PROFILE: Propositions on the Artist's Life
Kandi Workman's profound profile on Robert Singleton's life & work
Douglas John Imbrogno photo | July 2019
INTRODUCTION: The following essay is about the life of 2022 Tamarack Foundation for the Arts Master Artist Fellow Robert Singleton. While no one essay could dutifully capture any person’s life, this essay contains snapshots and allusions to the making of a master artist. It is offered to you in the form of propositions, seemingly unrelated topics and images that, hopefully, by the end will lead you to some sort of cohesion. Moving away from traditional essayistic writing, this form allows for moments of pause, meandering, spiraling, and exploding. It is inspired by Maggie Nelson’s book Bluets. Nelson was inspired by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's propositions and the thought that the inexpressible is contained, albeit inexpressibly, in the expressed. ~ Kandi Workman
The Art of Living: 60 Propositions on Becoming
By Kandi Workman
Art is perpetual negotiation.
On my way to Baker, I stopped in Thomas. What a dreamy little place! It certainly nurtures hope for rural main streets nestled in these mountains. I had lunch at the Purple Fiddle. Regretting not having time to read Core of My Joy before the trip, I took in a few pages as I nibbled on the Fiddle Platter and drank ginger beer.
The thought of writing about you both excited and intimidated me. Why do we sometimes hold the idea of a person to higher standards than our human existence has to offer? Especially when doing so creates space for devaluing ourselves? Why do we get in our own way?
You once asked a juror, who had awarded your work Best in Show, “Why am I always so insecure.” His answer: What makes you think you are any different than other artists? All creative people are insecure.
According to poet Dean Young in The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction, poetry—or any art—is made up of equal parts what it is and what it is not:
Interior self / exterior self Referent / What can be referred to
Liberty / Obligation Defamiliar / Recognizable
Anarchy / Order Self / Community
As an artist, do you agree?
I made myself a few minutes late by leaving Thomas right on time instead of early. I had no clue how captivating the wind farms along Highway 48 (Corridor H) would be to my Corridor G coalfield eyes. A mesmerizing kinetic image that slowed my driving by an unintended 15 miles an hour or so for a good stretch of highway.
We shouldn’t rush wonder.
I was impressed with the robotic, industrial magnitude of the turbines towering trees like trees were merely weeds and standing over power transmission towers like a parent, the towers knee-high to turbines. (I read that power transmission towers range from like 50 to 200 ft; wind turbines, 400 ft.) The seemingly off-time red blinking lights wouldn’t let me go, and the kid in me wished the turbines were shiny and colorful like pinwheels of childhood. I suppose that might offend some if true, but the idea that turbines are painted white to blend in with their surroundings is a farce. Something that unnatural could never blend in.
Apparently, applying white paint for blending in with surroundings contradictorily helps turbines stand out for aircraft. White paint also absorbs less heat. Yet, researchers at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research compared bird mortality rates over five years at a Norwegian wind farm and then randomly selected four out of the 68 turbines for a new paint job. They found that painting a single wind turbine blade black could reduce bird fatalities by 72%, and it was most effective at reducing collision deaths for birds of prey.
I called you when I reached what I thought was my final turn, a left onto the start of the long, rugged road that leads to your home. I slowly trekked upward in my small Ford Fiesta, took in the color of fallen leaves and bare trees, spotted deer, noticed a tree stand, wondered if you were a hunter or a gatherer or both or neither. Taking walks crossed my mind, all the walks at all the different times of day in all seasons one could take in that place of wildlife and solitude.
When I topped the mountain and pulled up to your house, you were there waiting for me in the driveway with a big-hearted welcome. I wondered if this is how you greet all your guests, strangers or not, or if you were mostly just happy to see another human and counter the long days of careful containment the pandemic has necessitated. The seeming comfort and warmth of your midnight blue sweater and gray sweatpants made me feel right at home on a crisp December day. As we walked toward the backdoor of the house, I said, “This place is precious.” You’d never heard someone call your place precious before.
