Pooh Bear and Mental Health

Pooh woke up that morning, and, for reasons that he didn't entirely understand, couldn't stop the tears from coming. He sat there in bed, his little body shaking, and he cried, and cried, and cried.

Amidst his sobs, the phone rang.

It was Piglet.

"Oh Piglet," said Pooh, between sobs, in response to his friend's gentle enquiry as to how he was doing. "I just feel so Sad. So, so, Sad, almost like I might not ever be happy again. And I know that I shouldn't be feeling like this. I know there are so many people who have it worse off than me, and so I really have no right to be crying, with my lovely house, and my lovely garden, and the lovely woods all around me. But oh, Piglet: I am just SO Sad."

Piglet was silent for a while, as Pooh's ragged sobbing filled the space between them. Then, as the sobs turned to gasps, he said, kindly: "You know, it isn't a competition."

"What isn't a competition?" asked a confused sounding Pooh.

"Sadness. Fear. Grief," said Piglet. "It's a mistake we often make, all of us. To think that, because there are people who are worse off than us, that that somehow invalidates how we are feeling. But that simply isn't true. You have as much right to feel unhappy as the next person; and, Pooh - and this is the really important bit - you also have just as much right to get the help that you need."

"Help? What help?" asked Pooh. "I don't need help, Piglet.

"Do I?"

Pooh and Piglet talked for a long time, and Piglet suggested to Pooh some people that he might be able to call to talk to, because when you are feeling sad, one of the most important things is not to let all of the sad become trapped inside you, but instead to make sure that you have someone who can help you, who can talk through with you how the sad is making you feeling, and some of the things that might be able to be done to support you with that.

What's more, Piglet reminded Pooh that this support is there for absolutely everyone, that there isn't a minimum level of sad that you have to be feeling before you qualify to speak to someone.

Finally, Piglet asked Pooh to open his window and look up at the sky, and Pooh did so.

"You see that sky?" Piglet asked his friend. "Do you see the blues and the golds and that big fluffy cloud that looks like a sheep eating a carrot?"

Pooh looked, and he could indeed see the blues and the golds and the big fluffy cloud that looked like a sheep eating a carrot.

"You and I," continued Piglet, "we are both under that same sky. And so, whenever the sad comes, I want you to look up at that sky, and know that, however far apart we might be physically...we are also, at the same time, together. Perhaps, more together than we have ever been before."

"Do you think this will ever end?" asked Pooh in a small voice.

"This too shall pass," confirmed Piglet. "And I promise you, one day, you and I shall once again sit together, close enough to touch, sharing a little smackerel of something...underneath that blue gold sky."

We all need a piglet in our lives.

- Joanne Wellington

We All Need A Piglet In Our Lives Sometimes!

by Joanne Wellington, February 11, 2020

* * * * * * * * *

Mental health matters.

I really, really think the secret

to being loved is to love.

And the secret to being interesting

is to be interested.

And the secret to having a friend

is being a friend.

* * * * * * * * *

We all carry a little something...

* * * * * * * * *

Pooh Bear – Piglet and Pooh

 by Jacqueline, May 18, 2018

This was posted on Facebook as part of Mental Health Awareness week. I felt I wanted to share it to help eradicate the stigma which still surrounds mental health issues. - Jacqueline

“Piglet?” said Pooh.

“Yes Pooh?” said Piglet.

“Do you ever have days when everything feels… Not Very Okay At All? And sometimes you don’t even know why you feel Not Very Okay At All, you just know that you do.”

Piglet nodded his head sagely.

“Oh yes,” said Piglet. “I definitely have those days.” 

“Really?” said Pooh in surprise.

“I would never have thought that. You always seem so happy and like you have got everything in life all sorted out."

“Ah,” said Piglet. “Well here’s the thing. There are two things that you need to know, Pooh.

"The first thing is that even those pigs, and bears, and people, who seem to have got everything in life all sorted out… they probably haven’t.

"Actually, everyone has days when they feel Not Very Okay At All. Some people are just better at hiding it than others.

“And the second thing you need to know… is that it’s okay to feel Not Very Okay At All. It can be quite normal, in fact. And all you need to do, on those days when you feel Not Very Okay At All, is come and find me, and tell me. Don’t ever feel like you have to hide the fact you’re feeling Not Very Okay At All. Always come and tell me. Because I will always be there.”

- Jacqueline

* * * * * * * * *

Eeyore and the Damp and Dreary Day

It was a damp and dreary day

 and Pooh and Piglet were eager to get back to Piglet's house and warm their feet by the fire .

