life roar: a safe space for anarchist apes

Dinosaur Bees #4! and other publishing adventures, plus Thailand notes and nonhumans

carolyn zaikowski — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:23:59 +0000

HEY EVERYBODY! The new issue of Dinosaur Bees is here!It stars Collin Blair Gabarek, Karen Greenbaum-Maya, Amanda Ackerman, Kyle Hemmings, Peter Schwartz, Davy Carren, Misti Rainwater-Lites, F.J. Bergmann, Matthew Burnside, Matt Robinson, Nick Narbutas, Eleanor Leonne Bennet, Alexis Pope, Suzanne Marie Hopcroft, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, and Meghan Lamb, with a Spirits of the Strange homage to she who is probably my biggest literary inspiration, the dear Kathy Acker! The issue includes such planets as:

“Springfield/ never used to have this /sandwich on the menu, kid” (Hopcroft)

and “I do not have a very healthy concept of family. To some people that makes me very cool but to others that makes me a very bad person” (Schwartz)

and “Little raksasa, little deer-pig, no one fears you either. We both commune in moans and grunts, but you never quite manage to come in on the downbeat. Babirusa, I can jitterbug and waltz, and trot like a fox, but I cannot box like a kangaroo, or swim the Sula Straits with the other babirusas. I am easy to find. I crash into tables” (Greenbaum-Maya)

and stunning photographs by 15-year old, award-winning Eleanore Leonne Bennet– keep an eye out for her.

And, oh hey, Shelf Life Magazine said we had the fifth best lit journal name. Thanks SLM, we love you too! Let’s hug sometime!

What else? I was lucky enough to contribute to, as well be the guest editor for a week, over at Everyday Genius. Check out amazing work by Ella Longpre, Ben Hersey, Kristin E. Nelson, and Amanda Ackerman that I got the chance to show off over there. Do you know these folks and their writing? You would be a better person if you did.

I’m still in Thailand and will be coming back to Massachusetts in April. What does that mean? I’m not really sure yet. What will seasons be like for me now? How will I feel come autumn? What will the flowers look like, at first, and the oak trees, as I have become so accustomed to palm? I think I will be so excited for the pink trees on my block and the firefly party on the dike come May. I think I will hug you, and you. Will Massachusetts feel like home again? Does Thailand feel like home? I don’t think I will know the answer to either question until I leave here and go back there. What if neither feels like home? Will this be freedom or freedom’s opposite? Or perhaps it will be a familiar feeling, to have a feeling of no home. I suppose I will see. What I do know is that time is a strange thing that goes in every direction and takes on every language and form, and I wonder, does it realize itself? What would that mean, if time could do that? Does it matter?

Some thing haven’t changed since I’ve been here: I still dream about vegan pizza, I still get a (perhaps unreasonably) large kick out of things that are the “wrong” size like capybaras and espresso cups (I swear I will write a post on this at some point– btw, I just spelled “post” as “pot”), and I still treasure the opportunity to wear sweatpants. Though there is nothing in Massachusetts comparable to the local, fresh pineapple juice that I currently get to bless my insides with on a regular basis.

There are so many political things, so many huge things, I want to write about in this blog, and my heart feels like a beanbag and my mind feels like an old soccer ball whenever I sit down to try. Soon, though.

This: There was a frog in the water bucket, and he jumped seven times his height. This would be like you or I jumping up a large flight of stairs. My cat sees six times better than me, and in the dark, because, among other things, her retinas are mirrors to light. Also, sea turtles map entire oceans and birds map entire coasts, as those coasts form an invisible line from the sky that we will never see or understand. The skin of a cuttlefish is a brain. Elephants have funerals and can hear for miles, and birds sometimes live on their backs, and it appears that the one cares deeply about the other by all reasonable observational models. Bats are blind but that’s okay, because their ears create their existence and their space. Hens protect their young in the rain with the determination of warriors. Warrior hens who would shoot you if they had guns and thumbs and you tried to mess with them. Cows mourn their stolen children by wailing and shunning food. Once, a tortoise adopted an orphaned baby hippopotamus after a tsunami and became her surrogate mother. The biggest whale has a heart the size of a car. To paraphrase Mickey Z., imagine how much love is in that heart? Maybe that brand of hugeness of love isn’t something humans can comprehend, at least, so long as they are numb and scared and their stomachs are filled with bullets and their minds are filled with lazy categories and wildly splitting atoms.

