Dear Reader,
This is a collection of poetry inspired by and compiled from hundreds of social media posts, essays, and articles I wrote during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. My “career” in science communication accidentally commenced when my piece “Getting Vaxxed Was My Act of Ahimsa,” was published by Yoga Journal in July of 2021. To this day, its announcement remains the outlet’s most liked, commented, and shared piece of content, and likely one of its most widely received articles. My perspective of vaccination as an act of ahimsa (the sanskrit term for “non-harm”) launched the White Wellness world into uproar and coaxed me to approach conversations about vaccine hesitancy to the masses of the White Wellness Industry with facts and love.
While I originally intended for this project to be a non-fiction book, it ended up moving through me as snippets of poetry and verse. I printed out over 500 pages of my own instagram captions, published articles and essays, blog posts outlining the history of vaccination, along with scripts I had written to help everyone debunk pseudoscience and misinformation…and then I dropped the stack of papers while bringing them out onto my patio for an editing session.
Everything was a mess, and I was about to give up making sense of everything when I realized that I didn’t need to. Making sense of this mess wasn’t my job. It never was.
So, I pieced together highlighted passages from those 500 pages into the poetry below.
It all became much less about communicating science, and much more about my own humanity. My own struggle.
After 3 years of science communication during a pandemic that none of us asked for, I was finally able to let go of the stress, the resentment, the hurt, the pain, and the exhaustion that was pent up inside of me, and speak about the only thing that matters, the only thing that has ever mattered: Kindness.
The word "pandemic" is derived from Greek. "pan" means "all" and "demos" means "people."
I humbly present All The People: a collection of science, kindness, and poetry during a global pandemic.
I love you,
Wolf
This is a collection of poetry inspired by and compiled from hundreds of social media posts, essays, and articles I wrote during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. My “career” in science communication accidentally commenced when my piece “Getting Vaxxed Was My Act of Ahimsa,” was published by Yoga Journal in July of 2021. To this day, its announcement remains the outlet’s most liked, commented, and shared piece of content, and likely one of its most widely received articles. My perspective of vaccination as an act of ahimsa (the sanskrit term for “non-harm”) launched the White Wellness world into uproar and coaxed me to approach conversations about vaccine hesitancy to the masses of the White Wellness Industry with facts and love.
While I originally intended for this project to be a non-fiction book, it ended up moving through me as snippets of poetry and verse. I printed out over 500 pages of my own instagram captions, published articles and essays, blog posts outlining the history of vaccination, along with scripts I had written to help everyone debunk pseudoscience and misinformation…and then I dropped the stack of papers while bringing them out onto my patio for an editing session.
Everything was a mess, and I was about to give up making sense of everything when I realized that I didn’t need to. Making sense of this mess wasn’t my job. It never was.
So, I pieced together highlighted passages from those 500 pages into the poetry below.
It all became much less about communicating science, and much more about my own humanity. My own struggle.
After 3 years of science communication during a pandemic that none of us asked for, I was finally able to let go of the stress, the resentment, the hurt, the pain, and the exhaustion that was pent up inside of me, and speak about the only thing that matters, the only thing that has ever mattered: Kindness.
The word "pandemic" is derived from Greek. "pan" means "all" and "demos" means "people."
I humbly present All The People: a collection of science, kindness, and poetry during a global pandemic.
I love you,
Wolf
