In the Body of the World

by Eve Ensler

  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 extraordina
ry 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

  EVE ENSLER 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.