Eat your heart out, humans

Bucket list, updated again, from the land of Thai; sweatpants, places, animals

carolyn zaikowski — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:22:52 +0000

Listen, I have what the kids call a “bucket list” and every year or so I updated it, in part inspired by several friends including Taryn and Vanessa who also like to make lists as a way to enter the wonder and chaos of life and all that stuff. I really like lists. I always have a Five-Year Plan (whenever I mention this I am secretly counting on any history buffs in the room to get the reference to the world’s five-year plans, especially the ones in the USSR but usually no one gets my incredible joke. It must be that I’m just too funny to handle.) I update the five-year plan whenever I do one of the things that was on it. ANYWAYS I recently updated my bucket list and, as Taryn has challenged me before, I made myself find 100 things to put on it, because I figure if I couldn’t find one hundred things then I am being boring.

Also, this is a slightly related aside, but I think my New Years resolution is to start WRITING IN CAPS MORE OFTEN because I really APPRECIATE THEM and I think they ARE A GOOD WAY TO EXPRESS CERTAIN ASPECTS OF MY PERSONALITY WHEN INTERACTING WITH CYBERSPACE.

It should be noted that I included things on my updated list that I’ve already done from earlier versions of the list, so I could feel good about myself. Those things are designated BY AN “X”. Yes, I’m going to write the whole list. ALSO it should be noted that, if you care about this kind of thing, the sentences aren’t always complete because I am copying this directly from the hand-written list I scrawled down on a bumpy bus in Kanchanaburi.

Sarah Connor had a lot of plans

TO DO IN MY LIFE:

1. Go to India X

2. Go back to India (rajasthan, jaisalmer, etc.)

3. Go to Thailand. X

4. Go on a retreat in Thailand. X

5. Go to Plum Village.

6. Iceland

7. Spain

8. Italy

9. New Zealand

10. Australia

11. Incite the universal downfall of capitalism

12. Yosemite & Yellowstone NP

13. Become a boxer, be able to fight but then never fight

14. Publish my first novel X

15. Publish my second novel

16. Publish my third novel

17. Write a book of kooky essays tentatively entitled “is it politically incorrect to entitle a book ‘i don’t have any cool diseases”

