Creative Selections
from
Artists, Musicians, Writers, Poets & Performers

Introducing Forces of Nature. We need you. We need your unique perspective. We need your deeper understanding to help us all better understand. And we need you to help us tell the deeper story that is happening all around us—invisible to many but in plain sight to you.

Here is a new and supportive place where we can share our hearts—excerpts from our inner journey, —our struggle in the darkness, our dull and sharp pain, our unseen triumphs, our quiet contemplations, our deepening love, our subtle insights, our profound epiphanies, and most importantly our tender hopes.

If you have created something with your heart and soul that helps us build a connection with you and one another, please consider sharing it here.

Do you have a song, a poem, a drawing, a painting, a sculpture, a craft, a photo, performance, a dance, a short story, a speech, verse, a reflection, a maxim, a comic line, a recipe, an invention or a tattoo design...?

Please send your submissions for possible selection and feature in this column and on our social media sites.

By submitting your work, you give us permission to share it with others who visit our website, view our social media sites and support our mission.

We at Parker Bounds Johnson Foundation applaud and respect your original work and therefore would encourage you to protect it through copyright, if desired, before submission to our public entity and public social media sites.

(The PBJF Board of Directors reserves the right to select submissions for public presentation at its discretion.)

Please send your submissions to:

info@pbjwilderness4life.org
or through Facebook Private Messenger at @PBJWilderness4Life

Thank you for being Forces of Nature!

Mental Health is Physical
by Ben Sutherland

For centuries, largely thanks to a lack of scientific knowledge, there has been a mysticism projected onto the brain. This fundamental lack of understanding resulted in a distancing of the brain and the rest of body and consequently there was a distancing of the mental from the physiological. This logical assumption is not baseless and false but it does a great disservice to those who are suffering from mental health issues out there and aren’t given the credence they deserve because there is no obvious physical manifestation of their ailment.

The physiological component of mental health became very apparent to me this past summer. I was in New York being dragged round an art museum by my girlfriend. I had begun to run a lot again as the cross country season approached and it was slowly beginning to take a toll on my mental health.

The all too familiar anxiety and depression began to creep back into the picture. I was medicating and getting fairly regular psychological consultations and so figured this level of management was sufficient and did my best to just shrug it off.

However, as I walked round this museum, I noticed that I was beginning to limp. There was no pain, just an incredibly exaggerated walking gait. My heart sank. I thought I was injured again and I got on the next train back to college to get the athletic trainer to take a look at it. An MRI showed nothing and a thorough examination by the athletic trainer, an orthopedic surgeon and a chiropractor revealed nothing. There was nothing physically wrong with my leg. In fact, I was repeatedly told my leg was in great condition and there was absolutely no reason that I couldn’t walk. However, the limp persisted.

Having not been able to walk for three weeks, I was beginning to lose hope. My last resort was to go and see doctor that we had had success with in the past who was based down in Boston. To my great surprise, he had seen something like this before. He diagnosed me with Conversion Disorder. Conversion Disorder is generally defined as a physical symptom that cannot be explained by a physical cause. In my case, the doctor concluded that my depression and anxiety had gotten to the point where they had caused by leg to stop working so I would have to acknowledge the problem, stop running and begin to treat it.

That is exactly what I did and after another 4 weeks of limping, I began to walk normally again.

That was about as an exaggerated and blatant example of mental health issues presenting in physiological ways. However, this is the case for far more regular mental health issues too. Recent studies have managed to detect chemical imbalances in the brain and other physiological markers in the blood that allow medical professionals to identify depression. Anxiety also brings with it a whole load of physical symptoms including trembling and panic attacks. Consequently, mental health isn’t really mental at all. It shows up physically. It is diagnosable by tests and it is very very real.

To try and push off mental health issues as something that is “all in your head” is simply wrong. Not only is it wrong, but to perpetuate these attitudes is dangerous to the point that it is getting people killed.

If your friend told you that they had cancer, you wouldn’t tell them it was made up. You would take them seriously. Mental health problems are no different. In fact, amongst teenagers and young adults, mental health issues kill significantly more people every year than cancer does in the same demographic. It’s time we started treating mental health issues as they should be treated, as genuine and potentially life threatening health problems.

Your mental health concerns are not something you have created in your head, they are genuine issues and they are valid. You should not feel ashamed of going to get help.

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My Treatise On Death
by Dominic Paul

Before the school year began, a dear friend of mine took his life. The last important person in my life to die was my Great Grandmother, who passed away at the age of 91. When I was told she had died, I didn’t really know what to do. I was only about 9 or 10, and I don’t think I was able to really wrap my head around it at the time. I didn’t even cry, I just stared into the void, letting it sink in. Recently however, I did cry. I cried into the shoulder of my dog, who didn’t know what was going on but boy was I glad she was there for me. After a couple hours, still feeling unsettled and shaken, I climbed into the attic of my garage, sat down and meditated. I don’t normally meditate because in one’s busy schedule, who has the time? This time however, I did meditate. I sat criss-cross, closed my eyes, and breathed in and out. All the sounds of the outside world continued, the birds still chirped, the wind still blew, the children continued to scream and shout playfully. The world kept turning, just as it always has and always will.

