Digging our way out

I wrote the following about three months ago.  A melancholia wraps itself around me from time to time.  Feelings of overwhelm arrive, hope grows thin and I withdraw from my friends.  Thankfully my friends love me and provide a safe container for whatever is present.  I have come to recognize the darkness as another teacher, not to be feared or blamed, but to be curious and perhaps bring to art.  Write poetry with it, dance it, engage it in loving conversation.  I write this right now from a loving witness place.  When I'm possessed by the darkness, it's a whole different ballgame and a post like this sounds like airy-fairy embrace your pain shit .  Grace, love, small embers of faith, something - pulls me out.  We all need help digging our way out.  What pulls you through?

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...I've hit another bottom in my life and as I look around, the thought comes - now what?

I've searched so much in my life for the answer, for purpose, to make sense of it all (or even some small part of it - life).

I gather wisdom, friendships, insights, connections and then I find myself at the bottom again.  Tempted to toss it all out and declare everything I have learned as just so much bullshit.

Then something, perhaps grace, a song, a poem, a friend, a sunrise comes along and I start digging myself out of the pit.

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Faith
by David Whyte

I want to write about faith,
        about the way the moon rises
            over cold snow, night after night,

faithful even as it fades from fullness,
        slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
            sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself,
        I refuse it the smallest entry.

Let this then, my small poem,
        like a new moon, slender and barely open,
            be the first prayer that opens me to faith.