The eyes on the bus

I want to know what occurs to you when you hear the term “self-care”. I want to know what happens when you hear: You exist and are real. That, therefore, you must live and take care of your container, your body.

I first heard “self-care” during my training as a rape crisis counselor. I was a feisty 21-year old with a lot of energy invested in my identity as a crusty vegan feminist. My fellow counselors discussed the importance of self-care, but I couldn’t overcome the notion that it was blasphemy to waste precious time on meditating, weekends off, and creative projects when I could be using that time to help others. How could I justify “indulging” in self-care, when so many humans and animals hardly get to live at all? Like most other things I know, I learned the hard way that in a society based on so many hierarchies placing one body above another, self-care might be amongst the most political and revolutionary ideas one can engage with.

As a rape crisis counselor and supervisor, I was working overnights on the hotline. During that time, I also founded an animal rights group and became involved with anti-war organizing leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. All these issues were embedded with each other in painstaking ways I couldn’t escape. My cells and heartbeat obsessed. Every day I made new connections between the hierarchies and violences permeating the planet, from the destruction wrecked by global capitalism, to that done against individual bodies on dinner plates. The choice I made in the face of this overwhelm was to starve. How could I stop for dinner when a shift needed to be covered? When I had to facilitate a meeting? When Iraqi children were being destroyed and I had the privilege of a voice?

Since adolescence, anorexia had been my default. Yet I hesitate to indulge some grand personal narrative around this. It’s true that I’ve obsessed in a manner, to a depth, that you’d only understand if you’ve had an eating disorder. Eating disorders are a purgatorial encasement comprised of out-of-control thought-patterns that incessantly generate themselves through your body, consuming your reality like a tyrant who may or may not exist in a guard tower. Eating disorders are torture. It doesn’t matter who you are; they don’t discriminate based on intelligence, bravery, strength, or political orientation; based on whether you are made out of love or hate. Anorexia doesn’t come from personality, yet it destroys personality altogether. It comes from a place before you, and it goes beyond who you are, infiltrates you from all sides and from around every external and internal angle. It makes you it. It becomes your only story. This is why I hesitate to write about it. I want to say things that go beyond a tired individualist tale and into the realm of helpfulness.

The best I can come up with is: I’m writing this, offering it, because, if you are so alone that you cannot even find your own body, I want to remind you that you are allowed to rest and be gentle, to hold yourself back into existence. I want to tell you that you are wonderful. I suppose I could say things like: My self-destruction arose from a message I’d internalized during my personal and cultural upbringing—that my existence, my literal and metaphorical body, had time to wait. There was only so much happiness to go around, and I had to sacrifice some of mine for the sake of those who seemed to have none.

So, you? How do you hold yourself? Do you see that you exist? Me, I lost so many pounds of myself that I couldn’t get out of bed. I vomited blood, broke bones, destroyed my stomach, lost my hair, got banned from the gym, fucked up my teeth, forgot where I was, got lost on my own street. Eventually I was forced to remove myself from almost all the political and social work projects I was involved in and enter treatment. Everything became its opposite. Maybe you’ve enacted a similar story. If so, I bow to you. Eating disorders override all things life-ward and good. If you’ve been to the depths of one, you have seen hell and known hell’s profound wisdom. Tell people about what you have found there. Tell people how anorexia puts a prison inside and outside you. It makes you into a prison and it makes a prison around your prison. Oppression is a prison in which we learn to police ourselves. Tell people how we can break the prisons if we decide to see them. To see our own prison bars and to see each others’ and maybe, if we are strong enough, to even see the prisons that encompass the guards. Tell about how in order to do these things, we need each other—desperately, profoundly, in ways that we might not have even conceived of yet.

When I was in that hospital that time–it was, unfortunately, far from the only one my eating disorder landed me in—there was one political project I rationalized lingering with, for it was mobile. I’d been helping a friend with some important research and brought all my materials and books with me to the locked ward. I could only use a tiny pencil to write, and I had to sneak it in, because pens and pencils are considered dangerous in these kinds of places. Two days later, my heart almost stopped. It was my 23^rd birthday. Because I was almost dead, I do not recall this happening. I recall waking up and my roommate on the ward swinging her fists at doctors. She wouldn’t eat because she thought they were poisoning her. It was then that I was persuaded to put the books away. At night my roommate moaned and I whispered to her: I know you know yourself. You exist. Keep going. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

For months my life was consumed by all-day eating disorder treatment. I was essentially forced to eat food that, to me—someone who’d spent most of my life considering and advocating ethical ways to eat—was unethical. It was more than a year before I was able to re-engage with the things I cared about. This might seem extreme. Yet almost all the helpers, activists, and radical dreamers I know have at some point experienced a consequential degree of preventable self-neglect. Very few have truly internalized the vital connection between oneself and others that self-care sustains, a connection that evaporates with self-destruction.