15 days after Parker Johnson’s death, I spoke with his mother and told her how I felt I had made my piece. She was curious how I was interpreting his passing, and asked for me to write my thoughts down. Finally on December 11th, I have done so, and while I feel it only scratches the surface of what I’m trying to say, the soil is rich and ready for planting, so here it goes.

The physical being that was Parker Johnson is dead, he has passed on from this earth. However, who Parker Johnson was for me, and was for the others who loved him dearly, has not and will never die. Because in my heart of hearts, I believe this: Who Parker Johnson was, was not based solely on him and him alone. Parker Johnson was formed due to the love and nurturing of his beloved parents and sister, and his whole entire family (even those from School, Rugby, Tucson, and the MHN). He was a being created by all of his experiences and interactions with other people. Every person he met or who had an affect on him, created him into what he was, and what we loved about him. while the flesh and blood that was created is gone, his being still lives on in all of us who knew him, admired him, and loved him. I will forever react to certain things the way I do today because of Parker Johnson.

Every time I eat a molasses cookie, every time I listen to rap music, every time I see a tattoo, I will react and think the way I do because of my experiences and interactions with Parker. That goes for everyone else too. Every time you hear a song, see a piece of art, every time you eat cinnamon toast crunch and ice-cream! Parker is as much a part of who and what you are today as you were of him, as you ARE, of him. You will continue to pass these experiences and points of view on to your kids, and they to other people, so that Parker Johnson lives on. That is the case in every death, and in every loss of life. I see my Grandma Jeanne in my Mom; in every joke that she tells, every meal she cooks, and in every caring hug and kiss. I even feel her every time i watch someone get schooled in checkers. I feel these loved ones because I am these loved ones, and you are too. And I love you.

Originally posted at:
Dom made a Tumblr—
the musing of a young man who seeks to change his own perspective as well as the perspective of others. (Link)

*Thank you Dominic Paul. You wrote this thoughtful prose December 12, 2014 just a month and a half after Parker crossed over, and it popped up today....A gentle reminder from Parker? It sure feels worthwhile to share again.

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Objectivity:
by Ben Sutherland
Contributing Writer for PBJF Forces of Nature

I am having a bad day. I am walking to the train station after a weekend in New York. My knee hurts and I am limping very badly. It’s the same knee I had surgery on last year and I suspect a reoccurrence of the same injury or something worse. I have slept poorly the last few nights, the heat is bearing down and I am tired. That piercing sad feeling is making a comeback, that familiar inexplicable pessimism and sense of despair.

I descend into the subway and hobble quickly onto the train. The train is delayed and the doors remain open. As I stand there, waiting for the train doors to close, a little boy walks into the carriage. He can’t be much older than 10. He is wearing clothing peppered with holes and his shoes are ripped. He announces to the crowded carriage that he is selling popsicles for a dollar each. He shuffles through the carriage and collects what can’t be more than two or three bucks before he quickly ducks out of the carriage as the doors close.

I don’t know the circumstances that led to this boy collecting money on the train, but I can confidently speculate that it is an unfortunate set of conditions which have devastated the early portion of his life.

In that moment, I realized my knee was insignificant. The biggest problem I have is an injury which threatens to hinder a few weeks of my training. Training for a set of competitions which, whilst they are intrinsically important to me, are arbitrary and irrelevant to my quality of life. Things aren’t that bad.

This realization doesn’t cause the sad feeling to dissipate. It remains pretty much constant. However, it is now put in perspective. I made a conscious decision, I refused to let this irrational sad feeling dominate my life. It was there but I wasn’t going to give it the credence it desired.

It is a hard thing, when you descend into that dark place, to realize things aren’t that bad. It is something I tell myself regularly now, so when I fall into a depressive spiral I have something to cling onto. Things get better, things aren’t as bad as they seem and you aren’t alone.

The depressive spiral, which unfortunately a far too prominent feature of our society, tragically takes the lives of so many people every year because they falsely belief their situation is insurmountably difficult. These situations are almost never as bad as they seem to the person at the time.

Depression is not a rational thing. That is the threat it poses to us: It takes away our perception of reality. Objectivity is a vital component to overcoming this disease. I don’t have the solution. Far from it. But it is nonsensical that I am sadder than that little boy on the train. It took me a really long time to reach this level of self-awareness, a self-awareness which protects me from depression’s irrational and despairing claws.

Objectivity: a focus on the facts presented to us by reality rather than our own biases or perceptions, is the key. So here are the facts: despite what you might think, you are not alone. Help is out there, it is readily available and it is effective. Life is worth living. Your situation might seem dire, but it will get better. It will always get better.

Those are the facts, never forget them.