By Melanie Kim Brockwell in My Daily Journal

The Storm Dragon Revisits

October 29, 2023

I am often depressed.

The last few days have been difficult, filled with storms of the heart-mind. I am a storm dragon, after all. Whence one comes, a significant one, of thunder or drenching rain, of two cycles intertwining to form one unseasonable event, I feel it. It haunts me, sometimes days before it occurs.

There is sadness, wishing an end-of-life, unsettled circling of the house and yard, unquenchable thirst and a kind of blanking of the taste buds making food completely unfulfilling. I ride a wave, washed up and down by way of music and theatre, light and sound, affected by the cool dark of night as much as the Spring bright electrifyingly sprite-filled day. An automatic undercurrent takes over to lead me from room to room, to listen to and watch this or that, to read or do whatever, wherever I find myself. I rely on it, in a way, the way a sick husband depends on his neighbour, the way a tired bird leans into a branch, the way a frightened child all alone has no-one and yet knows of a secret silent way out, through, speaking to his whole self as she lay paralysed by the world around them.

I can’t negotiate an end. There is no way around it. I can only, if I try, if I am lucky enough, find peace in its seriousness as it lets me go. It highlights the cruelty of the world, of society, of man and civilisation as much as beauty. The beauty available in connection, in nature, in light and dust, and fore-giveness. And, in its clutches, I am safe until it is over and I am given back again to the night of my own and daylight that follows.

It’s exhausting. Maybe that’s the point. To tire me out. To distract me from what other things may have been about to be going on if it weren’t for the storm brooding in my wake. I cannot say. I do not know. I am only here, now doing this and being, simply being. Typing what my fingers dictate and delivering us all from our own inner turmoils on the next page, and the next. For what is confusion but the assumption that we know what it is we are meant for and believing this is not it.

What is turmoil without judgement? Where might we find ourselves, in the next moment and the next, if only…