In the Body of the World (16 page)

This is a fairy tale. The handsome prince who lost his mother to an evil killer gets taken by the wild stepmother into the woods to see if they can find the secret that will set them free. As they step deeper and deeper into the tangled woods, part of them would like to turn back, but something drives them farther. After a while they stop talking. The cacophony of the forest—the overworked woodpeckers, the croaking frogs, the incessant cicadas—fills their beings. Maybe an hour in, their guides suddenly come to an abrupt halt. The handsome prince and the wild stepmother cling to each other. The guides motion them to hush, and they slowly climb a hill, gently pushing back the trees with hands, no longer using their machetes. They all tiptoe until they come upon a small clearing. Their guides, smiling and proud, motion the handsome prince and
the wild stepmother to come closer. There in the middle of the forest, in the middle of an ordinary day, is a family of totally happy gorillas: the ancient sleeping grandfather, snoring and scratching; the teenager, like an acrobat from the tree circus, swinging from vines above; the mother sitting crossed-legged on the ground, her newborn to her breast, making the simplest and most earth-shattering gesture. When she sees the approaching invaders, the crowd of seekers, she simply, calmly, without thought or hesitation, closes her arms around her baby. The prince and the stepmother are stunned. It is this simple gesture they have each been searching for all their lives—the arms of the mother who instinctively and absolutely protects her vulnerable baby. The handsome prince and the wild stepmother, two orphans, gripping each other’s hands a little too hard.

SCAN
SECOND WIND

Live as if you were already dead
.

Zen admonition

I am on Essence Road. It is after the rain.

I am cancer-free eighteen months.

I know the crisis on Essence Road in Bukavu is the crisis in the world. Indigenous people starving as their government exports their crops. Indigenous people making a dollar or two a day (if they are lucky) as the West and the world pillage their plentiful oil, gold, copper, coltain, or tin. Women carrying insane loads, sacks, tanks, baskets. Women putting their lives at risk, and getting raped.

Each time I take this journey, I force myself to look out at Essence Road, to pay attention to the details, to map the changes and outrages, insults and miseries. I do not look away, and, believe me, I want to look away. It’s hot
on Essence Road. It’s crowded and it’s impossible. Most of the people here have fled violence. Nearly everyone has left their homes. Most are traumatized, dislocated, orphaned, hungry. Essence Road burns in me and I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that some days when I consider why Essence Road and so many roads like it exist all over the world, I have very violent fantasies. I think of rapacious greed, the hunger for more and more, the tiny percentage of those who have everything, and the majority who have nothing. In my rage, I imagine the overthrow of corporations, industrial destroyers, rapists, corrupt leaders, and the arrogant and disinterested rich. Some days I think there will be no other way. None of the powers that be will voluntarily give up their private holdings and their dreams. I try to explain to myself how I can be having such murderous fantasies about uprising and revolution when I have spent my life devoted to ending violence. And the only answer I can find is also on Essence Road—the City of Joy. Each time I arrive there, I am reminded again that we can build the new way, build the new world, birth the new paradigm.

I do not know how to end the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I don’t know where governments end and corporations begin. I cannot show you exactly how the mining of the coltain that is in your cell phone is linked to Jeanne being raped in her village. I
don’t know how to move the UN Security Council, or the secretary-general, or the European, British, or Canadian Parliament, or Congress or Downing Street or the White House, and I have made impassioned visits to all these places and have left each time, crushed and bewildered. I do not know how to arrest the war criminals or the corporate exploiters.

I do know that the minute I enter the City of Joy everything seems possible. It is green and clean. It is the lotus rising from the mud. It is the metaphor for a new beginning, for building a new world.

Three of the ten principles governing the City of Joy are (a) tell the truth, (b) stop waiting to be rescued, and (c) give away what you want the most.

In the City of Joy I know how to do things: how to hug Telusia, Jeanne, and Prudence, and how to remind them not to turn their gaze away because the shame they carry is not their own. I know how to listen and how to keep asking questions.