18. Write a book about veganism

19. Learn guitar

20. Run around a lot

21. Become an insane professor who “accidentally” wears my sweatpants to class

22. Grow vegetables and my own beans, toot!

23. Be good at knitting… knit ridiculous things

24. Learn Spanish, go to Latin and South America

25. Be friends with lots of old people, young people, kids

26. Garden/flowers etc… have the best compost pile ever

27. Basic carpentry…. at least build a shed

Shit... I forgot to put see a capybara on my list

28. Have my own house w/ flamboyant, overgrown garden that pisses off the neighbors

29. Love myself X

30. Be healthy and happy X

31. One-month retreat

32. Start revolution

33. Get a hammock

34. Write 100 novels

35. Hitchhike across country X

36. Travel down Cali. coast/ rt. 1 X

37. See Aurora Borealis

38. Liberate one million animals

39. Tattoos X

40. Be okay with cold weather since I am from New England

41. Remember to dance a lot (maybe constantly)

42. Play drums and get big arm muscles from them.

I told you I was going to write all of them

43. See Andes Mts.

44. Live in germany

45. Re-learn German

46. Wear more wigs

47. Live abroad X

48. Scandinavia

49. Write one hundred million songs

50. Costa Rica

51. Square states (WY, etc.)

52. Rollerskate proficiently; get over fear of foot-related things that have wheels (skateboards, et al)

53. Don’t fall so much, don’t spill so many glasses of liquids

54. Have farmed animals as friends.

55. Go to eye doctor regularly so my retina doesn’t explode

56. Be a domestic violence counselor

57. Walk in the forest a lot

58. Get good at bike riding

59. Go camping a lot

60. Be in “Les Miserables” (pref. Eponine)

61. Read one million books

62. Stay in touch w. ppl

63. Make a lot of money then throw it at ppl

64. Spirit Rock Meditation Center

65. Bake a lot, esp. cakes, muffins, also vegan whoopie pies


Don’t you fret, Monsieur Marius, I don’t feel any pain… a little fall of rain can hardly hurt me now!

66. Grand Canyon X

67. Be ok w/ body, I mean srsly, F you

68. See ocean after a hurricane

69. Swim in ocean a lot

70. Be good to people

71. Live to be elderly and when I am elderly be really outrageous with my clothes and tell young people about punk rock

72. To tonglen and metta when I feel overwhelmed or on the verge of giving up, also make lists of things I appreciate

72. Do a lot of stretching…. remember it makes you feel good and helps prevent osteoporosis (?)

73. Make all my own food, eat SO MANY leafy greens

74. Take care of myself because that is the same as taking care of others X

75. Don’t buy a lot of stuff X

76. Try hard to not own a car X

77. Don’t be self-conscious about [things that are listed on another list]

78. Be a free-mic singer in a band where I get to yell/scream/wear costumes

79. Be less clumsy (stairs, curbs etc.)

80. Radical ecology in the heart/mind/space

81. Tropical island! omg i went to one X

Flipping off this "Buddhist" Ronald McDonald in Chiang Mai wasn't on my list, but it should have been.

82. Equanimity

83. Say yes

84. Say no

85. Have no idea and admit it

86. Speak even if voice shakes X

87. Be quiet

88. Take lots of naps inside and outside

89. Meditate in pretty places

90. Live in a loft

91. Encourage awesomeness

92. Floss

93. Have hair like J-Lo

94. Get MFA in writing X

95. See a geyser!

96. Put my butt in a hot spring

97. Interact with dirt a lot/the ground

98. Alaska

99. Make my own soap, tofu, gluten, clothes, soy milk, bookshelves, etc.

100. Be a stowaway on a ship (that’s how I will get to all the places mentioned above)

“My mouth and mind and typing fingers are weapons of mass destruction”

carolyn zaikowski — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:25:50 +0000

Please read this incredible article by hero Margaret Cho. Two quotes from it:

“I fly my flag of self-esteem for all those who have been told they were ugly and fat and hurt and shamed and violated and abused for the way they look and told time and time again that they were ‘different’ and therefore unlovable. Come to me and I will tell you and show you how beautiful and loved you are and you will see it and feel it and know it and then look in the mirror and truly believe it. If you are offended by my anger and my might at defending my borders and my people you do not deserve entry into my beloved and magnificent country.”

“We deserve beauty, love, respect, admiration, kindness and compassion. If we don’t get it, there will be hell to pay.”

An underrepresented cultural conversation, I think, is how important comedians are to sustaining and improving society. Obviously not all of them; Dane Cook… I mean, watch him perform, I guess, but bring a friggin book! Jim Carrey, I actually find that you’ve blossomed into an amazing serious actor, and I admit that Ace Ventura Pet Detective was my favorite movie when I was 13, and I personally get an abundance of satisfaction out of poop and body-part jokes (which might be a part of me staying sane) but that’s not exactly the kind of critical cultural role I’m talking about.

