Page 60 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

woman to turn against her own body, to view it as an enemy to be dominated and controlled,

and to ignore the grave risks and dire outcomes of her life style.

In my understanding, this mindset arises out of our profound disconnection from the earth, the

great body from which we all emerge, and by which we are sustained. Life itself has become the

“collateral damage” of our rapacious hunger for more power, control, property, resources, and

wealth. We take with a sense of entitlement and impunity.

In Columbus and Other Cannibals, Native American author Jack D. Forbes puts it this way: "I

call it cannibalism. ...But whatever we call it, this disease, this wetiko (cannibal) psychosis, is

the greatest epidemic sickness known to man. The rape of a woman, the rape of a land, and the

rape of a people, they are all the same. And they are the same as the rape of the earth, the rape

of the rivers, the rape of the forest, the rape of the air, the rape of the animals. Brutality knows

no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. Arrogance knows no

frontiers. Deceit knows no edges. These characteristics all tend to push towards an extreme,

always moving forward once the initial infection sets in."ı

In my own prolonged state of disconnection, I perpetrated countless acts of violence and

betrayal against my body. Eventually this led to a rapid and irreversible die-off, as infection

devoured my skin and left only gangrenous tissue in its wake. Cannibalism, as Forbes describes

it, consumes the lives of others; gangrene consumes its living host. I think about illness as

metaphor and wonder if gangrene is a form of cannibalism turned inward—a disregard for the

sanctity of life that can eat us alive.

***

During a recent meditation, I ran my hands across the forehead and down the trunk of an

elephant, then along the broad and weathered expanse of her side. Moving around to the back

)"