My mother never held a baby that way. Even when she was feeding my brother, he always somehow rested on her arm, never melted into her body. In New Hampshire, I finally said something to my brother about never having been treated that way when I was a baby. “No,” my brother said. “Our mother would have held us out there with a pair of tongs if she could have.”

Our materialistic culture breeds depression by promoting distorted and unattainable goals for human life. And our commonly held psychological theories make it hard for people to make direct contact with depression as a living experience, by framing it as an objective “mental disorder” to be quickly eliminated.

I didn’t understand what he meant when I first heard John Lennon sing, “No one can harm you. Feel your own pain.” But I knew his words were true, just as a sudden change in the weather is true, just as the alarm clock with its shrill ring is true.