I digress. There is a reason why the court jester, back in the day, was a) the only one allowed to mock the king and b) sometimes killed. Because comedians and jesters work from a level that is beyond what is acceptable for everyone else. It’s their definition and their allowance. And that they are sometimes silenced should tell us something about their potential power. They are subversive in the unique-est of ways, using humor to soften hearts and minds thus opening folks to issues they might not otherwise be open to, like how much of a dick the king is. Now, what are we going to do with the consciousness they potentially give us? That’s the question and the charge.

While I’m at it, watch this, if you haven’t already:

Another thing I think about a lot is how subversive it is for women, in general, to be funny. To be funny necessarily means to be assertive and loud and smart. Not always physically loud, but loud with one’s existence– a determination to take up some part of one’s own space with one’s mind. That being said, I have a soft spot in my heart for women’s physical comedy/humor ala Amy Sedaris, Kristen Wiig, Gilda Radner, Amy Poehler and my best friend Courtney Bartlett… come to think of it, all of my best woman/female-identified friends are bastions of hilarity. Ask anyone.

For a culturally conditioned woman to make oneself ugly for the sake of a laugh, or to use her body in a huge and obvious and contorted and ridiculous way, is subversive, even if the content isn’t. Precisely because we are supposed to be so small, contained, clean, sexy (and virginy too, you big oppressive false dichotomy dicks), and quiet (all metaphorically and literally.) Bottom line: women aren’t supposed to take up their own space. If you’re funny, you have to take up, to reclaim, at least some of it, whether mind/intelligence, body, or both and more.

So do you hate yourself? Your body? Do you degrade yourself unwittingly, degrade your body and mind? I love you and I’m here for you. It’s okay. It’s a struggle, one worth fighting, which I know from an unfortunate amount of personal experience. Keep fighting. Let’s take care of each other. “We deserve beauty, love, respect, admiration, kindness and compassion. If we don’t get it, there will be hell to pay.”

Why don’t we all do ourselves a favor and watch all of three seasons of Strangers With Candy (Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert) for free on Netflix and, I think, Hulu. And also let’s all get copies of all of Margaret Cho’s revolutionary stand-up comedy compilations.

I’ve come across a lot of people/commentary that says women can’t be funny. Hey, guess what? That’s nothing but bullshit penis-farting. Men, be allies, call it out. Women, continue onward in your awesomeness. Folks who fall on other parts of the gender spectrum, explode the conversation gloriously and to your liking.

"Pee on me"

I love my male comedians too, don’t get me wrong. John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and George Carlin are all personal heroes of mine. Gender-fucker Eddie Izzard just blows everyone’s balls to the wall. But that’s another post, if I get to it. Are you bored right now? Do yourself another favor and watch vintage George Carlin on youtube. Talk about subverting the shit out of things! He was the master (at least, in the men’s realm. Margaret Cho definitely stands right there next to him.)

I, for one, fancy myself a hilarious lady. Do you know how funny I am? Maybe I will tell you about it some day. All in all, I’m really awesome across pretty much every realm that a person can be awesome. There’s no way around it. How about you? Why don’t you leave a comment telling me how amazing and hilarious and smart you are.

I leave you with this little note from my temporary Thailand home, which I consider completely related to musings on comedy: I have to believe that the point of life is love, even if I’m wrong. If I don’t throw my entire self into believing this, I will go insane. Join me.

My novel, Kenneth Patchen, and sun-related things

carolyn zaikowski — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 09:05:06 +0000

Hey! How are you? Really? Cool. Sounds good. I’m still in the land of Thailand. It is exactly 12 hours time difference from my actual home and, as such, the sun is at the exact opposite place when it’s there and when it’s here. Well, unless you count that weird decimal point of a minute, or whatever that phenomenon is, that makes it so leap year has to happen. You know what I’m talking about? What’s that called? In any case, there is a sunset and sunrise constantly happening on the earth. And so inevitably we end up with this quote:

“And why were you so sad, then, on the day of the forty-four sunsets?” But the little prince made no reply.

