Waste Land

This was a difficult piece. I read all the interpretations I could find and I agree that it is difficult to wake up after sleeping for a long time. "Warm, covering in forgetful snow" is an excellent description of the sleepy, waking dream of depression. I've spent medicated years covered in forgetful snow, subsisting on dried tubers, and Summer definitely surprised me when I decided to stop taking all those meds. I argued with my doctors and eventually did it on my own as memory and desire stirred the dull roots of the life I was no longer living so much as stumbling through. I think I need more than a week to adequately discover what lies between the lines of this song for me; a year ago or so, I would have sailed through this and known it all but I've come a long way with lots of therapy and trying to bury the snow under fresh new hyacinth flowers.

The Chess Game had a different meaning for me. I spent this summer in group therapy for a very old event that changed my life; it took me 15 years to come forward and ask for help. I admit I didn't "get it" but when I read the interpretations and learned that the Chess game is a cover-up and a description of a rape, I read it again with old eyes and came away with the nightingale who filled all the desert with inviolable voice: that's how the group sessions felt, actually, being able to give voice to such a terrible act and the struggle to find meaning in the senselessness of it, and that sometimes a death is merely symbolic and just to give life to something new. Yes, I understand the sacrifice of the old king for a bountiful harvest; I've always been enamored of ancient legends and myths, and tarot is nothing new but I studied I suppose a different pantheon with different symbols.