I often turn to a story Thich Naht Hahn tells about the eyes of a bus driver. We’re all on and around her bus and our lives depend on her ability to see. On her intricate awareness of the road, how to move the machine and do the job. This is literal. If the bus driver closes her eyes, gets drunk, gets dizzy, goes blind, or has a heart that stops, we’ll all be deeply harmed. This is the nature of self-care. It’s intimately tied into the well-being of everybody around us. It is the opposite of personal indulgence because the self is not just the individual. We’re all riding on each others’ bus, whether or not we want to, simply by virtue of being alive together. Without a basic awareness of what we need, how we work, what our strengths, intentions, and weakness are, and how to be present and alive, we risk causing profound harm even when we think we are being neutral or helpful.

If I’d chosen to be healthy, I’d have been able to do more, and better, work. I’d have felt happy doing it, instead of guilty, depressed, and anxiety-ridden. I wouldn’t have had to spend months unbound, eating food I advocated against and using my time and resources trying not to die. I’m positive my self-destruction, reactivity, and poor health affected others in ways I’ll never know, because I was driving the bus with my eyes closed and I crashed. I experienced this crash and so did everyone around me: my loved ones, my colleagues, my clients and those I counseled, my cat, everyone I wanted to help, the folks who wanted to help me. Many of the political systems I was trying to name and break down—patriarchy, violent food production, hatred and destruction of bodies—were actually strengthened.

But to heal from anorexia is to grow yourself back. To grow yourself back is to grow others back. I was so terrified that I almost disappeared. I healed and I appeared again. I was so terrified that I almost unfastened my heart and dropped it in a cultural garbage can. I healed and grew my heart back. I dug my heart out of the war because I do not support the war. I stopped an entire war by healing.

At first, I brushed off self-care as inherently apolitical—some kind of sneaky twist on hyper-individualistic consumerist culture. And it’s true that self-care, like everything else, often gets channeled through Western culture as little more than a brand to consume—a quick-fix tweak of diet, a brand-name exercise regime, an excuse to disconnect. A solely individualist pursuit that should come at the cost of everything and everyone else; the other extreme, the rejection of the political for the unadulterated personal. But if we are to be effective mutineers, we must be able to mindfully contend with these extremes of relating to the self. To take care of ourselves in a manner that doesn’t reject the body for the politic or the politic for the body, because the two are connected in ways that came before and go beyond both of them, and beyond words and constructions altogether. If you inhabit a body that’s in some way been deemed unacceptable— if you’re a woman, a queer person, a transgender person, a person of color, a person of the “wrong” size or shape, a trauma victim of any gender— then to insist upon your own existence is one of the most revolutionary acts you can perform.

There are so many simple, free self-care practices that we can try to commit to: eating as well as possible, getting enough sleep, mindfully building breaks into our lives. Contemplative activities like journaling, developing presence and awareness through meditation, and spending time outside can change the entire game. We can set up childcare, meal, and work shares to help each other create space for rest. Whenever possible, we can ask others to take over tasks we don’t have energy for. On the path to radical self-care, saying “no” is sometimes in everybody’s best interest. It takes patience and awareness to create new habits. We must be so gentle and creative. But even just twenty minutes a day of self-care has changed my life. For those who are worried about losing their perspective, or their identity, to self-care, I promise: I haven’t lost touch with my passions—in fact, I’m a much better, happier, and more useful version of myself now.

Just like the rest of the sentient beings, we don’t deserve to starve, and we’re part of many systems that are affected by our starvation. For better or worse, it’s impossible to opt out of the reality of not being alone in this strange existence. If we don’t have health and awareness, if we’re unnecessarily starving in a societal trash heap, we can’t have ourselves and each other. This “each other” extends from our loved ones to all beings across the world. I believe this is spiritual, dharmic and karmic, but it’s also plain old physics, biology and evolution. Our genuine well-being is nothing but magnificent. It is in our ability to create enough well-being to go around for everyone.

