Today my world shifted a smidge on its axis. Today, I took in a painting. Really took it in. The painting is “The Return of the Prodigal Son” by Stephanie Frostad, and the reason I took it in is that I watched a video where Ms. Frostad described her process in the creation of it. (The interview with Frostad begins 6:45 minutes into the video.)

The painting is named for the Biblical parable about the return of a son who has been away from home, wasting his family's money by living a life of irresponsible debauchery. Upon his penitent return, he is welcomed by his parents, who celebrate by slaughtering the “fatted calf.” The parable is filled with themes near and dear to Christian theologists: the redemption of the sinner, unconditional forgiveness, turning the other cheek, and so on.

Frostad has done something shocking. She has told the story—in painting—from the perspective of the calf, its mother, and the sober, responsible son who has stayed at his post, as a steward of the land and of the animals. The idyllic, pastoral relationship between the mother cow and her calf dominate the painting to such a degree that it appears at first glance to be a portrait of cows. The next most visible figure is what Frostad refers to as the “dutiful son.” In her video, there is a close-up of this figure. He stands aloof, watching the joyful reunion with a poker face. What is he feeling? Anger, ambivalence, resentment, skepticism, disgust?

Finally, way in the background, is the scene that takes center stage in the Bible—the reunion of the wastrel son and his grieving parents. The figures are so tiny, they almost appear to be stick figures, their personalities reduced to gesture.

On the three-month anniversary of the most dangerous nuclear accident on the planet, with radiation continuing to spew into ocean and air, I experienced a paradigm shift as I viewed Frostad’s work and as I listened to her words. The story—the real story, the important story—is the cow and her calf, the sanctity of the innocent. The drama of the disconnected, dissociated son returning home, because he has finally run through his resources and is out of options, seems suddenly small, insignificant, obscene, out-of-focus. Who cares about him? And why should any more of the planet's precious resources be wasted on him? Frostad has finally put the story of the prodigal son in its true, planetary perspective... and along with it, the toxic theology and pedagogy that spawned it. No small thing.

I am a playwright, and this drama of the bad-boy acting out  occupies an inordinate amount of the canon of Western drama. It is perpetually compelling. There was an entire school of  "angry young man" plays. And the ongoing parade of "mommy-shocking" films. There is the angst of the dying salesman, the corporate criminal, the hubris-ridden king, the corrupt politician. Whatever will become of them? Will they be saved in time by the love of a good woman(or man... but mostly woman)? Will they die unrepentant? Will the long-suffering partner be amply rewarded by a show of gratitude? And then the homecoming... the tearful reunion, the joyous return to the marital bed, the father-son reconciliation, the sentimental return to the mother's embrace...

Let's face it: The addict takes focus. Why wouldn't he or she? The addict's actions are dramatically erratic and potentially disastrous, the monstrous selfishness is compelling to watch, the mounting debt and burden of guilt carry their own momentum. It's a plot that fairly writes itself. The storyline of the victims is nowhere near as fun. And the sober citizen? Well....zzzzzzz.

At least this is how  we have been conditioned. This is The Story. This how women learn about relationships with men, how children learn about relationships to parents, how minority cultures learn about relationships with the dominant culture, how underdeveloped countries learn about relationships to developed ones, how workers learn about relationships to bosses, how underclasses learn about relationships to the privileged classes, and so on.

We watch with anguish as these favored "prodigal sons" of patriarchal culture repeatedly betray our loyalty, as they take our resources and squander them on their selfish pleasure. We wring our hands, wondering when they will realize how much they owe us, when they will come back and make amends. And if they do return (invariably for more access to our resources), we are just desperate or self-deceived enough to receive them back with open arms, eager to spare them any humiliation... and pressing upon them more of our already-plundered resources.

The parable of the prodigal son plays out in our unending hopes that the men who run the governments and the corporations will gain a smidgeon of self-awareness, some glimmer of compassion for the lives that are so affected by their greed-driven, war-mongering policies. The drama of the return of the prodigal plays out in our living rooms with the focus on the addict or the alcoholic—with whole families held hostage to whims of this most banal of diseases. What is so fascinating about the self-absorption of the dissociated individual, or government, or corporation?  It must be our investment. The investment of a parent in the child they have raised. The investment of the lover in her partner. The investment of the electorate who has campaigned for a candidate. The investment of the stockholders in a corporation. And the investment of the just plain desperate, whose already hellish lives can actually be made worse.