But unlike that little creature, I am not melancholy about the sun, not usually. In fact, here in Thailand, it is December, and still 80 degrees. How does that work? My New England inner child is flustered.

And as it turns out my first novel is going to be published by the lovely Aqueous Books. It’s called A Child Is Being Killed and you can read more about it here, and below is the cover, the cover which has beautiful photography from the one and only Catie Rae Zappala on it. I’m quite excited, folks! I’m jumping into the air right now. No, I’m not really, cuz then how would I be typing? Also, is it possible to develop dyslexia as an adult, because I just wrote “zuc” and then “cyz” before I finally got “cuz” out. Anyways, here’s the cover!

My first book cover... isn't she great?

Additionally, December 13th would have been Kenneth Patchen’s 100th birthday, and it also happens to be YOUR TRULY’S birthday, so I wrote this piece for him and it’s up at The Rumpus today. Check it out friends!

All At Once Is What Eternity Is: Musings on Kenneth Patchen

If you mess with The Patch, he will destroy and then rebuild you with love

With no future/ we have nothing/ to fight about

carolyn zaikowski — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:48:48 +0000

World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns

I’ve been thinking lately about this poem.

Any moment, preparing this meal,
we could be gas thirty thousand
feet in the air soon
to fall out poisonous on leaf,
frond and fur. Everything
in sight would cease.

And still we cook,
putting a thousand cherished
dreams on the table, to nourish
and reassure those close and dear.

In this act of cooking, I bid farewell.
Always I insisted you alone were to blame.
This last instant my eyes open
and I regard you with all
the tenderness and forgiveness
I withheld for so long.

With no future
we have nothing
to fight about.

-by Ed Espe Brown, from The Tassajara Recipe Book

Love you.

RIP Troy Davis

carolyn zaikowski — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:25:59 +0000

Shame on America. Shame on Georgia. Troy Davis is dead. Long live Troy Davis!

Maybe now you’re finally free.

I’m in Thailand/ Dichan yoo tee brah-thet tai kah

carolyn zaikowski — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:45:02 +0000

I’ve been a bit lax over here at the blog because I’m in Thailand. I had to prepare to go to Thailand, which meant a lot of things, including leaving the dear dear home I’ve lived in for four years, and helping my boy Mike Young move to Baltimore for the year, and then I had to actually get to this faraway land. Long story short, it was multiple huge love-explosions from friends and family and community that blasted me here. Rainbow-style, with puppies, etc. So my mind-energy has been circulating in all kinds of ways that haven’t involved a blog post. But I’m going to be here for seven months, so I’m trying to get into a routine. Was in Bangkok, a lovely cluster-fuck of a city where all of the taxis are florescent colors, and now I’ve arrived in Mae Sot, in the Northern Thailand hills, the general area I’ll be staying in for the rest of my time here.

All that being said, I’m still a writer, and I have some writing updates to pass along, my favorite update being that a poem I wrote about our dear passed Akilah Oliver appeared in this summer’s print issue of Eleven Eleven– a beautiful publication. And then it was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, which I found out just as I got to Thailand. So, huge love to Eleven Eleven for their support of my work and, moreover, their support of Akilah’s legacy.

I also have an essay about a car accident I witnessed up over at the new issue of Bluestem. Thanks, Bluestem!

I’m pretty sure I had a dream of this impossibly beautiful space, which, it turns out, is real:

Wat Phro, Bangkok; The Temple of the Reclining Buddha

I promise to write more soon. Life sure is a wild something or other! A son-of-a-gun, if you will! Love you.

