1000 Cranes Recap and Update

I'm writing this blog entry to reconnect with my story as it pertains to suicide, and hopefully, to inspire a new wave of collective healing around this incredibly difficult issue. 

I am currently a teaching artist living in Alaska. I moved here after spending some years overseas, largely disconnected from my own support network and many markers of my personal identity (language, culture, etc.) Three months after I arrived here, my immediate supervisor commit suicide. It was the first suicide I had ever been close to, and I didn't know what to do with myself. I stayed in bed for three days. Since that time, each year, I have lost at least one friend, colleague, or student to suicide. I have lived in Alaska for nearly ten years. I struggle now with my own fear to connect meaningfully with the people in my community, painfully aware of the risk involved, the grief and dangerous apathy of exposure to continual loss. 

Last year, while teaching as an artist-in-residence in a small native village near the Bering Strait, I was part of a failed rescue attempt to save a young man who drowned in the lake beside our school. That night, out of my own feelings of helplessness, I began a project to fold 1000 origami cranes in a gesture of healing and support. I got the children involved right away, and through the network of social media, I included my students, friends, and family remotely, asking them to fold cranes with us then post their pictures and words of support to a facebook site I created called "1000 Cranes for Alaska". I promised to share the posts with the children of the village in the hopes that this would help cheer them up.

In less than three days, our story had gone global, and hundreds of people from as far away as Switzerland and Greece were sending pictures of cranes and words of hope. As we looked through the hundreds of posts, one of the children asked me "How do these people know who we are to care about us?" It was a huge "aha" moment for me, and I realized how powerful our collective gesture of healing had become. 

It is hard to describe the feelings of isolation I experience when I visit remote Alaska. The village of St. Michael has a population of 350, slightly larger than the last village I visited. Beyond a tiny cluster of weather-beaten homes there is only the vast expanse of nature as far as the eye can see. Mountains, tundra, swaths of frozen ocean; it is incredibly easy to feel like we are completely alone in the world.

When tragedy strikes here, as it often does, (without ready access to emergency medical care no less), everyone is deeply affected. Alcoholism, sexual and physical abuse, and sadly even the exploitation of native populations at the hands of abusive clergy, are ripping deep wounds into the fabric of humanity in rural Alaska, and suicide is a desperate escape for far too many.

In Anchorage, our largest city, the suicide rate is twice the national average, and in rural Alaska some villages are experiencing the tragedy of suicide at a rate seven times that of the rest of America. In St. Michael, pop. 350, three people commit suicide in the seven months just prior to my visit. Since folding our thousand cranes, (a project the children and I completed in just 4 days), this village has not experienced another suicide. St. Michael will be suicide free for a full year come June. 

I'd like to leave it there, with a tidy, happy ending, like in the movies. But my story continues, and it was not long in my own life before I found myself facing this terrible issue yet again. Six months after I returned home to Anchorage, my romantic partner attempted suicide, (thankfully unsuccessfully). On the heels of becoming a public face speaking against the riptide of senseless death, this last act hit a little too close to home, and despite everything I'd learned, I began isolating myself from those around me, wounded and fearful of human contact.

I know my fight to stop the hemorrhage of my community is far from over, and I have begun to process and transform my own experiences through the best avenue I know, my creativity. In addition to our cranes, which now hang on permanent display in the St. Michael school library, a live facebook page where visitors can fold cranes and share stories, and this weblog chronicling our story, I have created and performed a 30 minute piece about my experiences in St. Michael, utilizing movement, storytelling, music and video to share a unified message about hope and healing. 

I am now in the process of expanding this project into a one-woman show that, in addition to my story, explores the deeper issues of isolation and interdependence, grief and healing, social media and the transformative powers of inspired, collective art. I am working with a director who is also a clinical therapist and shares my vision of healing through the process of creating art. I have begun reaching out to friends and family, and support networks, such this one, for both personal and creative inspiration along my continued path of transformation. This new show is set to premiere at Out North Contemporary Art House in mid-August, and I am grateful to be discovering another chapter in our continually evolving story of "1000 Cranes for Alaska."