But this drama, as Frostad makes so clear has nothing in common with the natural world, its seasons and its cycles. Our investments have been misplaced and we must collectively cut our losses. It is time for the “dutiful son”-- those on the planet who are attempting to live moderate, sustainable, environmentally conscientious lives--to turn away from this tedious drama of redemption, to reject the pseudo romance of reconciliation, to refuse to kill any more fatted calves for this obscene celebration of non-accountability. And it is time for the “dutiful son” to examine destructive loyalties to a family that is so absorbed in that drama that it cannot focus its priorities.

Looking at Frostad’s painting, I am aware that the peaceful relationship of cow and calf is about to be shattered, that the animals are oblivious to the distant drama that can seal their fate. But the figures do not come off as vulnerable or as victims. Frostad has painted them as integral to nature. It is as if she wants the viewer to understand that this essential rightness of relation in the natural world will endure, and that it is the unstable and disconnected humans who will be displaced.

What this painting has done for me is to push me to examine all the ways in which I have internalized the drama of the return of the prodigal as a meaningful narrative. What are the ways I am complicit with it? Am I still susceptible to the romance of redemption, to the paradigm of the mother, eternally delighted to reward the males who show any signs of coming home, thrilled at any return, however meager, of my investment? Am I the father, flush with the power of "forgiveness," sponsoring the prodigal back into the family? Am I the prodigal herself, expecting the world to be waiting for me with open arms when I realize the extent of my profligacy, arrogance, participation in a culture of  greed and exploitation?

The parable of the prodigal son is a tale of enabling, and it has always been a luxury. Now, as it has become a planetary imperative for all us to be learn what it means to become "right-sized," we need to flip the parable, as Frostad has done, privileging the narratives of the innocent and of the accountable. We need to shrink the romance of the reformed sinner to a distant memory from a dying planet.

Having just written and performed a play about a severely-abused, nineteenth-century, domestic servant, I was intrigued to discover that a book has been written about Virginia Woolf's relationship to the women who cooked and cleaned in her various homes. The book is Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury by Alison Light.

Before I talk about my responses to this remarkable book, I want to explain what I was trying to do with my play about the servant--which, by the way, is titled Lace Curtain Irish. It's a one-woman piece, and the one woman is Bridget Sullivan, who was a live-in cook and maid in the home of Andrew Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts. Yes, the Andrew Borden who was the recipient of eleven of the famous "forty whacks" presumably delivered by his daughter Lizzie's axe. The premise of my play is that Bridget was the actual wielder of the much-celebrated and conspicuous-in-its-absence ax (or hatchet).  Everything in the trial transcripts  supports that theory, as well as what is known about the habits, attitudes, history, character, and personality of LIzzie Borden.

Obviously the crime was frenzied and spontaneous--an act of passion. (The Bordens were each dead on the first blow.) Murders that are motivated by desires to inherit generally involve either long-range planning (cumulative doses of untraceable poision) or felicitous  opportunities (finding oneself alone with the victim on the edge of a cliff at night). Crimes involving overkill generally are triggered by immediate and overwhelming circumstances... like abuses of power and/or outright sadism.

Bridget had just been vomiting in the yard on the hottest day of the summer when her mistress, Andrew's wife, gave her the order to wash every window in the house, upstairs and downstairs, inside and out. In 1892, this entailed ladders, buckets, trips to an outdoor pump,brushes, and rags. Not surprisingly, Bridget had only washed a window or two before the arrival of the police and the discovery of Mrs. Borden's mutilated corpse.

One of the first actions by the police was a lock-down of the house. No one was allowed to leave. Oh, except the "Irish girl." She was allowed to leave the house to stay with a friend, taking with her an uninspected bundle of possessions. After all, she was just the maid.

What caught my attention was the fact that Mrs. Borden had been stricken with a bout of vomiting just the day before, and had taken to her bed. In other words, she had good reason to empathize with Bridget's distress and physical debilitation. Why would she insist on a chore that certainly could wait a day-- or even a week?  There can be only two answers: sadism or staggering classism. She either delighted in tormenting Bridget or else she considered the "Irish girl" to be of a different species than herself-- a species impervious to heat and illness, and whose responses were either lazy malingering or ungrateful attempts to cheat her employer out of a day's labor!

Reading Mrs. Woolf and the Servants opened my eyes to the fact that Abigail Borden's attitude toward Bridget was far from unusual. In fact, it reflected prevailing attitudes among the privileged classes of England. Servants were expected to work for little more than room and board. They bought their own uniforms, worked from sunup to sundown, and only had two days off a month. Frequently, the kitchens and washrooms where they worked were in basements, and their rooms were cramped and inadequately heated and ventilated. (Bridget's room was under the eaves and must have been stifling the night before the murders.) Often the servants were assigned names at the whim of their employers who were too lazy to learn their real names. (Bridget had been called "Maggie.") Without pensions or insurance, they relied on the patronage of their employers for support in old age and in sickness. Employers, then as now, had strong incentives to "let go" older workers, in order to avoid the fiscal responsibility for their retirement.