Precious: of an object, substance, or resource of great value, not to be wasted or treated carelessly.
take a walk
listen to birdsong, chatter of chipmunks, squawking of squirrels
keep a watchful eye for unfurling fiddleheads
the gold-spined tiny dragons of morning sun
hunt for patches of molly moochers and mayapples
blackberry brambles and plump red raspberries
search the forest floor for awe-worthy moments of wonder
in the most minute little worlds
an ant crawling the stem of a bright orange mushroom
no taller than my thumb
We entered your house and stepped into your studio. I witnessed the afternoon light shine through the massive wall of windows, a naturally well-lit room, by design. I wondered about all the acts of creation and communion that have taken place in that room, with that light, your hands, your vision, in the forty-three years you have lived on the mountain.
My curiosity grew. What came before all this? What came before this room was yours? By some accounts, you had lived an entire life before you called Hardy County home. I wondered about a life rich in contrast, imbued with juxtaposition.
There’s no way someone who paints clouds the way you do has not been well-versed in the strife and sweetness of this life.
In the chilly studio, looking at your workspace, I told you I was intimidated to write about you, but, coincidentally, my concern had been mildly soothed by reading your admission of insecurity at the beginning of your book.
Just from reading the first few pages, I gathered you were a kind person. Being in your presence, seeing your clouds in person, I knew this was true.
You were born in 1937, yet there’s something so sweet and childlike about the way your eyes shine when you smile.
Upstairs, the embrace of the fireplace quickly warmed me. You only use wood for heat. A loved one helps with this task by gathering fallen trees from the forest and preparing them for use. And the tree stand belongs to a friend; you are not a hunter.
While sitting at the dinner table, snacking on German cookies, dried fruit, nuts, and cheese, you asked me if I knew St. John and the Dark Night of the Soul. I was unsure.
“In the twilight of life, God will not judge us on our earthly possessions and human successes, but on how well we have loved.” ―John of the Cross
You pulled out the well-worn book of words from the shelf behind you and thumbed through, lightly nodding to the darkness before the light, as it was for St. John, then for you. By the time you rather serendipitously made your way to West Virginia in 1978, you were a mid-forties, well-established artist with a catalog of successes and awards and material wealth. But internally, you were unsettled. A gnawing ache to be apart from people drove you to disconnect from the influences of others. You dropped out of the art world and sought hermitage. It took three years of isolation, studious and monk-like on the mountain in Baker, contemplating and meditating from sun up to sun down, both cocooning and shedding, before you made your way through that dark night, before you realized the light you sought glows from within, before you understood how love, the agape kind in all its unconditional goodness, is that warm radiance, is that light, that undefinable awareness that lives beyond language. Love is the sweetness of this life—that which makes the bitterness of living bearable. As Nietzsche put it, “We have art so that we shall not die of reality.” I may not have read the book, but I knew the dark night of the soul intimately, I told you. Significant change does not come without it.
How do we understand each other when we say I love you? Do you think art is love manifested?
Poetry, like any art form, is recognized through its relationship to precedents/conventions. While all art forms evolve to some extent through resistance to convention, that resistance is defined by the set of conventions it resists and with which it remains in identification.
A month later, sitting in Subway at noon on a Tuesday, I read St. John’s quote about love, saw your face and felt your spirit in memory, and I bowed my head and wept. Our short yet generous time together that Friday afternoon at your place was enriching and pleasant, yet I was experiencing difficulty writing about you, a difficulty that stepped beyond insecurity into something else. That quote helped me understand. You saw me, and I saw you. That’s hard to put into words.
What do we know about forbidden love? It seems that we are often conditioned in the name of love, not to love. A paradox plumb full of rights and wrongs. And it hurts us.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
In the book “The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere,” essayist Pico Iyer tells about his journey of learning stillness, about becoming un-busy. In his search for stillness, Iyer visited Leonard Cohen at a monastery in the mountains of California. In 1994, Cohen temporarily retired to the Mt. Baldy Zen Center in Los Angeles and was ordained as a monk in 1996. Cohen spent five or six years on that mountain. He penned “Hallelujah” during this time, and it is said that it took five years and 100 revisions before he found his final words.
You considered becoming a monk after you moved to West Virginia, during your period of awakening, after the deaths of your brother and father. You were even baptized with the cold water from a tributary of the Potomac in the Smoke Hole Cavern Church. But a monastic life was not meant to be your path, though, was it? It would be easy to sweetly joke about what changed your mind—you found companionship with a dog called Bear. But you also longed for a love you never knew. Little did you know your spiritual path, although opaque, was well into a state of becoming.
