“The best thing for being sad, ” said Merlin in T.H. White’s The Once And Future King, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails.” And it’s one of the wisest things I’ve ever read.

In our label mad culture, we need to give everything a name, and depression is the name we give to the feeling of sadness. Technically, to be depressed means to feel sadness, gloom or dejection.  We have, in America, increasingly come to see depression as a  disease in its most extreme forms, a condition of general emotional dejection and withdrawal. And it can surely be that. There is real medical help for depression.

But sometimes, we are just sad, and being sad is a natural condition of the human emotional range, all of us are sad sometimes, to varying degrees and for varying degrees. We are often too busy arguing or telling each other what to do to talk about the things that often matter the most to us – how we feel, and how we feel about our lives.

When you are sad, good friends become concerned, alarmed. I don’t want anyone to pray for me or worry about me. I know good people can only distract me from sadness, only I can make it go away. And Merlin is right, there is only one thing that never fails. I have learned not to push sadness away, it is the most natural thing in the world sometimes, I sit with it, give it some time, accept it. And then, when I have had enough, I will go and  learn something.

I drifted yesterday into a state of melancholy, a feeling, I think of sadness and dejection, perhaps rejection.  Depressing for sure, but also sweet and cleansing.

As one gets older, you can’t help but review your life, and mine is not pretty in many ways. I am not really sure what I am leaving behind, what good I have done, what my life will have meant. I suppose the winter hasn’t helped, and a lot of loss.  I have to smile at the idea that even though Wikipedia doesn’t even spell my name right, at least I am worth mentioning.

We live in a nation that increasingly runs on fear and embraces it as our national ideology, along with anger. It is in the screens we watch, the air we breathe, the topic of our national discourse.  I may be growing older and trembling in my joints, I might lie awake at night contemplating the disorder in my life and heart. I watch helplessly as our world sometimes seems devastated by greedy and evil lunatics, and I sometimes feel my honor and ideas trampled upon by base and angry people.

There is only one thing to do then, as Merlin suggested. Learn something, create something. Take a picture. Write a poem. Read a book. Write a book. Download some new music. Post on the blog. Encourage someone. Help a friend. Teach someone something they need to know.

Consider what makes the world work, and what might make it work even better. Love a friend. Love a partner. Love a donkey or a dog. Creativity is perhaps the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tormented by, and will never regret.

Creativity is the only thing for me, think how many things there are to create. In sending out images of light, color and feeling to the world, the artist is saving himself, healing himself and the people around him or her.

Creativity and learning starves fear, is incompatible with it, causes it to wither, fade and shrink. Learning is the opposite of sadness. I have a friend I admire who knows depression well, he beats it over the head every day with poems and photographs. That is what heroic means to me.

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And then there comes this, a message from Susan, out there in the ether, reading my blog. Susan is a therapist, she knows the Black Dog well,  she has heard all the lectures, seen all the ads about saving and needing money.  Become a slave all your life so you can pay for your nursing home. We won’t talk about death in America, but we will surely profit from it.

Because of a chronic illness, Susan has not been able to save all the money we are always being told we will need as we age and die. “Hard not to feel I screwed up even though it wasn’t a choice. We are a nation that feeds on fear. It’s our challenge not to go there.” Wise and inspiring words. In our world, if you don’t go to fear, it will find you, that is how marketing works. Be prepared.

“I so respect  how you choose to live your life,” she said. “You are a healer to many people, in addition to the critters. I learn from you, feel validated by you, and care about you. May the truth always set you free.”

You too, Susan, good friend, you too.