I know how to cry and that if I love the women of the Congo, and I don’t close off my heart, that love will cut a path, a plan will be revealed, and I will find the money and everything that is necessary. Because love does that.

Having cancer was the moment when I went as far as I could go without being gone, and it was there, dangling
on that edge, that I was forced to let go of everything that didn’t matter, to release the past and be burned down to essential matter. It was there I found my second wind. The second wind arrives when we think we are finished, when we can’t take another step, breathe another breath. And then we do.

Because City of Joy is in a valley, the air is always fresh. Sometimes late in the day, after the singing of the women has died down, a wind comes, a delicious, clean wind. I believe in wind. It pollinates and moves things around. It can cool us off. It can make electricity. It can scatter seeds. It can become a hurricane or a tornado or typhoon. It can rustle the leaves. It rises up and it can help us rise up too.

What does it mean to have a second wind, a second life? It means screaming
fire
when there is a fire. It means touching the darkness and entering it and tasting death in the earthquake scar down the center of my torso, in the first scan that announces the chances are good it’s in my liver. I am burning because the second wind is also a fire that will burn through our fear. We cannot be afraid of anything, not of anything. There is no one coming but us.

The second wind is not about having or getting or buying or acquisition. It is about giving everything up,
giving more than you thought you owned, giving double what you are taking. What is coming is not like anything we have ever known before. Your dying, my dying is necessary and irrelevant and inevitable. Do not be afraid, no, death will not be our end. Indifference will be, disassociation will be, collateral damage, polar caps melting, endless hunger, mass rapes, grotesque wealth. The change will come from those who know they do not exist separately but as part of the river. If you want to overcome your sickness, reach out to someone who is sick. If you want to forget your hunger, feed your friend. You worry about germs and stockpile your herbs, but they will not save you, nor will your fancy house or gated villages. The only salvation is kindness. The only way out is care. The second wind will come from the ground, the Earth. It will rise like a dust storm. It will suddenly appear from the corners and the barrios, the favelas and the invisible places where most of the world lives. Because the streets are alive, and the women who carry the two-hundred-pound sacks are alive, and they dance. The second wind will be brought by the girls. By the girls. By the girls. It is in them and of them. This wind will take everything away. And those of you who can live without will survive. Those of you who can be naked, without a bank account, a known future, or even a place to call home. Those of you who can live without and find your meaning
here, here, wherever here is. Knowing the only destination is change. The only port is where we are going. The second wind may take what you think you need or want the most, and what you lost and how you lost it will determine if you survive.

I have lost my organs and at times my mind. I know it is a race now between the people who are helping themselves to the Earth, to the loot, and the rest of us. I despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others. Either we go all the way now or there is no more way. Who will step off the wheel? Who will join the women who have lived in the forests, in the projects, in the loud and cramped cities and who carry sacks of pain on their backs and hungry babies on their breasts, who are not counted, but whose strength and whose work hold up the world? Who will stand with them and trust that they have always known the way? The world burns in my veins, just like chemo did only a few months ago. I dare you to stop counting and start acting. To stop pleasing and start defying. I dare you to trust what you know. The second wind is beyond data. It is past pain. It is found in the bloodstream and cells of the women and men who purged the poison of their perpetrators, who walked through the cancer, the nightmares. The second wind is coming from your body, it’s in your mouth, it’s in the way you move your hips.

Every vision is necessary now. Every instinct must be awakened. The wind does not turn away. It blows through everything. Do not be afraid. There is no more winning and losing. We have already lost. Even the so-called winners feel that way. That is why they can’t stop self-destructing. Step off the wheel of winning and losing. Of course there is risk. Of course it is dangerous. I wish I could make this easy for you. I wish I could tell you there is nothing to lose. Lose everything. That is where it begins. Each one of you will know in what direction you need to move and who to take with you. You will recognize the others when you arrive. Build the circles. Listen to the voice inside. And when they come and say, “This is the one way only some can profit, we need the oil, we need the drilling, the reactors, the tar sands, the fracking, the coltain, the coal,” stay tight in your circle. Dance in the circles. Sing in the circles. Join arms in the circles. Surrender your comfort. We must be willing to go the distance. We must be willing to leave the kingdom and surrender the treasures.

