Dueling with Depression:  Broken Stones above Broken Bones

I recently had the opportunity to visit the ruins of a 15th-century castle, tucked away in the highlands of northern Scotland. Only remnants remain, crumbling walls surrounded by cracked stones that fell — hundreds of years ago — into the swampy landscape without a sound.

It was a place of calm, the razed castle situated on a small island in the middle of an enormous lake, the large body of water sunk into the shoulders of rolling hills that unfolded into the distant horizon.

Spiders spun their homes in the corners of cellars once used to store grain or house treasonous prisoners. A sense of quietude overwhelmed me, save for the ceaseless wind blustering across the surface of the lake.

I couldn’t help but wonder what it was like to live each day in such a place.  No electricity. No hot showers. No cell phone incessantly ringing with obstinate obligations.

Strangely enough, I felt at peace as I experienced the loud impermanence of such a place, the transitory nature of someone’s brief existence made tangible. You could literally touch finitude with your bare hands. The stones felt course and cold against the skin.

I wondered: How is it that these ruins ease my depressive, anxious mind?

The castle belonged to the MacLeod Clan, constructed around 1490, two years before Christopher Columbus landed on the shores of the Canary Islands.The site was home to a number of bloody battles, including a 14-day siege in which the MacLeods surrendered the fortress to their rivals, the MacKenzie Clan, in 1672. The castle was left largely derelict before being struck by lightning in 1795, burning most of it to the ground.

So why is standing amid such destruction so paradoxically comforting? Perhaps it’s because I work so hard at building my own castles, all neatly tucked away in the corners of my life. These strongholds protect those things that are most precious to me, aspects of my own life I’ve worked hard to build, such as my writing career (or lack thereof). But I often find myself growing restless as I try to build and defend all these blasted castles, forgetting to just stare up into the night sky and let loose my imagination on all that empty vastness above me. All those distant stars, so ancient and massive that they dwarf anything I could hope to accomplish here on this planet.

And those same stars watched with ambivalence the men who bled and died protecting that castle, their broken bones long buried beneath the marsh. What does a star cluster care if some lonely castle was occupied by the MacKenzies or the MacLeods?

We all need our fortifications, practicalities to protect us from the cold or invading armies — a citadel to nurture creativity, to drink and laugh with friends, to sleep naked and content next to a lover.

But all too often I get lost in the shadows of my own castles, in the worry of keeping it maintained and the disappointment when those walls inevitably decay. Ruins are an important reminder that the Earth will one day reclaim our carefully laid stones, leaving only grass bending to the ceaseless wind.