in pain. I want to step out of the energy of the struggle, sit by the lake, and see if it will tell me its name.

Wednesday are now advice days at Magpie Girl. We can share our wisdom with one another about this thing or that. Launch your queries to moi @ magpie-girl dot com.

So last week we talked about three kinds of sadness: hormonal, empathetic, and pervasive. Your comments and emails have been wonderful, and I love that everyone is contributing to the wisdom pool.

I have a few more thoughts, and I’m struggling to make this eloquent. But better to get it down in the rough, than to not get it down at all right? So here goes…

Right Place: Right Time
One thing I wanted to follow-up on was this question asked by Tami:

“With all the grief and loss in the world, how would one not feel empathic sadness constantly?”

This was interesting to me, especially in light of what Lisa said about empathetic sadness helping her in her healing work with others. In my experience as a minister, I’ve found that people tend to have empathetic reactions only to certain people, situations, or physical spaces. This is sometimes called ‘having a gift of discernment,’ or ‘the personal prophetic.’ Let me tell you a story….

When I was a minister in the University District of Seattle, I had a strong affinity for the neighborhood. Although it was run down and dirty, with people begging on the corners and a plethora of homeless kids, I adored it. It gave me good energy to walk down the streets, and I enjoyed the personalities I encountered there. I did not even mind the garbage. (Once while walking down the alley from the church to my car with the kids, my then 3 year old pointed to a dumpster and said, “Look Mama! Wildlife!” She was pointing to the crows picking through the trash! I found it delightful that my urban a baby considered crows “wildlife.”) All in all, the place and I vibed together well.

Anyway, at the same time I had an acquaintance who came from L.A. to visit. He had a knack for discernment as well, and he lived in a pretty hardcore part of L.A., so I figured the U District would be a cake walk to him. I was so wrong! His radar was on high alert the whole time and he could barely walk down the street without having to back up against the wall and say a few prayers. The spirit of the place completely demolished him.

What I took away from that is that you can be attuned to different things. You probably will not be tuned in to every instance of sadness around you. If you feel panicked and overwhelmed, perhaps that is your radar telling you this in not the area/person/situation for you to work in or with. But if you are just feeling sad and have some sort of insight about an area/person/situation, then that might be a clue from God and the Universe to lean in and listen a little closer.

What do you think? Does that make any sense.

What to do if you are connecting with everyone’s sadness.
That being said, there are times when your empathetic sadness goes on high alert — you feel every news report, every blog post, and every tragic email.

One obvious answer might be that something is amiss and your are projecting, projecting, projecting. So check and see if there’s something you need to grieve in your own life. But if that comes up empty, try this on for size…

One of my favorite stories is told by Sue Monk Kidd in The Secret Life of Bees. In this novel one of three sisters has an over-active empathetic sadness reflex. Every sadness she sees, she experiences as her own. The sisters help her cope with this by building a sort of wailing wall in the back yard. The physical exertion helps dispel some of the energy, and it creates a concrete place for her to express, and deposit her sorrow.

At one point in my life I found this happening to me, especially in regards to world events. At the time I was attending Regent College and was fortunate enough to take classes under Eugene Peterson. He advised the class to sink into one place/issue at a time, and to only focus on learning about that situation. At some point along the path of following this advice, I glommed on to the situation in Sudan, and to help me focus my sadness, grief, and intercession, I built a shrine. There I kept images of people of Sudan, news clippings, a candle, and a jar for money I later sent to a relief agency. It helped to have a place to focus my connection with that situation, and to express sorrow for her people. Perhaps, if you are feeling overwhelmed by sadness, this kind of symbolic focus might help you as well.

What do you do when you are overwhelmed by either grief or sadness? What techniques to you have to channel your empathic energy?

Next Week: How to create a soulcare community when there’s nothing in the ‘hood that fits.

Wednesdays are now advice day at Magpie Girl. Got a question? Need some tips? Email me: moi @ magpie-girl dot com.

***

The other day Kristen at Halfway to Normal and I were having a little on-line chat about sadness. Where does it come from? What does it mean? And what do you do with it once it’s got you?

Kristen was talking specifically about that free-floating kind of sadness that descends upon you sans apparent cause. You know the kind, right? Here’s what we came up with so far:

Hormonal Sadness
Well the first obvious culprit is hormones. Hormonal shifts often cause seemingly random bouts of sadness. One of my best friends told me about this article once that said whatever emotion you are experiencing when you are ‘hormonal’ is probably something that you haven’t been able to adequately address in the past month. When your body chemistry starts shifting into high-gear, that emotion (sorrow, anger, regret, etc) can’t hide out anymore. So in some ways, that hormonally triggered sadness could be helping you out by knocking on your window and saying “Hey! Look at me please!”