The thing is, control is not the same as agency. Agency is big, it is empowering; control tries to contain and dominate things. Even at my worst, I have the agency to try to turn dominance into co-operation, power-over into power-with. When I am overwhelmed by personal losses, I can look at myself and be a witness. I can say, “I see you. You are in pain. Let’s rest.” We can say that to each other. When I am overwhelmed by my perceived powerlessness in the face of issues as big as wars, rape, factory farms, and ecocide, I remember that I do not have to contribute to the fucked-ness of the world by harming myself and, by proxy, those around me.

A beautiful person I was in treatment with once said, “Eating disorders are when you are busy dying. I want to be busy being alive.” Yes. That’s just it. We’re huge and ravenous and impossible to contain; this is terrifying. Especially as a woman in this culture, it’s supposed to be. When there is pain, sometimes it feels nearly impossible to keep my eyes open. But when I can move beyond the fear, I find myself in an inexplicable wellspring of wonder and reverence. It’s the kind of wonder where I can’t breathe, like when I saw the Milky Way from that deserted West Virginia field, or when I stood in a rainbow beneath Niagara Falls, or when I touched the Mississippi River, or when I find that pink tree on my block in the spring, or when it’s firefly season. Or when I met my nephew the day he was born. And suddenly I remember why I need to start being busy being alive. Suddenly I feel the need, with a desperation as big as my heart, to beg you, all of you who are in so much unnecessary pain: Come with me, come with me, come with me…there is so much to see on the other side! It is real. To heal is real. You’ve got to believe me. Look at yourself. You have hands and knees, a face, lungs. You have pens and paper. You, yourself, are as spectacular as everything you love. Do not listen to the tyrant—take up your own space. Come with me.

The Next Big Thing Blog Post

Fabulous Cynthia Reeser

Cynthia Reeser, writer, artist, and editor of Aqueous Books and Prick of the Spindle, has graciously tagged me to write a Next Big Thing blog post, in which writers chat through internet-land about an upcoming project. You can read about Cynthia’s new book in progress, a short story collection called Lefenstrausse, over here at her blog.And as for me:

What is your working title of your book? A Child Is Being Killed.

Where did the idea come from for the book? I began writing this book immediately after I finished reading Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School for the first time, which is a radically shattered text about sexual abuse, trafficking, and bodies. Later, I read Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster, in which Blanchot ruminates over the impossibility of truly representing trauma through language. He writes, for instance, that it might be impossible to say the sentence “A child is being killed” and have that sentence really mean anything– that it might even be an erasure or betrayal of the trauma. I took this as a challenge to say the unsayable–the disaster–even when you know your words must be incomplete. Words cannot capture trauma because trauma is, by definition, that which explodes all of our systems of meaning and coherent narrative. But the challenge is to speak anyways, for the sake of bearing witness. We cannot have a new society without people who are willing to compassionately witness violence, however incomplete our ability to understand it. That witness will be the floor upon which a radically liberated society is placed.

What genre does your book fall under? I like to call it a novel. Maybe an experimental novel, if that’s not too annoying of a word.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? Unknown actors with blurry faces.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? A teenager named Shrap is attempting to tell you the story of how she was sold into sex slavery in exchange for her father’s business.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? It is being published by the lovely Aqueous Books in June, 2013.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? Several years. I wrote it in fits and starts, in all kinds of notebooks and on several different computers, and finally finished it when I did my MFA.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? I have strong relationships with the work of Kathy Acker, Bhanu Kapil, Selah Saterstrom, and Helene Cixous, four writers whose books I was eating up while I was writing this. I see those relationships as strongly reflected in my book, but god knows if anybody else would agree with me there.

Who or what inspired you to write this book? This musing is long, but indulge me, for this is actually something I hardly ever talk about due precisely to my own perceived inability to do it justice. In 2004, I spent a summer working at an anti-sex trafficking organization in Kolkata, India’s red light districts. The women and children I worked with had all been rescued from sex trafficking and/or lived their entire lives in brothels. Most of them, some as young as eight, had been drugged, beaten, and sold across borders in Southeast Asia under the watch of police, soldiers, border patrol, business people, and various other folks in positions of national and international power.

Part of my job there, aside from watching and teaching kids at shelters in Sonagachi, one of Asia’s largest red light districts, was to research hundreds of pages of news articles for the English education outreach department. So it was day after day of reading story after story about human trafficking. My mind became a veritable clearinghouse of these narratives– police officers, government officials, and millionaires running massive international trafficking rings; family members selling their children overseas so they could eat; people raped tens of times every day for years in tiny rooms, then murdered when their bodies were no longer useful; women and children performing unspeakable feats of creative survival for themselves and others. The incredible things that peoples’ minds and spirits do when they are physically, sexually, or mentally unable to pivot away from hell.