Nevertheless, the two friends trudged through the carpet of leaves  which had begun to cover the ground of the Hundred Acre Wood and decided first to check on Eeyore.

"Hello Eeyore!" said Pooh and Piglet when they came upon him.

"Hello Pooh and Piglet," said Eeyore, in a sad, sorrowful  kind of voice.

"Is everything okay, Eeyore?" asked Piglet.

"Oh," said Eeyore. "Well," said Eeyore. "No," said Eeyore .

"Oh Eeyore," said Pooh, looking at the miserable eyes of his friend. "Would you like a hug  ? It would make you feel so much better"

"Absolutely not," said Eeyore, taking a step backwards.

"No thank you very much. Physical contact is Very Much Not My Thing." 

"Then how about a different kind of hug  ," said Piglet.

"A different kind of hug  ?" said Eeyore, intrigued in spite of himself. "Whatever do you mean?"

"A hug , you know," continued Piglet, settling himself down on a pillow of leaves  on one side of Eeyore and encouraging Pooh, on the other side, to do the same;

"a hug  doesn't have to be about physically touching someone. A hug  can be a lovely cup of tea  someone has made you;

"or it can be a friend popping in just to see if you are okay; or it can be a silent wish sent heart  to heart ;

"or it can be sitting with your two friends, not really saying very much at all, counting the Autumn leaves  as they fall from the trees ."

"Oh," said Eeyore. "Oh," he said again. "I had no idea, that a hug  could be all of that".

He thought for a while, quite a long while in fact, and then said; “If a leaf  is at the top of the tree it will take ages to fall to the ground, won’t it?”.

“I hadn’t thought of that”, said Pooh. “I can imagine we could spend all day looking at leaves  falling”.

“Let’s do that”, said Piglet. For a long time there was silence as Pooh and Piglet and Eeyore sat together and counted the leaves  as they drifted down, swinging from side to side.

"I think," said Eeyore, after some reflection, "that this is the very nicest hug  I have ever had." 

We can not hug  at the minute but sometimes all it takes is to be kind we are all under one sky, it might mean the world  to someone. 

Eeyore - Depression

by Yana Walljasper

Oct 23, 2014

This is a video I made for my Mental Health in the Media class.

I don't own any of the video clips, all rights go to Disney.

Medical News Today - https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322395

NAMI - https://www.nami.org/About-Mental-Illness/Mental-Health-Conditions/Depression

WebMD - https://www.webmd.com/depression/mental-health-depression#1

Healthline - https://www.healthline.com/health/depression

Stepping Stone - https://www.steppingstones-counselingcenter.com/

Poems for a Nuclear Age of Pandemic

Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman

offers words of hope amid pandemic

April 17, 2020

Let's GoForth

by W.B. Yeats

“Let us go forth,

the tellers of tales,

and seize whatever prey

the heart longs for,

and have no fear.

Everything exists,

everything is true,

and the earth is only a

little dust under our feet.”

W.B. Yeats

The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

Jan 1, 1893

During difficult times…

by Elena Mikhalkova

“Grandma once gave me a tip:

During difficult times,

you move forward in small steps.

Do what you have to do,

but little by bit.

Don’t think about the future,

not even what might happen tomorrow.

Wash the dishes.

Take off the dust.

Write a letter.

Make some soup.

Do you see?

You are moving forward step by step.

Take a step and stop.

Get some rest.

Compliment yourself.

Take another step.

Then another one.

You won’t notice, but your steps will grow bigger and bigger.

And time will come when you can think

about the future without crying.

Good morning.”

Elena Mikhalkova

The Room of Ancient Keys

And the People Stayed Home

by Kitty O'Meara

And the people stayed home.

And read books,

and listened, and rested,

and exercised, and made art,

and played games,

and learned new ways of being,

and were still.

And listened more deeply.

Some meditated,

some prayed,

some danced,

some met their shadows,

And the people began

to think differently.

And the people healed.

And, in the absence of people,

living in ignorant,

dangerous,

mindless,

and heartless ways,

the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed,

And the people joined together again,

they grieved their losses,

and made new choices,

and dreamed new images,

and created new ways to live

and healed the earth fully,

as they had been healed.

Kitty O’Meara

How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One

Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

by Sarah Bakewell

Other Press, October 19, 2010

“The effect, in Montaigne’s time as in our own, can be intoxicating. A sixteenth-century admirer, Tabourot des Accords, said that anyone reading the Essays felt as if they themselves had written it. 

