All Will Be Well

1 Writer

Additional Project Info

Statement Since being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 10 years ago I’ve made forays into wellness, alternative medicine, psychedelics, and all manner of healing treatments. I’ve felt conflicted, hypocritical, intrigued, amazed, skeptical, and even fleetingly enthusiastic. I noticed that wellness didn’t match well with my autism, I asked too many blunt questions because the logic of Wellness is contradictory: the array of indigenous healing practices on offer are perverted from their collective, environmentally sustainable origins, becoming extractive, working, instead to turn participants’ gaze inwards to focus only on themselves. The chance to “find yourself”, “be present” and “connect to the Earth” through purchasing combinations of meditation and mindfulness, healing, and hallucinogens, is an appropriation of ancient communal knowledge for financial profit. While expressing gratitude to Mother Earth, Grandfather Tobacco, and Grandmother Ayahuasca, these retreats perpetuate endless extraction, wanton consumption and contamination of land and sea for economic gain. The bewildering array of healing treatments and workshops on offer promote focusing on ourselves, dwelling on our own sickness as though it was an obstacle on in a kind of hero’s journey we make towards “wellness”. This somewhat sociopathic contemporary tendency is perhaps a symptom of a prevailing sense of hopelessness, disappointment, precarity and insecurity that hangs over us. My intention is to consider how the rise in loneliness and narcissism intersects with the detached, sociopathic way we treat our environment - the clear tendencies of extractivism: taking what you want and getting what you need. But what if a visitor to such a retreat were to take the imperative to connect to the earth literally? Our story starts with Safia wiping out an invasive species, her overzealous use of pesticides leaves a no-man's land behind. She’s a woman who needs to be in control, she has deep anxiety about contamination, yet slowly she opens herself to disorder, learning to let nature take its course, it isn’t what we’d think of as “pretty”, it's more then that, she learns to listen to the earth, unlocking a space of visionary wilderness that follows the objective of “letting go” to its logical conclusion of total abandonment.