The first case of HIV in the United States was reported in 1981.
I was in first grade when I pushed my tiny finger into the reflective foam insulation board that covered a wall in the basement. I loved the way the pushing on the foam felt almost as much as I loved the way my fingernail would slip into an eraser, especially a softer, gummier one. Inside the crooked pressed-heart I added names: Kandi + Leah. She was my friend and I loved her, and this was an expression of friendship. The next time Leah came for a visit, I showed her the heart and our names. You’re not supposed to write that. Girls can’t love girls. That’s against the Bible. It was also around first grade the first time I heard my parents talk about HIV and AIDS and my oldest brother’s perverse behaviors, as far as they were concerned, and my mother’s scared, uninformed warnings of limited physical affection towards my brother when he was around—all the unknowns that created fear and limited love-giving, both to him and, internally, to myself.
How old were you the first time you ever felt loved? No, not the first time you loved someone. When was the first time you ever felt loved back?
Stephen moved in with you in 1988, and you two built a beautiful life together on the mountain. Painting. Photography. Roses reaching up to the sky. Stephen + Bobby. You were in your fifties the first time you experienced a genuine, authentic, loving relationship with a partner.
I’m nearly forty-three. This gives me hope. Thank you.
Novelist and creative nonfiction writer Anne Lamott said, I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us. Sit here with me for a minute, and let’s think about grace.
Stephen rests high on the mountain, near the hickory. A life cut short by AIDS in 1993. A love unending, found in the light of clouds, love manifested.
The Allegheny Front is one of the windiest spots east of the Mississippi, thus the investment in wind farming and altering the landscape of mountain ridges with turbine towers. Might it be destiny that you found solace so close to the Eastern Continental Divide where the winds push up and form orographic clouds? Stratus. Stratocumulus. Cumulus. Cumulonimbus. Transfigured. Fear No Evil. Apparition. Old Soul. Satori. Sanctuary. Safe Harbor.
Writing this is hard. I can’t write about you from home, although for two months I’ve held you near in thought no matter where I’m at. Right now, I’m in Chapmanville, close to Logan. At a combo gas station/Burger King. Drinking Seattle’s Best coffee with extra cream. A lump in my throat. Full eyes. Thinking about heartache and rocking chairs and your cross necklace and how acts of compassion during times of deep suffering can be so overwhelmingly beautiful, much like the graceful rays of light breaking through the cracks in apocalyptic clouds after a storm, and not just any storm, but a cataclysmic storm like the derecho of 2012. It felt like the world was ending and then ribbons of white, blues, pinks, and purples manifested repose in the sky, leaving a powerful before and after scenario, the juxtaposition between the beauty and allure of nature and her femme fatale intensity and contradictory force.
You told me the story of when your close friend, sick with AIDS, made plans to come spend his last days on the mountain with you, wanting nothing more than to rock in rocking chairs and spend long hours of tea drinking and talking. When it came time to travel, he wasn’t well enough to make the trip. You went to Florida to keep him company. When all was said and done, his family brought some of his ashes to the mountain for a memorial service. It was 1994, one year after losing Stephen. Now, thirty years after the AIDS epidemic started in the U.S., there are seven headstones memorializing the friends you have lost to the disease, the friends who turned to you for release. Your calling was to see them through their final days and onto passage for whatever comes next.
After a moment of pause, holding my breath, I looked at you and finally said, “You are a fine example of what it means to be a friend,” wishing one day to be more dedicated to sharing the suffering of my kith and kin, like you, letting dedication rise above doubt.
“I try to be,” you responded.
You didn’t say this in passing or as a thoughtless canned response. You spoke with a tone of humility that carried with it complicated memories, deep remorse, and emotional complexity. I can only imagine how that utterance filled your chest. Growing older teaches us we will never outrun our regrets or our longings.
I try to be.
To be
How much meaning this holds when you/we/I hunger for
identity individuality family community security
liberty visibility solitude grace togetherness
love
When you hunger for love.
You have been trying to be for a long time, Robert. I’m so very proud of you for trying, my friend.
We are communal, physical beings, and, ideally, our human bodies are designed to respond to nurturance and healthy touch. To respond to eyes and smiles and soothing tones and calm energy. Our brains contain mirroring neurons to aid in mimicry, to create healthy connections and bonds with caregivers.
