Saturine anguish may give gifts to life's meaning

Avatar Arts offers a post by Neve, "Melancholy is Meaningful", that quotes Thomas Moore's Dark Nights of the Soul about being "in Saturn":

"You do a disservice to yourself when you treat your feelings of despair and emptiness as deviations from the normal and healthy life you idealize. The dark times too, like enlightenments leave their mark and make you a person of insight and compassion."

After describing a two-day period of feeling down, Neve offers five ways to invite the Saturnine spirit, rather than trying to ignore it. Her second suggestion is to read melancholic poems, quoting Emily Dickinson, one of Moore's favourite poets: "For each ecstatic instant we must an anguish pay in keen and quivering ratio to the ecstasy."

Avatar Arts wants "to combine art and spirituality to inspire and empower others to live a more conscious, creative, and luminous life every day."