In spite of this appallingly exploitive situation, employers expected loyalty and gratitude from their servants. They saw themselves as role models and mentors for their servants, introducing them to a life of refinement and morals that working-class folks presumably could not be expected to find among their peers. Employers felt entitled to enter a servant's room at any time, and to search their possessions without permission. All of this was for the good of the servant, of course.

This world changed, however, and Virginia Woolf lived through the transitional time. When she and her sister Vanessa moved from the family estate to Bloomsbury, they left behind many of the rigid class roles and formal rituals of their Victorian girlhoods. What they did not leave behind, however, were the servants. But in Bloomsbury, there was no need for the liveried fleet of gardeners, coachmen, personal valets, parlor maids, cooks, charwomen, etc. There would only be a maid and a cook. The uniforms and the hated white caps were gone. The servants could say "Miss Stephens" instead of "Madam." Occasionally, they were even invited to eat with their employers. The middle-class youth of Bloomsbury considered themselves artists, bohemians, radicals, socialists.

This must have been enormously confusing for the servants. With the old upstairs/downstairs boundaries gone, where were the new ones? No one seemed to know. The Woolfs would host political meetings in their home which the servants would attend as fellow socialists... at least until it was time to cook dinner. In spite of her repeated attempts to include working-class characters in her books, Virginia would usually end by editing them out of the final revision, acknowledging her near-total ignorance about their lives.

Two things stand out to me from reading about Woolf and her servants:

1) The time when Virginia's cook ordered her out of her room and Virginia pitched a fit.

2) The fact that two of her servants appeared to have been in a relationship of primary intimacy during the eight years when they lived under Virginia's roof and shared a bed in their room together.

The first stands out because Virginia Woolf is famous for her 1929 treatise,  A Room of One's Own, where she argued passionately how women's creativity had been and was continuing to be stunted by their lack of access to a room that was their own. So here we have Nellie Boxall, thirty-seven years old, who has been living with and working for Virginia for eleven years... for five pounds a year, working 341 days per year... and Virginia, who is fighting with her, enters Nellie's room. What does Nellie do? She orders her out. And what is Virginia's reaction? Does she applaud her for defending her territory? Here is Light's description:

"Nellie had got above herself; in reality the room was not 'hers.' Being treated like a servant was so painful and humiliating that Virginia went straight to Leonard and determined to sack Nellie by Christmas. The 'famous scene' was relived in her imagination many times. She found herself muttering  and rehearsing arguments, unable to work, sick and shivery, trembling with anticipation at the day... when she would give Nellie a month's notice. She wrote in her diary as if possessed, copying out replies to Nellie, speaking their parts..." (p. 193.)

Wow. Just wow.

And then there is the fact that Nellie Boxall and Lottie Hope came together to work for the Woolfs in 1916. Nellie was twenty-six and Lottie was a year younger.  These two young women lived, worked, and slept together in a shared bed at Hogarth House for eight years. Before that, they had lived and worked together in Roger Fry's home for five years. Virginia fired Lottie in 1924, but Nellie stayed on for another ten years. In 1941, both of the women moved into a rented home of their own, which Nellie eventually bought,  and where they lived together for another twenty-four years, until Nellie's death. The two were inseparable, being seen together at weddings, funerals, holidays, visiting.

Nellie was the stouter, the butch. Lottie, rumored to have gypsy blood, was the more glamorous. Lottie had been a foundling, raised in the Home for Deserted Children, and Nellie, the youngest of ten, had been orphaned at twelve. Nellie's relationship with Lottie was protective and maternal. They shared a bedroom from the time they were twenty-one until they were thirty- four, and then again from fifty-one until seventy-five. It was an enduring love.

Did Virginia Woolf notice? How could she not? More to the point, what did Nellie and Lottie make of their employer who was not even ten years older then them? Virginia Woolf was a study in chronic discontent, in parsimony, in eating disorders... And then there was her sexless marriage with Leonard--something that would have been difficult to hide from the servants. And friendships? Virginia took malicious delight in writing scathing inventories of her closest women friends in her diaries, and she often peopled her novels with hateful caricatures of them. In the end, she took her own life.

In spite of their oppression, it was  Nellie and Lottie who managed to find a room of their own and to fill it with loyalty and loving companionship. Too bad Virginia never took a page from their book.

Yesterday I listened to an interview on NPR, celebrating the twentieth-year anniversary of the iconic film Thelma and Louise. Why was it iconic?  Because they killed a man. Yep. They killed a man… a rapist actually.  You know, an “enemy.” Oh, wait… am I allowed to say that? They rob a convenience store and blow up a truck, but it’s killing a man that really does it.