Kolkata, 2004

I had always wanted to write about these beings but I did not quite know how to do it without co-opting their voices. They are perfectly capable of telling their own stories, and have. But after I read Acker, and later, Blanchot and other theorists of trauma and language, I realized there were lots of ways that violence can be fictionalized while still retaining that critical aspect of being a radical witness to the real world. Though much of the violence that happens in A Child Is Being Killed seems extreme or unbelievable, almost everything that happens in the book is a version of true story.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?  I am interested in what it means to be a reader-witness. If books are bodies and bodies are made of story and time, I consider A Child Is Being Killed to be a traumatized text–a violated body of language. I want to know what it means to hold the space of the traumatized body as that body is trying valiantly to tell itself. To assist that telling simply through meeting and seeing it as a reader. To tolerate and trust the dissociation, hyperarousal, compulsion, and panic of that birth process. To be a witness and decide what we are going to do about how the text, and our relationship to it, reflects the real world, where there are more slaves currently than in all of human history. That is my invitation.

Thanks again to Cynthia for tagging me and please tune into these writers’ blogs the week of January 18-25 to hear about what they’re up to:

Stacy Opalewski Walsh will be writing about her new collection of non-fiction stories, How Film Destroyed My Life, which details her experiences in the film industry.

Pampi, digital mixed media performance artist, poet, and activist, will be discussing some of her performance work.

Nancy Stohlman, author of Searching for Suzi, will be discussing her new book, The Monster Opera and Other Bible Stories.

Love to Newtown, Connecticut and to the whole world during these unspeakable days

I want a children’s revolt. In which children say, no more sexual abuse epidemic. No more domestic violence. No more fucking with me with your gender bullshit that you push on me from the second I am alive. No more racism and homophobia that makes us hate and kill ourselves. No more killing children in other countries with your stupid wars then being surprised when children are killed here. No more killing children anywhere, ever. No more destroying schools abroad with bombs and robots that say USA on them, then scratching your heads when some psycho inevitably does it here. No more being the country that is the most armed in all of history and that has caused more catastrophic, unspeakable death and destruction to adults, children, animals, and the earth than any other entity in all of humankind. No more copping out, no more acting as though these things are not connected. No more rapist priests. No more violence on my streets whether via gangs or cops– it’s all the same to us: terror and blood. No more systematic repression of our natural creativity, empathy, and compassion. No more buying us all kinds of shit we don’t need that was made by little kid slaves in other countries. No more destroying the animals I want to love. No more destroying my very planet, my home that YOU brought me into. This goes so far beyond discussions of gun control and mental health services, though those discussions are important. But I want a children’s revolt so that adults will be forced to radically step up and undo the psychology and culture of violence and destruction they have caused. So that the adult world will have to look their failure of children in the face and consider every last implication of it.

Drunken dumbshow

How to discuss this life right now? The universe is attempting to teach me lessons that I have already mastered and I mean that thing about mastering in the best way.  I have mastered the algebra of this particular thing and I’ve done it the hard way and I am proud. But now to have to take the tests again… I will pass but it will be with suffering because there is no nice way to continually do algebra and I am not a genius or a Bodhisattva. I am inclined towards Buddhism but I reserve the right, sometimes, to call the universe ridiculous and amoral and to say “fuck you, asshole” to its tests and be angry in times when anger is as useless as cutting off my own ear.  I reserve the right to curse out the absurdity of timing, of algebra, of stances, of judgement, and to call things cruel even if they are neutral. There are other tests I’ve been studying for that I’ve not been given the opportunity to take yet. I want to tell you more about this. I won’t.

The most useful way I’ve found to discuss suffering: It’s not my suffering, it’s The Suffering, the state of being sentient. It gets channeled at one point or another through all bodies. (A dharma teacher said this; I can’t remember who.) All bodies are conditional, circumstantial, in constant flux and change. It is possible to create the space of awareness to see this, to begin to identify with the sun that’s always behind the weather and to dis-identify with the weather. Not that the mind-emotion-spirit weather is bad, or an illegitimate part of life. It’s just constantly changing and to believe that you are it leads to unnecessary chaos and pain. Maybe not for everyone, but for me, at least. What about you? And you?

