The Myth of Normal 47

Chapter 3 You Rattle My Brain: Our Highly Interpersonal Biology For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass “All my relations.” I have often heard this greeting when visiting Native communities in Canada. These are the places where my country, to its shame, sees the highest levels of physical and mental illness, addictions, and early death—a tragic situation analogous with that of similarly colonized aboriginal populations in the United States and Australia. The phrase, as I understand it, refers to the individual’s multidimensional bond with the entire world, including people—from close relatives to strangers, from the living to ancestors who lived long before—and also the rocks, the plants, the earth, the sky, and all creatures. Ancient cultures have long understood that we exist in relationship to all, are affected by all, and affect all. In the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita, the divine avatar Krishna declares, “They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them.” And the early seventeenth-century cleric and poet John Donne famously mused, “No man is an island, entire of itself.” He composed this line, perhaps not coincidentally, during a period of illness and convalescence. Walt Whitman, writing in mid-nineteenth-century America, could have cribbed the verse cited in the above epigraph from today’s quantum physics.