Anyway, Terry Gross was interviewing Callie Khouri, who had written the screenplay. And, of course, they were talking about the ending of the film. The killing of the man was iconic, but it was the ending that enabled the iconicity.  Rather than be arrested, the two women drive off the edge of the Grand Canyon together. Callie, in the NPR interview, gives her take on this ending: “They got away.” Perhaps, the more accurate  response is the statement she made when picking up her Oscar in 1992: “For everyone who wanted to see a happy ending for Thelma and Louise, for me this is it.” Yep. And there's a connection. If they hadn't driven off the Grand Canyon, Khouri would never had gotten the Oscar. In fact, the film would never have gotten made.

I have written about Thelma and Louise before. It’s in a paper titled “Ugly Ducklings:  How I Came To Write a Play Where the Lesbian Doesn't Kill Herself.”

"Consider the 1990 film Thelma and Louise.  They are survivors of male violence. They are outlaws.  They have killed a would-be rapist.   They are on the run.  And finally, they indulge in a passionate, lip-locked, lesbianic kiss. [which is filmed so poorly this was the best screenshot I could get...] Now, in the lesbian paradigm, that would be the turning point… the beginning of their journey out of the nightmare:  They kiss, they look at each other, they yell “yee-haw”—and then they get down to the business of survival:  They ditch the car.  Duh.  They dye their hair.  Duh.  They go underground on any one of the dozens of women's lands all over the US.  They're in Arizona, right?  They could go to A***.  Or A***** J*****, which is an entire village of lesbians.  They get healthy.  They heal.  They make love. They change their diets.  They do yoga.  They dance under the full moon.  They build a hay bale house.  They go to the women's festivals. They make their own clothes or just don't wear any.  They get wilder and more politically clear-eyed every minute.  They dedicate themselves to women, to the environment.  They have a zillion delicious options.   But, in the movie, they go off a cliff.  In the patriarchal paradigm that is all they can do after that kiss.  Lesbianism is the fate worse than death.  The movie may be dated, but it is still one of the very few that dares to depict girl buddies who retaliate against perpetrators.  The ending is not accidental, nor is the timing of the kiss—coming after the decision to commit double suicide."

I would not have had such a strong objection to the ending, if it had been depicted with the same attention to detail as, say, the blowing up of the truck. You know… the car making impact, rolling and bouncing down the canyon, the screaming terror on the faces… and finally the still shot of the carnage. But that’s not in Callie’s screenplay. What happens? The screen goes blank.  You know… death, transcendence. That romantic high-school fantasy that promotes so much youth suicide.

No, show the reality, or don’t go there. How many girls and women have taken their lives because of the romance of the white screen, the belief that this would be their triumphant escape… or how, as Callie Khouri might put it, they could get away?

Okay, Thelma and Louise is nearly a quarter-century old. Did it spawn two generations of girl-buddy, road pictures where the women unapologetically kill their enemies and go on to live happy, predator-free lives the way male protagonists do? No, not really. There are women who kill a-plenty in films these days, but they don’t kiss each other. They dress for the male gaze. Their idea of liberation is seducing the men who can’t keep up with them.

Yesterday, Beyoncé “dropped” her newest video: “Girls Who Run the World.” Iconically speaking, she’s got some interesting visuals… an army of men coming after a renegade band of women in what appears to have been a global gender massacre. The men have the usual arsenal of firearms, but of course, the women have that secret weapon that brings them all to their knees... oh, wait, our knees... what?  Anyway, the women have that pornographic fantasy thing…  the clothing, the moves. Beyoncé’s response to armed aggression is to “drop it like it’s hot” and crawl across the floor twitching her pelvis. In a lyric that says it all, she whispers, “Hope you still like me…”

I know, I know. This is mainstream media. Why am I wasting my time even writing about it? Well… I will tell you. Because I just want to point out the hijacking, the disconnect. It’s one thing to present women as brainless fembots whose only ambition in life is to fulfill male fantasies. It’s another to begin with an acknowledgement that women are targets and prey and that we don’t like it, and then to attempt to glorify capitulation as empowering resistance. I’m talking about that damned white screen and the nincompoopery of crawling around on the floor.

Because women are, unfortunately, watching. And girls are watching, too. Teaching is going on. Callie Khouri is interpreting for us--at the Oscars, on NPR. “This is what escape looks like.” “This is what winning looks like.” But here’s the thing. You have to be alive to escape. Yeah. I know… radical.  And you have to defeat your opponent/enemy in order to win. Unclear about what that means? Try “beat, conquer, rout, trounce, crush, thrash, whip, wipe the floor with, make mincemeat of, clobber, slaughter, demolish.”