You came from a Puritan family with parents who provided the material necessities but left you touch-starved and love-deficient from a mighty tender age. Spare the rod, spoil the child and maternal guilt trips. What you thought was love was non-love. Being bonded to a caregiver is not the same as being in familial bondage forged from the adversities of childhood traumas. When I asked you about your childhood, you said, “It was dark. It’s in the book.” I knew to stop there with my inquiry.
The CDC-Kaiser Permanente adverse childhood experiences (ACE) study is one of the largest investigations of childhood abuse and neglect and household challenges and later-life health and well-being. Examples of ACEs include:
• Experiencing parental divorce or separation
• Having a family member who is incarcerated
• Living with a family member who is addicted to alcohol or other substances
• Living with a family member who is depressed or has other mental illnesses
• Experiencing physical and emotional neglect
• Experiencing physical, emotional and sexual abuse
• Witnessing a mother being abused
Additionally, there are foundational harms at the community/group level, such as
• Religious violence or oppression
• Racism
• Poverty
• ViolenceYou did, however, readily share a childhood joy with me. Your first creative love was not painting—it was music. As a little one of ten years old with dyslexia you learned how to play the piano under the wing of Dagny Solheim Nordbo, a Norwegian pianist whose family lived just down the street from you. It was the first time you ever tapped into that well of creative inspiration. The piano was a sound that went to the core of your joy as Ms. Nordbo’s gentle hand guided yours, a precious memory that is always close.
The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard states, “The single most common factor for children who develop resilience is at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive parent, caregiver or other adult.” One committed adult can change the life of a child with exposure to ACEs.
February 10, 2022: I looked at my memories on Facebook. Four years ago I shared a TED Talk about childhood trauma featuring speaker Dr. Nadine Burke Harris. Dr. Burke is known for linking adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress with harmful effects to health later in life; childhood trauma and toxic stress are the number one killers. The more adverse experiences, the worse your health outcome, such as significant increase of heart disease, hepatitis, cancer, depression, and suicide.
But your parents stopped you from attending the free piano lessons. Who needed music, anyway? It was 1947, and you innately felt that nobody loved you.
In 2008 Prevent Child Abuse America introduced the Pinwheels for Prevention® campaign.
What our research showed, and what our experiences since then have reinforced, is that people respond positively to pinwheels, which represent childlike whimsy and lightheartedness and our vision for a world where all children grow up happy, healthy, and prepared to succeed in supportive families and communities.
Parents, and other adults, via their behaviors and actions teach children either what to do or what not to do. Either way, children learn. As a parent of three children, I will not outrun my shortcomings, and discover new regrets every day as I grow and learn. But the mother in me wants to hold tight the child in you. Oxytocin acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain and increases the bond we feel with others. Incorporate 30 second hugs into your every day routine. I can only imagine how your little child-sized body longed for even a 30 second hug from a caring adult. I would like to think that we know better now, and that we are more just with our love for young people. I know the reality of this is only partly true, but I won’t stop hoping.
High school held all the struggles one could anticipate for a young man trying to escape the hardships of toxic masculinity and homophobia. You did try to play football once, trying to escape your own internalized homophobia and please your father and gain any kind of praise possible from him, even if it meant going against your true self. You broke your fingers, and never played again. You played piano at the high school and discovered art with the support of kind teachers who identified your strengths instead of demeaning you for your academic challenges. By the time you graduated high school, you knew you wanted to become an artist. Little did you know that choosing art as a vocation was going to be your salvation.
Ready to escape the toxicity of unhealthy familial dependency, you eagerly left home for college, but your time there was cut short on the grounds of being homosexual. The years that followed were full of running away and creative exploration and making good friends and suicide attempts and moving back home and mental health hospital stays and discovering the horizon line of the uninterrupted landscape of the West and despair and all the “rights and wrongs” of being a young gay man in late 50s and 60s, underscored by the foundational feeling of being incapable of giving or receiving love.
After being expelled from college, and subsequently discriminated against and fired from a job for the same reason a year later, you found yourself tucked into a little remote country house with friends and their children. And as WV artist Kelsie Tyson puts it, “We were poor, but we loved.” You painted and helped care for the kids and kept up the home and went out looking for wood to chop to every morning to keep the house warm. This was the first time you got to know the true meaning of friendship and openness. Your time there, with a family that knew how to love and with woods all around, would prove to be monumentally influential on your life.
