Seasons of the Soul: My Bipolar Experience

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With Spring days away, I thought it appropriate to publish this lovely poem by Theron Messer, a graduate student at Oxford University.

From shortest to the longest day
Each season slowly drifts away
With gracious time for life’s adjustment.

As life in cycles comes and goes
Our seasons come as friends or foes
With sunny bliss and frozen desolation.

The budding newness of each spring,
The smell of earth, and birds that sing,
Bring rebirth to the silent death of winter.

Then frenzied summer slows in fall
And autumn’s colors like a shawl
Bring comfort for a coming ice-white winter.

All life withdraws beneath the sod
As nature mourns the death from God
And frost, like fire, spreads the dying season.

Some souls in seasons touched with fire
Hell’s horrors and heaven’s bliss conspire
With the violence of an ice storm in mid-summer

When madness, sadness, and brilliance mix
The lost soul’s moorings cannot fix
On any safe or constant thing in heaven.

The demon minions dance in glee
As battered soul on bended knee
Pleads God would bend to Earth and listen.

Earth’s seasons nearly three months take
But my soul’s seasons quake and break
With bud, fruit, frost, and death mingled together.

I early wake with sunlight spread
And prism’s colors in my head
Excitement and creativity awakening

My mind explodes with brilliant things
Relating cabbages and kings
And micro/macro details undiscovered.

Then racing summer thoughts give way
To bright sunshine on a warm fall day
And peace returns all energy expended.

Soon winter’s ice within my vein
And bone-deep rot like death brings pain
In blackness of depression my soul withers.

Then night-terrors with red swollen eyes
Stare downward from dark blackened skies
And fearing death I yet would soon embrace it.

When dawn arrives my soul is laid
In deep green grass with daisies made
By angels as a comfort to revive me.

I know that soon twill summer be
And butterflies will fly with me
But pain returns as certainly as winter.

These seasons are my destiny
God knows the purpose that shall be
Realized by my extremes of season.

You tell me you have summer highs
Then meet me neath deep azure skies
And soar with me to worlds of fantasia.

But you must leave me in the fall
Ere winter’s death might end it all
Depression is the soul’s solitary season.