Callie made a film the same way Beyoncé made her video: hoping that the men who control the industry, and the women who are subject to them, will still like her. And they did and they do and I don’t. If you want to know what real resistance looks like, read my plays.

This interview is part of the “We’Moon Anthology Blog Tour.” What’s that? Well, We’Moon has just published a 30-year anniversary anthology titled In the Spirit of We’Moon ~ Celebrating 30 Years: An Anthology of We’Moon Art and Writing. This anthology includes the work of many of the authors who have contributed to their internationally acclaimed We'Moon Daybooks for the last three decades. They have invited some of us contributorss who have our own blogs to interview each other and then post these interviews on the blogs, which will be linked to their website.  An “anthology blog tour,” right?

 It was my great good fortune to be invited to interview We’Moon contributor Marna… so here goes:

Carolyn: What has been your connection with We’Moon?

Marna: I lived at We’Moon [We’Moon Land in Estacada, Oregon] from ‘92-’93, and helped produce the ‘92 and ‘93 calendars. My work has probably appeared in over a dozen We’Moons [daybooks] since, including this year for which I was honored to be invited to write the holy day writings. We’Moon [daybook] has been a great inspiration for my creative work, knowing that it was going out directly to other womyn and weaving into their lives.

Carolyn: What was it like living on the We’Moon Land?

Marna: I learned about solar and lunar rhythms… due to a donated library of astrology materials from Marcia Patrick from when she lived there. (She was one of the 13 womyn who cursed Wall Street back in the Second Wave.) … So many seeds of my current work and scholarship and spiritual practice are sourced in my We’Moon experience! I learned so much from living in intentional community with other woms, and had creative space to garden collaboratively, learn herbal medicine and gardening, cultivate relationships with the living ecologies and life of the land, a real opening experience! The womyn’s land movement and womyn’s earth-based spiritually have pivotally informed my work and life, inspiring us here in Portland [Oregon] to create for thirteen years a Womyn’s Temple and now inspiring me to heed the call to cultivate a land-based campus with sacred herb gardens, a Hygeian dream healing center, and designing certificate and eventually graduate programs weaving together earth-inspired (ecological) creativity, healing, and hands-on skills in service of earth regeneration.

Carolyn: Wow… Is there information about your work online?

Marna: Probably the more relevant website related to We’Moon is the work I am doing with  Moonifest, a micro-grant nonprofit for women, the arts, and Earth regeneration. Also the graduate institute at the intersection of ecology, creativity, and wisdom traditions I am designing as my doctoral project in Sustainability Education .

Carolyn: That’s a fascinating idea… offering grants of $130, and asking applicants how many of them they need. As a playwright who has often needed to produce my own work, I can confirm how much mileage a motivated artist can gain with just a little financial support. Sometimes, for me, the isolation was as large an impediment as the lack of funds. Getting a grant was kind of like being alone on a life raft and being signaled to by a passing ship. It was a comfort to know that I had been seen, that someone out there was aware of my coordinates. It helped me to know that someone would be coming eventually.  So, what about your second website?

Marna: It has two related informational websites, one related to Gaian Methodologies for research inspired by the living presence of the planet, and one I just developed last winter on Earth Empathy, which offers experiential learning adventures in cultivating planetary compassion (with riffs on spirit of place, body/planet, despair and justice work, and deep time). I am in the midst of developing a resource web page on feminist pedagogy and women's collaborations (Gynagogy), which will be released later in this summer.

Carolyn: I see your “Earth Empathy” site has a page titled “Hope,” where you link to a video of Joanna Macy, where she says, “… recognize that the anguish, the horror even, that we can feel over the devastation that we read about or see or experience—that it’s okay to feel that. We're tough. Because if we are afraid to feel that, we won't feel where it comes from, and where it comes from is love—our love for this world.” This is an issue I’m struggling with right now… the sense of becoming overwhelmed, especially with the situation of Fukushima… There is such a temptation to resort to denial or diversion. Your hope and your activism give me hope. Is there anything else you would like to add?

Marna: What I can offer about my experience both with We'Moon, the land and the Almanac, as well as my experience with the extended womyn's land communities, is to praise the deep fount of strength and nurture they have provided for my spiritual-ecological wholeness and deepening. The newly published We'Moon Anthology is a portal to the song streams of so many womyn artists and writers, sustaining us in hope and justice, what Joanna Macy refers to as the work of the hands, head and heart of the Great Turning. May we each receive this nurture and continue to weave these cultures of regeneration and inspiration and be woven by the spiral thriving of planetary Gaia herself. I look forward to celebrating the sixtieth anthology in another thirty years, 390 lunar cycles from now!