I’ll call this post HOLY CRAP

carolyn zaikowski — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 20:17:24 +0000

Colliding Galaxies Form Exclamation Point

There Were Never Any Seeds

carolyn zaikowski — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 22:31:47 +0000

So I’m spread out on the white floor to stare at the white ceiling, when suddenly it occurs to me in a brilliant flash: there were never any seeds. I’d pick the flowers and stuff them face down in the dirt the daisies muddied and the roses crumpled, I’d rip the ripe tomatoes right off their vines and smash them gloriously into the holes I’d dug with my fingers, I’d cover the already grown wonders with fertilizer with shit and that is how I created my garden.

Navigating musicians’ deaths; navigating our compassion and fear

carolyn zaikowski — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 04:35:25 +0000

The death of Amy Winehouse, one of my favorite and most felt musicians, has spurred a lot of stuff in my heart/mind place. There’s a lot to be said and maybe I’ll say it later, but right now, I think of music, and those musicians whose creations you’ve sat beside while you were otherwise alone at night, depressed, pensive, joyful, whatever. How that music was there in a very particular, intimate way that is generally not even like any manners in which we relate to the folks we do know. How those musics and voices and creative offerings seep into your self, binding your life stories with sensory, visceral atmospheres. Sometimes it’s benign or joyful; I listen to No Doubt and am so powerfully, wonderfully transformed to teenage-hood with my best friend Courtney and our obsession with Gwen Stefani. These transportations take place in the body, in the senses. They aren’t simple reminiscences. Experiences with music have powerful effects on our bodies and brains, indeed help mold them. These are body memories which effectively translate, upon the sensory stimulation of music, into a paradoxical state of being present with the past. Sometimes it’s uncanny and sad; I listen to the Black Heart Procession and remember–no, I feel, almost despite my entire self, that Black Heart Procession show I went to with a dear friend who passed away a few months later. I listen to Weezer’s Blue Album and Pinkerton and can hardly put to words the joy that arises, memories that flow forth of things I hadn’t thought about in years, how those albums connected me to beautiful friends, some lost and some still present, and to one my life’s most euphoric experiences when Dave, Adrian, and the rest of us found ourselves in the front row at a Weezer concert. I think of all the times I’ve gone to Bjork’s music whenever I am confused. The calming sense that ensues, that awe I remember to have, so inseparable from her, the spiritual experience of seeing her perform live– it all interacts with my most basic chemistry through my breath, my neurotransmitters, through the softening of my back muscles, and the crawling warmth in my esophagus and stomach. Those are not cognitive experiences; they are full-body memories, silhouettes that stay. We can probably all relate to this felt sense, this transportation that music inspires, how it is literally a part of us, embedded in the neural components of our body and in the habits of our muscle tension, our heart beats, our dancing.

Yet I’ve never met any of my favorite musicians. That undoubtedly powerful relationship to a stranger who offers their music, their voice, their art, their literature to us–what is that relationship? Why do we feel so effected when these people we’ve never met die? Whatever this relationship to our beloved musicians is– or maybe, more accurately, our relationship to their creative offerings– it is an intense and real one. We will never know them personally, yet we hear their words, their laments, their voices, their deeply important musings and offerings, and we experience calm and healing, and epiphanies, and spirit, and despair, and wanting, and unsaid things. The most important parts of our lives are often imbued, saturated with music. These musicians are with us when we are alone, in our darkest or most private places. In our dark rooms at night– there is Amy’s voice, she’s there in an intimate way despite her total removal from anything related to my every day material life and space, her creations helping and holding and inspiring and witnessing me with her sounds. She will continue to do so. That means something. She meant something to me.

I felt this confusing brand of sadness– and strangeness– too, when Elliott Smith, Kurt Cobain, and Jeff Buckley died. Their music had a profound effect on me in times of both distress and joy, and helped me heal and get grounded and remember what’s important in life and what’s not. I’d go to them. Not in the way I go to the people in my personal life, of course, but it is a definite going-to. In times of joy and exuberance, I sang and danced with their compositions, and they helped foster more of that joy and hope. The deaths of these types of folks, our reactions to these deaths, are not the same as our reactions to the deaths of loved ones, but they’re real in their own right. These are feelings to be attended to and to grapple with. They are valid. Unfortunately, we are discouraged from thinking so.