After some time there, you took a trip to Seattle with a friend, the first time you’d ever left the East Coast. The horizon line of the West put to image your feelings of immense emptiness since childhood. You would never forget the emotion being mirrored through natural elements.
According to Dean Young, We must work to lose control when control has become too limiting. We must assert more vigorously the presence of choice to counter a too great loss of control. I’m sorry you felt so desperately alone and sad as a young person.
National Suicide Hotline: 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255)
HELP 4 WV: 1-844-HELP4WV offers a 24/7 call, chat, and text line that provides immediate help for any West Virginian struggling with an addiction or mental health issue.
The Trevor Project: www.thetrevorproject.org The Trevor Project is the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ+ young people.
2021 Suicide and Mental Health of LBGTQ+: 2021 results from a survey conducted by The Trevor Project found that 42% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, including more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death for youth between ages 10-24.
Reader, if you have made it this far, you will associate wind turbines with child abuse and healing from childhood trauma.
At the center of any artistic practice is a resistance as well as a contrary impulse to identify, to stand off from the tribe and to be part of it.
Back in late summer I made a trip to Elkins and Buckhannon to visit artists Emily Prentice and Suzan Morgan. I took 79, and just passed Sutton, where the elevation starts climbing, Brandi Carlile’s cover of “Hallelujah” came on. I’d never heard a woman sing this song before, and let me tell you, it hits you differently after you’ve allowed yourself to love how you’re meant to love. I topped the mountain and saw the horizon line. The emotional impact of representation, the beauty-filled vista, the good kind of smallness found in awe, and the power, humility, longing, and heartache in Carlile’s voice—it all broke me. I continued to drive as I listened to the song on repeat and welcomed the generous ache of emotional complexity taking place within. I’m still trying to be, as well.
We might not be David or Samson, but oh how we fall just as hard. Love is a cold and broken Hallelujah at times, ain’t it? But don’t we do the best we can with what we have, Robert? I see your flag on the marble arch. That we are still trying to be is victory, as we will keep up this march.
Hallelujah!
My art is that innocent child from years ago, you say in your book. I imagine you learned to love like you learned paint, bit by bit. Some things must be made opaque to be seen. But, my goodness, how well you shine now, Robert, safe away from harm.
Different from Carlile’s cover, k. d. lang’s performance of “Hallelujah” at the 2005 Juno Awards feels like surrender. Wearing a long black brocade jacket, she walks the stage barefoot. The tone, control, and smoothness of her voice take the lyrics to an ethereal place, a place of praise and gratitude that goes beyond romantic love and our experiences as physical beings. It is an act of spirit. Four minutes and ten seconds into the song, lang lifts her arms, opens her chest, tilts her head back, and belts the word “Hallelujah,” sustaining the last syllable with a long breath. Although physically present, she is wholly creatively immersed in that sweetwater river of divine creation. About thirty seconds later, lang’s tone drops as she physically shrinks herself into a bow and pushes out a wail of surrender. When the song is over, the crowd rises in full applause. lang bows. Rises. Bows again.
lang has been a practicing Buddhist for 22 years. She understood she had obstacles in her path that prevented her from doing what she needed to do in life. She found her way after being asked, What is your motivation? lang came to the awareness that her motivation was being in service to others in everything that you do. [Music] is my offering to you. My teacher always talked about the expansive nature—pulling yourself out of yourself and always looking with the widest possible view. It gives you a completely different perspective. In other words, we have to get out of our own way.
Robert, this reminds me of your journey. Your loss of innocence. Your struggle for connection and visibility. A deep knowing from a very young age that you had to be true to yourself while fighting against a hateful world. Loss and longing for the things you never knew. Your coming to the mountain. Your heavily marked up copy of Dark Night of the Soul. Your devotion to your friends and being in service of others. Your becoming. Your paintings as offerings. Offering yourself, the kid in you, to be seen, to be witnessed, to be loved while simultaneously honoring the light that is love manifested. Over the years, you have tried so hard to prove you are worthy of giving and receiving love, and your art and role as a creator are so intricately weaved into this. I’m glad to learn that you now practice living day to day in a state of being, presence, and peace. And I’m glad you have someone to gather the wood for you now, someone who is devoted to your care and showing you acts of love in return.