We are the people of the second wind. We, who have been undermined, reduced, and minimized, we know who we are. Let us be taken. Let us turn our pain to power, our victimhood to fire, our self-hatred to action, our self-obsession to service, to fire, to wind. Wind.
Wind. Be transparent as wind, be as possible and relentless and dangerous, be what moves things forward without needing to leave a mark, be part of this collection of molecules that begins somewhere unknown and can’t help but keep rising. Rising. Rising. Rising

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Charlotte Sheedy, who has been in my corner and my heart for almost forty years—thank you for listening to these pages and believing early.

To Frances Coady, who edited this book with the care, devotion, and craft of a surgeon and who gave me courage.

To Sara Bershtel and everyone at Metropolitan for believing in this book with their whole hearts.

To the circle of friends and family who visited and loved me back to life: Pat Mitchell, Carole Black, James Lescene, Paula Allen, Kim Rosen, Olivier Mevel, Diana de Vegh, Mark Matousek, Katherine Ensler, Adisa Krupalija, David Rivel, Hannah Ensler-Rivel, Jane Fonda, Denis Mukwege, Christine Shuler Descryver, Laura
Flanders and Elizabeth Streb, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis, Stephen Lewis, Amy Goodman, Rada Boric, Nicoletta Billi, Marie Cecile Renauld, Marie Astrid Perimony and Alexia Perimony, Donna Karan, Cari Ross, Emily Scott Pottruck, Jennifer Buffett, Beth Dozoretz, Mellody Hobson, Katherine McFate, Linda Pope, Amy Rao, Sheryl Sandberg, Lisa Schejola Akin, Jodie Evans, Elizabeth Lesser, Andrew Harvey, Curtis Ensler, Nancy Rose, George Lane, David Stone, Frank Selvaggi, Kerry Washington, Rosario Dawson, Glenn Close, Purva Panday Cullman, Susan Celia Swan, Cecile Lipworth, Harriet Clark, Monique Wilson, Urvashi Vaid, Shiva Rose, Brenda Currin and Marie Howe.

To all the doctors and healers who literally saved my life and put me back together: Dr. Louis Katz, Dr. Deb Rhodes, Dr. Sean Dowdy, Dr. Eric Dozois, Dr. Ilan Shapira, Dr. John Koulos, Dr. Joseph Martz.

The nurses at the Mayo Clinic, especially Sara, Rhonda and Monica, and the nurses at Beth Israel, especially Elizabeth, Regina, and Diane.

The women who healed and protected my body at its most vulnerable time—Maryanne Travaligone, Ruth Pontvianne, Deirdre Hade, Maryann Savarice.

Bassia—whose delicious cooking kept my appetite alive.

My extraordinary V-day team, who stepped in and moved it all forward—Carl Cheng, Kate Fisher, Shael Norris, Nikki Noto, Amy Squires, Laura Waleryszak.

All the friends, activists, family who sent me prayers, gifts, emails, flowers, and cards.

My son, Dylan McDermott; my granddaughters, Coco and Charlotte McDermott—my family, my heart.

Tony Montenieri and Laura Ensler, who were there every day with cool washcloths, irony, pills, and courage.

The women of the Congo—you are my strength and my reason.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E
VE
E
NSLER
is an internationally bestselling author and an award-winning playwright whose theatrical works include
The Vagina Monologues
,
Necessary Targets
, and
The Good Body
. She is the author of
Insecure at Last
, a political memoir, and
I Am an Emotional Creature
, a
New York Times
bestseller, which she has since adapted for the stage as
Emotional Creature
. Ensler is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised over $90 million for local groups and activists and inspired the global action “One Billion Rising.” Eve Ensler lives in the world.