Over two hundred and fifty years later, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson said the same thing in almost the same phrase. “It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life.”

“So much have I made him my own,” wrote the twentieth-century novelist André Gide, “that it seems he is my very self.”

And Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer on the verge of suicide after being forced into exile during the Second World War, found in Montaigne his only real friend: “Here is a ‘you’ in which my ‘I’ is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished.”

The printed page fades from view; a living person steps into the room instead. “Four hundred years disappear like smoke.”

Tic Toc

by Tony Smith

93,047 words I’ve found of my writing. I still have 2014 thru 2019 to search. 11 years total of FB. I have more somewhere. A typical novel is 75,000 words. I swear I didn’t know I had this much. I’m a lazy writer. I do not write everyday. I’m discouraged that I won’t get it all together before my time on the boulder comes to an end. Discouraged there is so much more in my noggin’ I haven’t pulled out yet. Discouraged I am having trouble now remembering, finding the right word, even spelling. I’m afraid this is an effect of the tick fever or the onset of an elder mental disability. I never wanted to write as much as I do now. I never thought anyone else would like it enough to encourage me. I never tried to be published like I do now. Hoping for a name brand publisher instead of self publishing. But that takes a great deal of luck and time and I hear tic toc and see the leaves come and go. Tic toc like my heartbeat I heard in my ears as a child.

The man who edits for me is 73. His tic toc I wonder which of ours will stop first. If I’m lucky, I’m in the morning and I'll limp to the coffee pot. Take the 1st round of meds. I’ll start on desk chores I hate. I’ll hope I don’t hurt too much to perform outside tasks. I’ll find a way to sit at the keyboard after a story rushes through my brain and I can at least remember the motion of it, a smell, a noise, the trigger of it. I write a lot of humor but there is also pitch black and tears and screams and clawing in my head. I need to get that out too but watching your reaction is hard to do. The truth is hard to look at, it brings fear, regret, remorse and shame to me. The fear of no reaction is maybe worse.

There it goes again. While I am pecking with my thumb on the iPad qwerty with one eye open, the tic toc becoming bolder taking me to a tomorrow I hope. G'nite. I never am quite sure where I’ll go when I tap the keys.

Tony Smith

April 22, 2020

I thought a song for sheltering in place might be Too Much Time On My Hands by Styx, but chose Chasing Cars as it speaks to being with someone you love and just forgetting about the troubles of the world. Weird video, but I like this song. - TJ

Snow Patrol - Chasing Cars (2007 version)

Courage
by Anne Sexton

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,

if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
comver your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,

if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,

when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

Anne Sexton

Samuel Mang'era, Kenyatta University's Arboretum in Nairobi | PTP Studios

 Messages to the Coronavirus

Link to NPR article here

by Eyder Peralta

International Correspondent, East Africa

"We also cannot afford to pay you too much attention" -

especially with a huge plague of locusts at hand.

- Samuel Mang'era

Dear Corona virus,

Welcome to Kenya. A few things you should know. Here we don't die of flu, don't be surprised if you fail to succeed. Usishangae [Don't be surprised], everything fails in Kenya. We are more likely to die of a cholera attack than to be killed by you. For us, every day is a run escape from death. We are the walking dead. Death is part of our lives the shadow that lingers over us from the time the umbilical cord is cut and buried behind the house to the time we fundraise for expensive arrangements to bury a no longer useful block of dead meat. Death can befall us anytime and we are not scared. It if comes, let it come. Why worry over what we can't control? Everything dies right? Even you corona will die!

Samuel Mang'era

Poem by Crown Heights Jewish Teen Goes Viral

Grief

by Nancy Cross Dunham

what I'm learning about grief ...

is that it need not be

a heavy gray shawl

to wrap myself in,

clutching my arms tightly

across my chest

nor ...

need it be

a granite rock

that I should try

to push away

neither is it ...

... at least, no longer ...

a vast dark ocean

ready to pick me up

and slap me down

without warning

what I'm learning about grief ...

is that it is not me,

but that it offers

to become a friend

a friend ...

who will lightly lay a hand

on my shoulder

when tears come in the dark

a friend ...

who will laugh

out loud with me

at remembered silly moments

a friend ...

who can still hear

the music of our life

what I'm learning about grief ...

is that this friend

doesn't intend

to leave me

but promises

to hold my hand

to carry my memories

a friend ...

who will bear witness to my love

as I venture

toward the next day

and the following night

Nancy Cross Dunham

“The Peace of Wild Things”

by Wendell Berry

Listen,

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Video Link