Here’s that grace thing again. Shew. I started to touch on our limited capacity for understanding grace. I don’t think this is true, though. Grace cannot be contained in words, this much is true. But the ethereal parts of us know the power of grace, and at some point we do ourselves well by stepping into that power, accepting how little we do know, ironically.
Apparently, Leonard Cohen thought most songwriters were better than him, and, according to Cohen, he didn’t go to the mountain in search of spiritual connection. He followed a man there.
I wasn't looking for anything exalted or spiritual. I had a great sense of disorder in my life of chaos, of depression, of distress. And I had no idea where this came from. And the prevailing psychoanalytic explanations at the time didn't seem to address the things I felt.
So I had to look elsewhere. And I bumped into someone who seemed to be at ease with himself. And without ever deeply studying at the time what he was speaking about, it was the man himself that attracted me. If he had been a teacher of, you know, physics in Heidelberg, I would've learned German and studied physics in Heidelberg.
The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say, ‘Look, I don’t understand a fucking thing at all – Hallelujah!’ That’s the only moment that we live here fully as human beings.
I told you I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to fully become myself, nodding to challenges with family and place. You reached across the table and placed your hand on top of mine. “It will be okay. Everything will be okay.” I felt that. I won’t forget it, ever.
Brene Brown is a researcher who has studied courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy for two decades. She preaches the audacity of authenticity. Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we're supposed to be and embracing who we are. Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.
Life is perpetual negotiation.
If you have made it this far you will always associate wind turbines with child abuse, and you might wish they were colorful, too.
KANDI WORKMAN is a life-long resident of the southern West Virginia coalfields, where she is raising her family of three children and exploring the depths of her connection to rural community and the past, present, and future of living in the Appalachian Mountains. She is a 2015 graduate of West Virginia State University, with a B.A. in writing and English Literature. She spent two years as an AmeriCorps VISTA, addressing childhood literacy, substance use, and trauma-informed community care. Kandi served as a Highlander Education and Research Center Appalachian Just Transition Fellow from 2018-2019. Presently, she is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing: Creative Nonfiction at WV Wesleyan College. She works with the Tamarack Foundation for the Arts as a grantwriter and programming manager, and is a member of the Waymakers Collective AppalCore governance team and a board member of the WV Mine Wars Museum.
Attributions:
1. Inspired by Dean Young’s “Poetry is perpetual negotiation,” The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction.
2. Robert Singleton, Core of My Joy.
4. Robert Singleton, Core of My Joy.
9. Christopher McFadden, “Why are Turbines Painted White?” interestingengineering.com/why-are-wind-turbines-painted-white.
20. Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction.
“How do we understand each other when we say I love you?”
21. Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction.
23. Rumi, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
31. Titles of Robert Singleton’s paintings: Transfigured. Fear No Evil. Apparition. Old Soul. Satori. Sanctuary. Safe Harbor.
41. Dr. Nadine Burke, Ted Talk, “How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime,” www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_trauma_affects_health_across_a_lifetime?language=en
43. Prevent Childabuse America, “Pinwheels for Prevention,” https://preventchildabuse.org/pfp-guidance/.
47. Robert Singleton, Core of My Joy, “first time you got to know the true meaning of friendship and openness.”
49. The Trevor Project, National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health 2021, www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2021/?section=Introduction.; America’s Health Rankings, “Teen Suicide,” “Suicide is the second leading cause of death for youth between ages 10-24,” www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/health-of-women-and-children/measure/teen_suicide/state/WV.
54. I-AM, “Pema Chödrön & k.d. lang talk Buddhism, creativity, and ‘gapaciousnes,’” Lion's Roar Staff, https://dreamintuitive.blogspot.com/2016/01/pema-chodron-kd-lang-talk-buddhism.html.
57. NPR, Fresh Air, “Leonard Cohen On Poetry, Music And Why He Left The Zen Monastery,” www.npr.org/2016/10/21/498810429/leonard-cohen-on-poetry-music-and-why-he-left-the-zen-monastery; Rolling Stone, “How Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ Brilliantly Mingled Sex, Religion,”
www.rollingstone.com/feature/how-leonard-cohens-hallelujah-brilliantly-mingled-sex-religion-194516/.