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend of mine who works in hospice. She educates people about the process of dying and calls herself an “end-of-life tour guide.” She used a phrase that gave me pause: “the acceptance of denial.”

What does that mean? From her perspective, it means accepting that denial can be a natural and helpful part of living. Denial can enable us to keep up with the functions of daily life in the face of fear or grief that might otherwise overwhelm us. No doubt, our capacity for deploying denial is some kind of neurophysiological adaptation designed to aid in our survival and the preservation of the gene pool. It may have been the case that the primates the most adept at denial lived the longest and propagated the most. Acceptance of denial may be acceptance of Darwinian truths hardwired into our DNA.

But when I heard the expression, I was not thinking about hospice. I was thinking about Fukushima. I was thinking about the disaster in Japan which still has no end in sight, which is still fraught with possibilities of ongoing, uncontrolled nuclear explosions. I was thinking about the tremendous amount of water which will need to be pumped into the damaged reactors to prevent these explosions, and the as-yet unanswered questions about the disposal of those thousands of tons of highly radioactive water. I was thinking about the radiation which has now gone around the globe and which continues to spew into the atmosphere and seep into the ocean every day as a result of this ongoing catastrophe.

I was thinking about Fukushima… but I was also thinking about not thinking about Fukushima—something which is becoming easier and easier to do as the media moves on to new headlines and the lack of answers has become the official answer. Not thinking about Fukushima is facilitated by the reassurances that appear in tandem with each new revelation: "The radiation being registered around the world is negligible, insignificant." "The amount of radioactive water intentionally dumped into the ocean is infinitesimal when compared with the entire volume of water in the sea." "Passengers flying across the country are exposed to more radiation than the amount turning up most places." "It’s safe to drink the water, eat the cheese, buy the fish."

Denial. And now the acceptance of denial.

On March 11 and 12, I had been panicked. Three decades earlier, I was part of a global, anti-nuclear movement. I had been arrested for occupying a nuclear power plant—if you can call leaping into the arms of the police an occupation. With my fellow activists, I had made a study of the industry. We understood the tactics, could spot the rhetoric, sniff out the lies. On March 11, I understood much about what was happening—with multiple, core-reactor meltdowns; with the power behind the cooling systems not only knocked out, but knocked out for days and possibly weeks; with cracked containment pits; with multiple bomb-like explosions. I understood that this was the worst disaster and the most serious threat to life that has ever occurred on this planet... and with no end in sight.

And I was terrified. For two days. But terror is difficult to sustain when there are viable and attractive alternatives. I had a life. I was actually out on tour with extensive obligations. I was traveling. Besides, there was nothing I could do about it anyway. This was not the terror of being pursued by a predator, where the extra surges of adrenalin translate into bursts of energy and sustained stamina for self-defense or escape. The terror induced by Fukushima was a kind of frozen horror, where the adrenalin played itself out in obsessive speculation and nervous, non-productive activity.

In the world of the jungle, terror is incentivized. Experiencing terror saves one’s life. In a world with scenarios of nuclear holocaust, terror is not incentivized. Denial is. It becomes an attractive option in the face of helplessness and overwhelming doom, of unthinkable consequences for millions of people, for thousands of years. Denial conditions us to believe reassurances without questioning source or motive. Denial enables us to function as if nothing has changed.

I am in this denial now, and it is a great relief compared with the terror of March 11 and 12. The world has not ended. Yet. And that word “yet” appeals to my biology… the “acceptance of denial.” The patient is dying. There is nothing we can do. There is no point in dwelling on it. The best thing to do is go on with our living. For now.

Is this really what it comes down to? “Not with a bang, but a whimper…” Or, not even the whimper?

I have found a locus of resistance, one that works for me. And it has to do with what is visible and what is invisible.

We have become an increasingly visual culture. I know this, because I am a playwright by trade, and playwriting is an aural art form. People used to say they were going to “hear a play.” Fewer than one fifth of Shakespeare’s audiences could actually see the stage. There is a limited arena for action on the stage, and without special effects, the physical drama is usually embarrassingly bogus. In theatre, the drama is in the language—in the impassioned speeches, in the verbally violent confrontations, in the seduction of argument. As a playwright, I am acutely aware of how theatre has been left behind, like some kind of cultural oxbow lake, as the river of pop culture has moved over, carving out new channels in visual media: film, TV, DVD, Nintendo, 3-D movies, Youtube, Wii, etc.

And the more visual the culture, the greater our disconnect. Why? Because when it’s visual, it’s about appearances. The symbols begin to usurp the substance they are supposed to represent. Thinking, and especially deep, radical, and independent thinking becomes short-circuited as the gaze is directed by the ever-editorializing lens of the camera.