We womenfolk have come to expect some moodiness before or during our period. But hormone flux can catch you at other times too. I know my moods (and migraines) are also bad at ovulation (about mid-way through your cycle.) And, when I was breast feeding I would get to feeling a little post-partumish whenever the baby went through a growth spurt and started nursing more, or while we were weaning.

There are some mood enhancing things you can do to help with hormonally-induced sadness. Mild exercise stirs up the endorphins, which help with both pain and sorrow. Calcium, Vitmain D and Vitamin B6 can help too. I make sure my dose is topped up the week prior to my period/ovulating. Ask your doctor, naturopath, or nutritionist for ideas and create a plan to support yourself.

Empathic Sadness
Another kind of sadness is what I tend to think of as empathic sadness – that is, sadness that isn’t mine, but is indicative of something that is going in some connected corner of the universe. What I’m talking about is a kind of ‘sixth sense’ that something difficult is about to go down. This can be a frightening experience; because of course you experience a sense of foreboding.

If you are highly sensitive in this way, it is possible to write yourself a script which helps you see this as a super power rather than as a disability. For instance, now that I’ve learnt to recognize empathic sadness, I use it as a kind of prep time. Just last week I had a terrible random bout of sadness. That night, I made a matchbox shrine using various symbols and items that at the time appeared quite random. Two days later I got a call that a friend had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. Every single object in the matchbox shrine related back to her experience. I packaged up the shrine and sent it off to her right away.

If you’re experiencing sadness that doesn’t feel like yours, fall back on the basics. Free write. Collage. Make lists of words, colors, images. Then sit back and see what the Universe is telling you. If the sadness feels too burdensome, try creating a symbolic place for it until its cause is ready to reveal itself. (This works when you need a break from sadness that ‘belongs’ to you too.) A ritual for this can be as simple as writing the word “sadness” on a piece of paper and putting it in a pretty bowl while asking God or the Universe to hold on to it for you for awhile . This kind of symbolic gesture can provide you with a bit of solace and relief.

Pervasive Sadness
Pervasive sadness that will not lift, or grief or sorrow that does not ebb with time may be a more serious condition. Depression is very common, and can be treated with therapy, medication, even dietary changes. The problem is, how do you know if you are just a little blue or downright depressed? There are assessment tools on line like this article or this test. But of course, the best thing is to see a doctor or therapist for professional assessment.

Over the years I’ve experienced all three of these kinds of sadness. In fact, sometimes I feel like assessing and managing my sadness is a pretty big part-time job. There are days when I wish I could just be happy-go-lucky and float around on the top layer of life — like the stars of the Disney channel, you know? But most of the time I can recognize my bouts of sadness as part of the package of living a life observed. Recently, when I was feeling overly burdened by illness and sadness combined, I asked my ever-ebullient soulsister Leonie if she EVER got sad. She said something quite wise:

What do you think? Can we embrace that? I say we give it a try.

What do you do when you are hit with a bout of sadness? What are your tips and techniques for riding the waves?

click for more on *8 Things

1) S.A.D. Prevention Parties. Advance-schedule friends to come over once a month and beat the blues away. Ours are: Equinox Chili Fest, Soup Night, Dia de los Muertos, Danish in December (holiday craft night); La Vie Boheme Salon (talent show w/Absinthe); and “If You love Pina Coladas…” (‘cuz you need alcohol to survive February!)

2) Get outside. Thirty minutes of even filtered sunlight a day can boost your mood. I get mine walking the kids to and from school no. matter. what.

3) Take your Vitamins. I take 400ui of Vitamin D and a good mix of B vits. I increase the amount of Vitamin B in the week before my period and up the calcium ante to help combat PMS moodiness.

4) Try a S.A.D. Light. I bought one of these this year to see if it can help me weather the..well..weather. As my friend at Possible Water said to me the other day, “I got one of those to. To see if I could NOT cry everyday in February this year.”

5) Stock your Library. There’s nothing like curling up with a good book. I ordered almost all of these from Rocks in my Dryer. And if you’re lucky enough to live in the country of your mother tongue, you can probably find a season’s worth of great reading for free at your local library. (Trust my former local librian, Nancy Pearl for good recs or check my list here.)

