Hard times when sadness hits. Advice comes in all forms and shapes and levels of triteness (if earnestly felt), levels of pragmatism, levels of wishful thinking, or levels of abandon to a higher power. Nothing wrong with picking and choosing among the options, whatever appeals, as long as it lifts the dark.

Today’s Smörgåsbord (some of it found in selected offerings by Maria Popova’s incomparable newsletter BrainPickings) includes

the “human connection and plants will heal” variety,

and the “God will right it, but in the meantime, for God’s Sake, stay busy” variety,

found in a letter by Charles Dickens, written in 1862 to console his grieving sister:

I do not preach consolation because I am unwilling to preach at any time, and know my own weakness too well. But in this world there is no stay but the hope of a better, and no reliance but on the mercy and goodness of God. Through those two harbours of a shipwrecked heart, I fully believe that you will, in time, find a peaceful resting-place even on this careworn earth. Heaven speed the time, and do you try hard to help it on! It is impossible to say but that our prolonged grief for the beloved dead may grieve them in their unknown abiding-place, and give them trouble. The one influencing consideration in all you do as to your disposition of yourself (coupled, of course, with a real earnest strenuous endeavour to recover the lost tone of spirit) is, that you think and feel you can do. . . . I rather hope it is likely that through such restlessness you will come to a far quieter frame of mind. The disturbed mind and affections, like the tossed sea, seldom calm without an intervening time of confusion and trouble.

But nothing is to be attained without striving. In a determined effort to settle the thoughts, to parcel out the day, to find occupation regularly or to make it, to be up and doing something, are chiefly to be found the mere mechanical means which must come to the aid of the best mental efforts.

There is the “always look for the bright side” variety (alas communicated by an artist who took his own life after decades of depression, by drinking a glass of cholera infected water no less) Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky:

I am sitting at the open window (at four a.m.) and breathing the lovely air of a spring morning… Life is still good, [and] it is worth living on a May morning… I assert that life is beautiful in spite of everything! This “everything” includes the following items: 1. Illness; I am getting much too stout, and my nerves are all to pieces. 2. The Conservatoire oppresses me to extinction; I am more and more convinced that I am absolutely unfitted to teach the theory of music. 3. My pecuniary situation is very bad. 4. I am very doubtful if Undine will be performed. I have heard that they are likely to throw me over. In a word, there are many thorns, but the roses are there too.

Of course there’s also Emily Dickinson, who knew that in the end, advice is useless. (And who knew how to mess with readers’ expectations – the poem below could be anything, a description of depression, a descent into madness, an ode to forgetting something traumatic, or a REALLY bad migraine….)

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

BY EMILY DICKINSON

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb –

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

(How I a d o r e Dickinson – that final ambiguity, finished knowing – it could be the end of knowing, or a state of arrival after plunging where you now know….)

May the planks of reason be sturdy and refuse to break. May a neighbor bring you amaryllis. May your day be busy with a structure that has meaning. May this endless rain stop so I can go out and forget everything while photographing plenty of rose hips among the thorns! November’s red confetti.

Muskrat baby (in November?) agrees – saw him this week.