The evolution of our technology has vastly outstripped the evolution of our brain. We have not had the time in a few generations to evolve brains that can instinctively distinguish between dancing dots on a screen and dancing dots on the back of the retina. The boundaries between reality and fantasy, documentary and drama, video games and war games are blurring. Children under the age of four are acquiring Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from watching on-screen violence. Celebrities are becoming government leaders. As humans become more and more attuned to a visual world, we become more and more easily manipulated by the images that we see. We have come to believe in what we see, whether or not it is real. And we are teaching ourselves to ignore or discount what we cannot see.

This is the problem with radiation. It is not visible. It can’t be felt or tasted. It has no odor, no texture, no temperature. It’s not as if Fukushima is being covered with ashes or buried in lava. It’s not as if there is a sulfurous, unbreathable gas hanging over the town. The sun still shines, the birds sing, and the flowers bloom. People have to be prevented from entering the zone around the reactors. People have to rely on readings and reporting from experts and agencies to tell them when they can drink the water.

And, as I said, denial has become accepted and acceptable. Because denial is natural in a situation like this, and especially in a culture so heavily oriented to the visual.

But has it always been natural to ignore what cannot be seen? Anthropology and archeology tell a different story. They tell us that, historically, indigenous cultures from every part of the globe have put a lot of stock in the unseen. Indigenous people have had many names to describe the ways in which the unseen world of spirit permeates and informs the visible and tangible world. There is Maori  “Dreamtime” or Hawai’ian “mana” or Yoruban “orishas.” The spirits of ancestors, of creators, of animals, of sacred places exist contemporaneously with humans, and rituals and codes have evolved to teach humans how to honor their presence and how to avoid offending them.

The ubiquitous spiritual systems of indigenous peoples point to the fact that ongoing consciousness  of the unseen is native to our evolution and our biology.  Had we not colonized our senses, we would have understood the blasphemy of splitting the atom, of creating a deadly waste material of which we could not dispose. We would have known that we were arrogating to ourselves the powers over life and death that should never belong to one species. We would have known that what we were doing was displeasing to the spirit world, constituting a profound violation of the sacred.

The sacred has been replaced by the profane in contemporary Western culture. We have electricity instead of spiritual forces. We have digital imagery instead of visions. In the words of Gertrude Stein, “Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation [sic].” Radiation is the perverse counterfeit of spiritual substance. It is the by-product of the endgame of divorcing the material world from its spiritual animus. The splitting of the atom is just the final act in a brutal campaign of disconnection. In the words of Robin Morgan:

"If one had to name one quality as the genius of the patriarchy, it would be compartmentalization, the capacity for institutionalizing disconnection. Intellect severed from emotion. Thought separated from action. Science split from art. The earth itself divided; national borders. Human beings categorized by sex, age, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, height, weight, class, religion, physical ability, ad nauseum. The personal isolated from the political. Sex divorced from love. The material ruptured from the spiritual. The past parted from the present and disjoined from the future. Law detached from justice. Vision dissociated from reality."

I derive hope from the fact that it is possible to recover an apparently innate reverence for the unseen. I take comfort in this. I understand how I am incentivized by a corporate culture and by my own biology to deny the full horror of radioactivity. I accept that. I accept my  denial about Fukushima. I accept that this denial may even be natural. But I know that it was once in my ancestral biology to experience rich rewards from sensing the unseen spiritual essence of life and to find joy and peace in honoring that spiritual essence, in being a part of it, in protecting it and cultivating it in myself.

And because I know this, I choose to believe that this sensing of spirit can be recovered—uncovered, dis-covered, and revivified. And this spiritual seeing-of-the-unseen, unlike Fukushima, is powerfully incentivized… by faith, joy, and even ecstasy. It results in tangible enhancement of quality of life, of self-esteem, of sense of belonging. It also results in the reverence that would have prevented the splitting of the atom in the first place, and this reverence holds the potential to prevent the building of new nuclear reactors.

This attention to the cultivation of my spiritual sense is the most focused and effective and political response I can make to what is happening to the ocean and to the land and to the air and to all the forms of life on this planet.

Albert Einstein said, “The splitting of the atom changed everything except man’s mode of thinking.” I am choosing to believe and endeavoring to prove that he was mistaken.

If the public knew these things, there would be more focus on how to use these drugs judiciously and there would be more focus on alternative therapies that don’t rely on meds, or that minimize use.

