My Planet.

Last summer i was listening to Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life, great title, best album next to Talking Book. I was listening to the song “Saturn”, and its about not needing cars, because you learn how to fly, people live to 205, stuff like that, an imaginary better world song. I started to imagine my planet, it started out being a place i could sleep with this person i kind of fell in love with last year, who’s with someone, and at the time, about to become a parent. It quickly became a place that i could retreat to, it could be whatever i wanted, i could bring people i loved back from the dead to talk with them and hold them. I wanted to erase things, erase the sexual abuse in my life, and the lives of my siblings and my mother, erase the emotional and physical violence that i was raised in. I wanted to erase the sexual, emotional and physical violence my friends have suffered, all of it. I wanted to create new currency, all based on kindness. If i had the power to take all the suffering away, knowing i wouldn’t be who i was today nor would anyone else i know, and maybe i wouldn’t know them if they hadn’t experienced that suffering, if i had that power, i would still take it all away. I don’t spend a lot of time in this place, wishing things away, but sometimes i wonder what i would have been like without it. I stopped imagining my planet by the end of the summer.

I talk about addiction a lot. Mostly with Bruce, he’s been talking about addiction for almost 40 years, my entire life. Greatest pandemic of our culture, bar none. Its the real plague. It is at the root of the devastation of our earth, of our bodies, and our cultures. It is a culture itself, a culture whose survival is reliant on our collective suffering, the more we suffer, the more it gets fed, the bigger it grows. It shrinks in the face of truth, love, contentedness. At the same time i don’t know if its that simple, but it makes for good drama in writing. I realized yesterday that the only thing that’s going to help me through this, help me through this death or whatever it is, is letting myself be as angry and as sad as i need to be, be as honest as i possibly can with myself until i’m gone, or this thing is gone, the weight. I feel like i’m this dance performance i saw from Chiapas about 6 years ago. The first 15 minutes, powerful and painful, the remaining 75 excrutiating. Its hard for me to stand in it, and not talk about the world i hope for, creating new dreams and better worlds. It would all be false at this point If i told you about the planet where no ones land, culture, body or spirit was ever raped for the sake of addiction, no such word as rape exists. That would of course be false, that would be denying the suffering, the devastation, the rape, and as i well know at this point in my life just because i don’t want to believe something it doesn’t mean its not true, denying it doesn’t stop it from happening, it does in fact perpetuate it. I was born a peacemaker, it was my family job, i’m named after the ending of the 6 day war in Isreal, my hebrew name means peace and blessing, i’m a 9 on the Eneagram- The Peacemaker, i stood at the corner of main and hastings street blowing bubbles while people were fighting. The 6 day war, peace at any cost, peace at the expense of someone else’s life or freedom, not peace, i am named after a false peace, and my life has mirrored that false peace. That is the truth.