Birds of a feather

Photo from Alaska Wilderness League

Sometimes as I wander through the streets of Blogopolis, I am struck by a theme. Several of the 20 or so blogs I read with any regularity will have written posts on the same subject, or in the same key. I guess it stands to reason that I would be drawn to like-minded people of similar circumstance. Birds of a feather and all that.

I like it when this happens. It reinforces my belief that the internet fosters connection more than it does isolation. It reminds me that humanity's fissures, however ugly, are only surface-deep. Crackling in the glaze. Underneath it, we are all telling the same handful of stories, over and over.

What I noticed this week was how many people are writing in a minor key. Two people wrote of seeking treatment for clinical depression (I also like it that the birds of my feather are the kind to pull against the tar and squawk for help. It's a scrappy flock.) Others just seem less jolly and more introspective than usual. I can relate. The temperatures in Little Rock have been around freezing for two weeks now, and sunlight has been unusually scarce. I have been sad and bitchy, vaguely unhappy with myself for stupid things, like not being rich or thin enough, or caring so much about rich and thin. It's been the kind of two weeks where I spend a lot of time with my face about one inch from the bathroom mirror, scowling, enumerating flaws. Reading the lines and spots like you'd read your palm — only, looking for the bad news, not the good fortune. No dark-haired suitors coming over the sea for you, my girl. No romance, no fame, no treasure. No more adventures. Face it, all your ships have sailed.

I realize this is skewed thinking. And that my little bout of the blues is piddling compared to the lifelong struggles with depression that others have chronicled this week. For me, the sun will come out in a day or two, and I will shake off my wings and take flight again. In the meantime, I am comforted by the call of others in the darkness.

We have made such a god out of intellect in this culture. We are the worst kind of religious zealots when it comes to the infallibility of the mind. We forget that we are also creatures of instinct and of nature. That in spite of all our scientific and philosophical overlay — our markings on the cavern walls — we are still animals. When the sun seems to turn away, there is a part of us, older than consciousness, to whom it feels like death. It is that part we are keeping warm when we huddle together, whether over fire or fibre optics, to tell our stories — the same story — over and over again.