Things worth considering: All beings have this in common, perhaps it’s the only thing we can truly be said to all have in common: We are born and we die. We arise and we dissipate. If we are sentient, we suffer in the meantime. It seems the best thing to do, then, might be to imagine the largest potential sufferings then try to alleviate and/or not contribute to them. A wildly imperfect process indeed, but it doesn’t seem one can go all that wrong with it relative to other constructed eyeglasses and circus mirrors through which to view the planet (everything is awful, no one can be trusted, I have no power, survival of the fittest, Almighty God). All provided there’s enough creativity, will, and owning of personal power, of course. I’ll quote this again: ““Well, while I’m here I’ll do the work — and what’s the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.” -Allen Ginsberg. I mean to include nonhuman animals in this to the fullest extent imaginable.

In the near future I will write essays about these things: terrifying political fundamentalism, particularly that of Democrats in the US; veganism as a pro-choice movement and the imperative for animal rights activists to own that and all its implications; my mind-revolution regarding running practice. People should read “Running With the Mind of Meditation” by S. Mipham Rinpoche. I signed up for my first 5K. There is a significant chance it will make me vomit. One time I was riding my bike home from work and I was so tired and dehydrated. Out of the blue I knew I needed to vomit. I vomited over my shoulder WITHOUT STOPPING MY BIKE. I just kept going. I’m telling you. I was wearing my helmet that has HELL spray-painted on the side. You do the math. In this life I have earned my self-esteem so thoroughly. Don’t mess with me.

creatures, AB and AK, crop dusters v. leaps

Friends! Creatures. Here’s a post. Today these two incredible creature-writers, these goddamn power-house energy-manifestations Ana Božičević  and Amy King, gave my blog, this very silly thing, a shout out at PEN amongst some hero-names. I just want to take a moment to say something here that’s been long coming. It’s not about the shout-out. These two folks are tireless explosions who just keep going outward with the red shift. I met them at the CUNY chapbook festival a couple years ago and they have supported me so much ever since. It’s because they f-ing care about women writers and other disenfranchised folks, and their explosions revolve around it. I want people to know about them. Go to their web pages, read their work, their creative work and their essays. They are examples of what we need in this world to make a better world.

Sometimes I cry because I read articles that tell me only 250 tigers remain in Thailand or that capitalist fuckwads are blowing the tops off mountains and blasting the debris into poor valleys–literal and metaphorical–and the head-hearts who inhabit them. Sometimes I’m a body-horizon in my bed for way too long, ruminating about pigs who become pork and the girls I knew in Burma who risked their lives sleeping on boats near enemy guns to learn the definition of “democracy”, because that word’s censored from their dictionary, and how all suffering’s connected but how different suffering is from pain and how the former is a narrated clusterfuck of the latter and is almost always unnecessary. I look at the trees behind my house where the police say a 9-year old may or may not have lied about being nearly hung to death with a jump-rope while I was doing yoga stretches in my living room fifty feet away, and I think to myself, just fucking take care of each other. Just fucking shut up and take care of each other already. And I make these connections that strain my tendons regarding bodies and animals and all kinds of us who are connected and are scared to see how much so, how deeply. Then some folks, the above-mentioned and many others, many more than I am expecting, come marching along, who realize that there’s a choice between being a shit-filled crop-duster infiltrating the earth’s heart and a golden superhero taking leaps and risks to love. That’s all I’m saying, that latter thing. Be that thing. Be that risk. You’re going to die anyways. Be that risk of love. Why are you alive if not for that? I ask myself this question often. Ask it with me.

There are other things I wanted to write about that are now seeming significant in their tonal difference. Let me make some space:

1) The synchronized dives of the Olympics lead to an uncanny valley. Robots exist. I don’t know if they are sentient or not. If they are… fuck. I’ll get back to you.

2) Blenders, turnip greens, strength training for the revolution, conversations about veganism with folks who think they have a lot of differences when they don’t actually, irrelevant iterations of the “Pink Panther” theme in the background, appreciation of arguments that do not involve personal accusation, TNH, tigers, earth, what to say out loud. I want to write your face lightly while rolling my ankle to “Paint It Black.” Don’t ponder alleged details. I sure haven’t.

Temperature/ more search engine terms / Check it out!