The author spends some time visiting psychiatric facilities in Western Lapland. Here, patients are treated to something called “open-dialogue” therapy. The nurses, psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists have, for the most part, completed a three-year, 900-hour course in family therapy. According to psychologist Tapio Salo, “Psychosis does not live in the head. It lives in the in-between of family members, and of people. It is in the relationship, and the one who is psychotic makes the bad connection visible. He or she ‘wears the symptoms’ and has the burden to carry them.”

Wow. And, even though this practitioner is referring specifically to psychosis, I felt when I read those words that they potentially have much wider application. What if all the folks who bought into the myth of “chemical imbalance in the brain” were to switch over to an understanding that mental illness resides in the spaces between people… between family members, certainly… and friends, but also members of one’s church, classmates, co-workers, between a government and a people, and between other species and ourselves? What if we all took that seriously and began to put the focus on treating those relationships as if our sanity depended on it?

But let’s go back to this “open dialogue” in Western Lapland. Everyone goes to the first meeting with family and patient with the awareness that they “know nothing.” Wow. Really? Yes, really. Those 900 hours have trained them all to be “specialists in saying that we are not specialists.”  In fact, the therapists consider themselves guests in the patient’s home. If the patient runs off, they just ask them to leave the door open so they can hear the conversation.

There is no mention of antipsychotics in the first few meetings. If the patient begins to sleep better and bath regularly, and in other ways reestablish societal connections, the therapists see that the “grip on life” is strengthening and meds will not be needed. Sometimes benzodiazepenes are given short-term for anxiety or sleep problems, but when the problem goes away, the meds are stopped.

Yes, this process takes time. Sometimes up to five years. Teachers and prospective employers are asked to join the dialogue. The focus is on restoring social connections.

 Results? Since 1992 not a single first-episode psychotic patient has ended up chronically hospitalized. The spending is less than any other district in Lapland. Eighty-four percent of the patients had returned to work or to school, and only 20% were on antipsychotics. Families have come to trust the system and call for help at the first sign of psychosis… and, consequently, very few go on to develop schizophrenia.  They have had a 90% drop in new cases of schizophrenia since the early 1980’s.

 
What about alternative therapies for depression? 70% of depressed patients respond to an exercise program. In fact, general practitioners in the UK are writing prescriptions for exercise. And the side effects are fantastic: more strength, better cardiovascular function, lower blood pressure, better sleep, better sex, improved cognitive functioning. Oh, and studies have shown it is not wise to combine exercise with drug therapy.

Then there is the Seneca Center in California, a last-stop for severely disturbed kids. When a child enters the residential program, the question is not “What’s wrong with the kid?” but “What happened to them?” The Seneca Center also does something else interesting. As they chart the life history of the kids, they also chart the medication history… looking for how behavior may have changed after medication. Not surprisingly, these histories regularly tell of psychiatric care that has worsened behavior.  If they can see that a drug did not help, they don't prescribe it.They frequently detox the kids and institute behavior modification techniques to help the kids control their own behavior.

According to the program director, “… feeling in charge of yourself and being responsible for yourself is [sic] the central issue of their lives.” It’s about power. And power in relationships. They provide “mentors” for the kids, and the kids learn that it’s safe to form attachments.

The Seneca Center highlights a major issue in mental health today: The need for social and medical support for detoxing from prescription medications.

Whitaker ends his book talking about an organization in Alaska called PsychRights that mounted a public information campaign in 2002 with judges, lawyers, psychiatrists, and the general public about the outcomes for antipsychotics. The founder of this organization, Jim Gottstein, filed a lawsuit against the state in a forced-drugging case, and won a stunning legal victory in 2006. The Alaska Supreme Court ruled, “Psychotropic medication can have profound and lasting negative effects on a patient’s mind and body. These drugs are known to casue a number of potentially devastating side effects.”

Gottstein has moved on to filing lawsuits on behalf of foster children and children living in poverty. He likens these suits to Brown vs. Board of Education, hoping they will have a similar effect to that watershed lawsuit that ended segregation—in this case changing national attitudes about the drugging of children.

There’s no neat way to sum up these ten blogs. Obviously, I consider it an important book. As an activist, I have seen a country and a generation of activists become progressively more numb and more complacent. I have seen friends change personalities, stop moving forward. I have experienced the suicides and attempted suicides of friends and colleagues—four in this last year. As global warming advances, as resources become more scarce and economies more fragile, as social services are increasingly cut, and as the environment becomes more and more toxic, there has never been so great a need for awareness, for clarity, and—yes—alarm. It is a time for radical honesty, for confrontation of the conflict-of-interest when drug companies have so many financial ties to Congress, to doctors, and to medical schools. It is time for honest studies, for “open dialogue” on a national level.

What I take away from the book, and take most seriously, is a new understanding that mental illness resides in the spaces between people. I want to take responsibility for my part in the healing of that space.

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