Further swirling stories in my heart is the suffering of Amy and these other folks, how sometimes I could relate to those brands of suffering, and that even though I’d never met them I was filled with deep compassion for them, they inspired my own compassion for myself– and that’s, often, quite a feat. They’re a public voice for all who suffer in the shadows; that’s all of us, of course, just being human– but especially those who suffer from these addictions, eating disorders, and traumatic, chaotic emotional states.

We have nothing to lose by touching and knowing that wellspring of healing and compassion that’s in all of us; that wellspring’s our birthright. Don’t dismiss this as cursory new-age musings or fluffy self-help rhetoric. This is real. Compassion is real and is in endless supply. This is the objective truth about compassion. There’s enough to go around for all of us, for all of the humans and all of the creatures. But we all have a choice to make. We can choose to let our human suffering, that suffering we all ultimately share, make us smaller, make us inaccessible, disconnected. We can make choices from a paradigm of poverty and fear. Or we can use our suffering to be bigger, to connect, to hold each other and find solace in each other. We can recognize the paradigm of abundance, in which compassion is not in limited supply, and in fact, grows like a muscle the more we engage it. We can reject the false scarcity paradigm in which suffering begets suffering.

So rest in peace, Amy Winehouse. May you start a band in that strange beyond with Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, and Jimi Hendrix. May your immense talent live on and continue to inspire and hold folks. May we remember you for your immense talent and not for sensationalist portrayals of your suffering that the media thrived on. May your death spur an assessment of our paradigms, of how we hold or reject those addicted and emotional chaotic folks, those Others. May your death incite an evaluation of how we viciously treat famous people as non-people; of how we neglect and get bored with and are often contemptuous towards what are actually the incredible, complicated existences of non-famous people all around us! May your death spark a conversation about how, as a culture, we flippantly lock up our addicted and emotionally chaotic folks in the counter-intuitive cultural spaces of jail, locked wards, hyper-medication, pathologizing diagnoses, bureaucratic institutions, shame, silence, lack of resources. May we all emanate the energy of healing and compassion to all those who suffer from anorexia, bulimia, addiction, depression, trauma, bipolar disorder, and all other pathologized states of being. Famous and not famous, these sufferers are creatures, they need us, we need each other and have to hold each other; sometimes, we’re each others’ only hope. The world is crazy and to be an addict, to suffer, to hurt ourselves, to starve ourselves, to mourn, to sink into deep dissociations and depressions and manias– these are actually not crazy behaviors. On the contrary, these are quite normal and even adaptive responses to a crazy world. We are not weak; we’ve been given to much to carry. Such a tragic death of an immensely talented, culturally notable person like Amy Winehouse gives us an opportunity, as a society, to evaluate our personal orientation towards compassion and healing, our personal and cultural attitudes towards “crazy” behaviors, and how we choose to “deal” with folks who suffer under such heavy pain. We can make the choice to carry each other, to be our most expansive selves as a response to fear and suffering, instead of shrinking from fear and suffering.

Come on, let’s carry each other. Let’s be huge. Let’s be vulnerable to that kind of love. We’ve tried the alternatives and they don’t work. No, it’s not easy to heal, or to empower others to heal. It’s sometimes terrifying and we get prone to numbing out and walking away from ourselves and others. Hugeness requires a leap of faith, a trust that healing, that being our most unprecidented huge selves is possible. But we’re all, whether or not we want it, creatures together, sharing a strange and sometimes incomprehensible planet, and that planet is sometimes filled with unspeakable suffering and, also, unspeakable joy. Let’s be creatures together in the most awesome and huge way we can. Let’s be creative and create new stories, less lazy stories. Let’s hold each other in all the ways we know how. We need each other even if we think we don’t. Even if we’re absolutely sure we don’t.