6) Go to the Gallery. We are looking forward to manga at the Lousiana Museum and have already hit GL Hotelgaard for Escher. And of course, we’ll be in the steamy Winter garden at the Glyptotek and the Palm House at the Botanical Gardens. Who’s around to inspire you this Winter?

7) Watch Quality TV. It does exsist! Buy, rent, or borrow the boxed set of anything by Aaron Sorkin (I’m working through Sports Night), get a little history from Rome, or overdose on drama with Skins. (When all else fails you can maybe find ‘em on youtube.)

8) Indulge a Little. I’m getting a pass to the tanning salon. (We get 4 hours of sunlight. Don’t judge me.) Maybe you could buy a punch card for an indoor pool, or use all the free one-month memberships at health clubs that have saunas? A little warmth might get you through the chill.

More tips for surviving the winter blues are linked up in my weekly column at BlogHer today, and there’s some tips for kids here and here. What are your ideas for making it through the big chill?

Practicing gratitude for things like this helps keep me where the light is.

Given that we’ve recently moved to a new nation, I’ve done very little public writing about our life in Denmark. There are sheets and sheets of morning pages in my spiral notebooks – mostly about displacement and how it’s triggering delayed mourning in me over a whole slew of lost things. Most of them I can’t bring into focus yet, but one or two are starting to get a little less hazy. Eventually I’ll be able to write about them here, but for now they are still percolating prior to public display.

One thing that has caught me off guard here is the level of depression I’m experiencing. In spite of the charm and adventure of living in Europe, depression is always waiting to find a nearby nesting place. Any of you who have been through a stint with depression knows how even one day of that old sorrowful feeling can make you fear sliping back into the abyss. I’m not overly concerned thus far. As long as the migraines stay relatively infrequent and the Spring unrolls into Summer, I should be okay. Keeping an eye out for my cycle buddy doesn’t hurt either. Still, there are days where there is crying, and phone calls to Jen, and where not even chocolate can help.

Staying present helps. I’m finding that living in the here and now is more helpful than slipping into a past I cannot reclaim, or spinning forward into a future over which I can only pretend to have control. But staying present does not come easily to me. My spirituality tends towards the prophetic which means I live a little less in the now and a bit more in the not yet. In addition, my works as a writer tips me towards the past to find connections between old stories, and casts me into the future looking for new inspiration. But the now, well, the now doesn’t come easily.

Having a rhythm for the day helps me stray present to the current moment. Every day that I deviate from my regular rhythms I find myself living in regret (I should have done X instead…) or being frozen by options (should I write? Bike? Clean the toilet?). Without routine my day too easily becomes a four-hour binge of Dexter, followed by a crabby afternoon where I try to write after the kids come home from school. (Never a good idea.) Last week, when I strayed from the routine, Jen had to spend the bulk of the day talking me out of the sobbing mess that once resembled Rachelle.

Right now the essentials to my daily rhythm include:

Walking through the college garden on my way home from dropping the kids at school. I’m finding that in this busy urban neighborhood I need the relative quiet of the park. Otherwise my tendency to get distracted by sparkly things goes on hyper drive and I can’t quite seem to calm my nervous system.

Writing my morning pages. This practice from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way are a mainstay for many artists and writers. My habit of penning three pages comes and goes as needed, and right now it’s quite needed. I write them every morning as soon as I get home from the school/garden. Now that it’s sunny I can write them on the bedroom balcony – any extra Vitamin D has to help the gloom as well.

Yoga. Yoga. Yoga. Thank god for yogis on DVD. I have to have at least 45 minutes of Vinyasa everyday or I wobble about completely off center. I don’t think I even knew how to be present at all until I started doing yoga. I spent all of my time regretting the past or wondering about the future. But yoga keeps me focused on the current breath, the work of holding one pose and flowing into the next – at least for a few minutes.

Working on a regular schedule. After yoga I grab a shower and get to my desk. Sometimes I actually have to set the kitchen buzzer to make sure I show up at the page on a regular schedule. When I first came to Denmark I tried to write 4-5 hours a day, but right now I’m finding that even 2 or 3 hours is a good day’s work for me – at least when it comes to working on a manuscript. Then I log another couple of hours answering emails and typing up blog posts. Then my alone-time is up, and it’s time to leaving once again to fill my bike basket up with the days groceries, then peddle to the school and pick up the kids.

Without this routine, this rhythm to my day, I’d be a) a basket case, b)completely unproductive.

What staves off your depression? and/or What helps you stay productive as a writer/artist?