Okay, suppose I haven’t written in a month, what then? Update on my weather-mind: As you’d probably intuit, it was hot in Thailand for most of my time there. Hot and dry. We had a winter (I really want to put “winter” in quotes but I don’t want to be condescending to those creatures who have a different temperature-orientation than me) and, where I was living, it got down to about 50 on many mornings. I was living in a bamboo hut and spending most of the day outside so it was significantly chilly. However…

Listen. I’m from New England. If you read my blog, you have probably figured out at this point that I have, for better or worse, a strong identification with this. And the fact is, New England gets cold as a… pick your word… polar bear’s butt? Ice cube? Basement cave’s ice-stalagmites? Whatever. It gets cold here. There was no way I could explain it to folks who’ve never experienced it. The thing is though, it also gets really hot here. And there’s this thing people say that makes me want to bust a knuck: “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” All knuck-busting accounted for, this cliche remains true. There were about three weeks of pre-spring when I got back. It was, as they say, nippy. I’d accidentally locked all my coats and sweatshirts in storage and had to wear my mom’s fleece pullovers which, as an aside, she has an uncanny amount of. But now it’s hot and I must confess: it’s not the heat. It’s the humidity. New England, what’s there to say? Your weather is like the potential of all emotions.

So my re-entry, other than weather, has been mercurial. Should I get into the details? Maybe later. For now, I think it’s time for another update on real, actual, literal, no-joke search engine terms people have used to get to my blog since my last check-in regarding this subject:

fish that change color. capybara diagram. natural people photography on daylight. exploding farts. intriguing cuttlefish. küçük prens dövme. question marks to explanation points quotes. holy call. splitting of heart sounds. landlord is obsessive over mowing grass. fish that can change shape. donut root healer. short western male dresses pictures. how many pounds can a tortoise. acker’s tomato. hippo stomach. penis ball. bjork animals. happy emotional photography. hippy picture with something for scale. scared turtle. anne frank prone. crazy dinosaurs eating people. rainbow exclamation mark. subconscious forest tattoo. hippo with long hair. car sized tortoise. tick capybara speak. disgusting feminists. cuttlefish costume. guys pee on each other. pictures of real hearts humans. evil ronald mcdonald. throw roses at face. fantastic body. giant hippopotamus monster afraid of big words. http://www.acker bucker bambay boo. smash my finger hurts. ace ventura buddha. the capybara;ocean park. adventure plus. lab puppy anorexic. fishing ninja. pictures of hippos working on cars. sarah connor shutting. white light the noise. 1st century dog most attractive dogs. whoever thought of grass for a yard. the significance of prefrontal roared. throwing fertilizer on the face. holy galaxy. yellow jester does not play.

I want to emphasize that a) this is a small selection and b) these are not a joke.

Let’s move on, then. Have you seen the new issue of Sententia? It so happens to be called What She Says: The All Women Writer’s Issue. I’m very honored to be a part of it. Thanks so much to Amy King, guest curator, for tirelessly shouting and whispering and working for women and their words.  Also thanks so much to James McWilliams for his recent support of my work over at the Eating Plants blog.

Check it out! Now I have a nice little organized page where you can reference selected publications and the like.

Speaking of which, a brief note on the building blocks of shushi from a brilliant brilliant manifestation named Steve Brule:

JGL

I want to write about you, to tell everybody about you, but since you have gone, I cannot find my words. I do not know where they went. I imagine a cliff or ocean. The only ones that arrive are: I want you back. And again: I want you back, I want my friend back. The words that arrive are: The world needed you. I tried to tell you that. The world needed you to fight and love. But we cannot have you back. This is the first thing I have written since you flew.

Rest in peace, dear comrade, dear friend, dear ally, dear talent, dear hugeness, dear light and dark, dear being, dear dear creature. Rest now, Jamie. It’s okay. It is hard to be a creature in this world sometimes. We all know that, sometimes subconsciously and with an unnameable buzz on our skin, sometimes fiercely as in an earth-shaped flame or in a salty wave in dreams. But we will fight. We will sing. We will love hugely and fearlessly and with fervor like you did. Sometimes we will take on the pain you took on and that is okay too because that is the name of being a creature.

If you are watching, if you can perceive us grieving somehow from the weird universe, don’t worry. We will go forward for you and from you. Thank you for everything you did and gave and loved; thank you seems like such a paltry expression for what you gave and how you loved. But we will carry it all on for you. This is a promise.

Well-Loved Local Musician and Occupy Wall Street Crusader Jameson Greeley Lavo Mourned By Friends

Video streaming by Ustream

I love you, Jamie.