Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: suicide

  • jarred honey

    A friend of mine took her own life, from herself and from the rest of us, a little while back, perhaps eighteen months. After a long time another of her friends whom I didn’t know wrote to me in Berlin saying she had left behind a painting for me. We met when he was in town and he handed me a plastic bag with her rolled picture. Today in Ghana I got an email from another of her friends. She was a wonderful person and most beloved. This friend says she left a letter behind for me. Would I like it posted. I am so sorry my darling friend cannot know what she meant to us and did not survive long enough to have meant everything she was and had, to herself.

    We met dancing. And at a certain point in the dance we sat down in pairs and she and I told each other the innermost stories of our lives and we both cried. That communion, when two foreign souls can grasp each other. When the self of this new person feels like paper or crumpled cloth or scatterings of cut grass on fine sand. I live for those times. She died, perhaps, for want of them. I will never forgive myself for having been too sad to reach back to her when she called out to me. I’ll never forget.

  • suicide: it’s the silence

    Every time somebody private or prominent dies by their hand, there is a rush of resentment, frustration and grief. Responses like this one begin to appear, many of them driven by the feeling I remember… People who care about people point out that those among us who are most sensitive, empathic, engaged, and gifted, who do the most good to humanity, are exactly the ones who most suffer from sadness and grief at the cruel state of things, from informed fear about our future, sometimes from the tendencies to depression and psychological disorders that can make self-murder seem like a life-saving relief. I know these feelings from my own history. I remember the frigid isolation of knowing there was no one I could make myself known to, who would listen and not judge, not dismiss or undermine or cover over or muscle in on my fears. When is our tipping point? How many bears on the ice? How many island nations with intricate shell currencies and hand-carved feathered cultures nowhere replaceable? How many languages, how many artists? How many species of feathered companions improbable, exquisite, helpless and lost? How many species of humans do we hand over to this convention of closedness, given that we each represent a wild, fresh, unknown, exotic, unprecedented breed, a new world of thought and invention and insight, a whole world of humanity written in one daft pinhead. How much diversity are we prepared to throw under the wheels of industrialised life before we wake up and embrace each other? I look into the heart of me, my beloved, my closest friends. Any one of us could have been lost to our own isolated sadness and guttered hope. In my mind these thoughts gather, forming a single phrase: the silence is killing me. How much more vivid bold planet do we junk before we really wonder where we are going to live? How many more sweating, cursing, loving, ridiculous and delicate people do we sacrifice to depression, anxiety, exhaustion, loneliness and plain sadness before we are willing to talk about one another’s pain?