So many of us feel uprooted. So many of the people we meet who've been labeled with mental illness or who call themselves crazy are the ones who are always looking for more or don't fit anywhere: the ones who feel rootless, displaced, unheard; the ones who wander and search and chafe; the ones who drop out of college and try to make music, or ride freight trains and live in abandoned buildings, or lay in bed paralyzed by the frenetic pace of the modern world and watch clouds; the ones who hear messages no one else hears or see connections no one else can believe; the ones who are haunted by restlessness and desire, conviction and doubt; the ones who can't overlook the emptiness of modern life or find niches for themselves within it. Some stay put and ache, others move around the country and the world relentlessly seeking the place where everything will finally make sense. Some of us get told we are sick and need chemicals to function in society with everyone else. Others among us get told we will never be able to work and we'll just live with our parents for the rest of our lives. Some of us cycle in and out of psych hospitals and menial jobs that make us feel like the living dead. Others find niches at the extreme margins of society and end up living in trees or pushing shopping carts or building shacks in the woods. Even when some of us find ways to keep ourselves balanced just enough to get by, whether it's with the help of a doctor, a psychic, a self-help book, or a bottle of vodka, we still find ourselves too often feeling fundamentally alone and wondering if we will ever feel really connected to anyone around us.

There is nothing that gnaws like loneliness. Finding supportive community and contributing to it is a huge part of real, sustainable mental health.

But we don't get taught too much about community in this world. We learn a lot about cost, efficiency, and meeting expectations. In America we have a national holiday to celebrate independence, but the word interdependence - an essential concept in ecology and Buddhism that stresses the interconnectedness of all beings - is not even in our spellchecker.

It is so easy to feel like those of us who don't fit in this system aren't needed, like we're essentially flawed or impossible, just a weed in one big standardized garden. But the thing we forget-or just never learn-about weeds is that they are pioneer species. They're the first to grow in disturbed soil, turning that which is disrupted into that which is productive. Despite all the ways in which weeds are denied acknowledgment, denied life, they are an absolutely vital part of an absolutely vital process.

The same holds true for those of us who are not sustained by the monoculture that tries to consume the soil of our brains and bodies. In finding each other, in building communities that create revolution simply by creating space for ourselves, we can discover that not only are we not to be denied life, we are, in fact, at the center of life. Together, as weeds, we can pioneer interdependence in the disturbance of stagnant isolation.

When the World Health Organization was trying to measure the cost of mental illness, the measurement they came up with was "days out of role," as in the number of days someone is unable to be a nurse or mother, factory worker or bus driver. Since we're told that our value lies in our ability to perform as student or worker, obedient child or good wife, it's easy to believe that there is something really wrong with us if we don't fit the roles that have been described. Very rarely are we encouraged to question the traditional roles while also questioning whether we are healthy in the ways we want to be healthy.

If we decide to look at our "days out of role" as days when we need each other differently, days in which we can reevaluate our relationships to our roles, or ask to be held until we can return to the roles we've chosen, then rather than measuring the cost of mental illness, we can instead measure the depth of the communities that grow out of crisis and the breadth of change that comes. Communities are complex organisms, and as much as we create them, they create us.

The Three Sisters and the Wisdom of Diversity

The truth is that healthy systems need all kinds of diversity. Not just the people who follow the prescribed rules and take the straight paths. The world needs the freaks and the rebels and the ones who can't fit in even if they try. The world needs the mad ones. To return to the metaphor of the cornfield, it's important to understand that what our modern day language calls "conventional" agriculture "” the planting of massive crops of identical plants which require the use of toxic chemicals to kill weeds and repel bugs "” is actually a very new practice that only originated after World War II. Before the advent of modern industrial agriculture, cultures all over the world had many tactics for raising healthy plants without using synthetic chemicals. Native American tribes frequently used a planting practice called the "Three Sisters" in which farmers would grow corn, beans, and squash all in the same field and let them help each other: the corn would grow up tall and straight, the bean plants naturally vine all the way up the stalk of the corn plant, and the squash plants have big spiny leaves which cover the ground and help keep the raccoons from eating the corn cobs and keep too many weeds from growing. Even the weeds in the field play a role early on by keeping the soil covered so it doesn't dry out in the sun and lose nutrients. Like wild relationships in the forest, the successive generations of plants co-evolved to grow well with each other and nourish the soil. Now the new revolution in agriculture is to genetically engineer identical plants that can grow in stripped soil, carry pesticides in their grains, and resist the poisons that kill any other plant in the field and keep the soil bare. Is this really a sustainable answer to meeting our needs? To extend the analogy to our minds "” do we want to engineer our brains to thrive in toxic landscapes, or do we need to build diverse, supportive communities where all kinds of minds support each other and support future generations?

What is lost when we put more value on short-term profit and efficiency than we do on diversity and community? Modern industrial harvests are done with enormous machines and armies of poorly paid workers, but traditionally when it was time for harvest, farmers worked with their families and neighbors, building community and maintaining a direct connection to the land that grew their food and their history. While methods like the "Three Sisters" did not produce the huge surpluses typical of the gargantuan grain farms of the 21st century, they had values that can't be graphed and measured "” from nourishing healthy soil to building connections between people.

If we extend this metaphor to the health of our own society, and the individuals within it, we can ask questions like: Is it healthy for the culture if everyone in it fits a standard mold? Do we all want to squeeze between straight lines with no room for deviation? Is there something not only beautiful but fundamentally important in our crookedness? Can we be healthy as individuals if the world around us is sick? Will we grow up stronger and more sustainable if we are interdependent rather than independent?

How can we create roles for ourselves that fit our own dispositions and contribute to the health of the greater ecosystem, rather than getting ill trying to fit into the lines that have already been drawn?

We have to understand what it means to us to be healthy. Many of us do want to be mothers or students, doctors or activists, and the struggles in our minds make it really hard to make that happen. Whatever roles we want to fill or carve out in the world around us, we've got to get the tools to take care of our bodies and minds. If we want to be part of changing the world around us, we need to figure out good ways to heal ourselves and get connected in our communities. As people trying to form supportive communities, we need to start valuing healing, educating ourselves, feeding each other good food, and talking to those who are struggling about what they deal with and ways it might be possible to help.