11,541 Empy Red Chairs

Thousands of Bosnians walked, lingered, held each other, and wept as they processed along half a mile of blood-red chairs stretching through the center of the city of Sarajevo. Many people lay flowers on the empty chairs. Some chairs were occupied by teddy bears or other toys, placed there in memory of children who had been killed. On a stage in front of the chairs a small orchestra and choir performed songs, many composed during the siege.

The 11, 541 chairs symbolized the number of people who were killed during the siege of Sarajevo that began twenty years ago, on April 7, 1991, and lasted three years and eight months, the longest siege in modern history. During that time, Serb gunners barraged the city from the surrounding hills, while the primarily Muslim citizens lived under constant threat. The war killed more than 100,00 people altogether, made two million homeless, and reopened old ethnic and cultural wounds between Muslims, Serbs, and Croats. 

There are few ways to find beauty and make beauty under such horrendous circumstances. Acts of compassion and generosity and small natural gifts, such as hearing birds singing resolutely at dawn after a night of bombardment, are among them. A participatory memorial such as that of these red chairs, this music, does not assuage grief—in fact, it may even pierce the heart all over again—but it can transform it. Acknowledging together the grief, the lingering shock and sense of vulnerability unites people. Their common history and the extent of their suffering unfolds before them like a long, long block of empty chairs. Words are unnecessary; presence says all that needs to be said. And music, including music that was written out of the experience of war itself, testifies to the creative spirit that will not be quenched, despite the circumstances. 

11,541 people are missing. The empty places marked by 11,541 chairs both honor their lives and attest to the grief of those who loved them.

Wendy Steele will join others in creating beauty for Sarajevo and its people (and indomitable pigeons) in Pigeon Square on Saturday, June 23 for the third annual Global Earth Exchange sponsored by Radical Joy for Hard Times.

What's the Story of the RadJoy Bird?

A friend asked me recently about our Radical Joy for Hard Times symbol, a bird, sometimes depicted flying into trouble spots, or a thorny graphic depiction of trouble spots. It's actually a wonderful story.

At our very first board meeting, right after RadJoy was formed in the spring of 2009, one of our members brought art supplies and we stuck pieces of paper together, then all worked together in silence for about an hour, moving around the paper, drawing, writing, adding to what others had done... with the intention of coming up with our collective vision in a non-verbal way. When we finished, we brought the painting outside to a little park across the street. We couldn't make any sense of it at all. Then one man stood on a picnic table, and suddenly exclaimed, "It's a bird!" And then we saw it: a crazy bird facing all the dark stuff of wounded places and flying into it, singing.

So that bird became our symbol. It arose out of our collective unconscious. On a more general scale, birds remind us of transcendence. They keep on singing no matter what's going on. They make their homes in all kinds of places. (Once in an abandoned weapons testing site in Florida, I saw swallows nesting in the artillery holes in the cliffs.) Also, the bird is a symbol that is recognizable and relateable to people of all cultures.

One Thousand Arms of Compassion

Dominique Mazeaud is an artist and ceremonialist who works with natural materials to interweave art, peacemaking, and deep attention to nature. One of her current projects, pictured here, is One Thousand Arms of Compassion, a spiral of forked twigs. Dominique writes:

One Thousand Arms of Compassion* is an installation continuing my work that began in 1987 with Earth, Water, Peace and the Alphabet. Working with the visible relationship between letterforms and nature, this project consists of thousands of forked branches in part installed in concentric circles in the tradition of the mandala.**

It all began with a powerful encounter with a tree some years back. This tree, shaped as a Y, spoke of arms raised in praise. Later, I looked at my wood pile and there was a small version of the Y-shaped tree. From that time on, I found this new "material" (Ys) in my many hikes in the Santa Fe mountains. Earth generously supplies the forked branches that are perfect Ys in abundance. This is a message of importance that I must heed. The Earth is my teacher and guide. By providing material that doubles as a universal expression of prayer, She strengthens the connection I have for the metaphysical/poetic side of life: Y-shaped branches have become a deep personal symbol of meaning and healing.

In forms reaching across art and the spiritual, this project celebrates the wonder of creation while mourning what has been lost or destroyed. One Thousand Arms of Compassion offers the deep reconnection with the wondrous miracle that is our planet. By standing within the circles of branches, by placing our center in the center of the greater circle of Nature, we open ourselves to receiving Nature's creative force through her tree emissaries. We can expand our understanding of life to include more of the infinite circle that is the Universe. If we stand under, we understand.

Art is a prayer supported by the Earth. 

 

* One Thousand Arms of Compassion refers to Avalokiteshvara, the Boddhisattva of Compasion in the Tibetan tradition, who is represented by a thousand arms with which to help the suffering multitudes.

** In the present struggle of the planet the mandala presents itself as the seed-symbol of a more harmonized world-order. “Mandala” by Jose & Miriam Arguelles.

 

 To read Dominique Mazeaud's blog, click here. 

Now Lie on Your Back Underneath It!

This traffic maze, located in Birmingham, England, is called Spaghetti Junction, and it is sometimes known as "Britain's most famous traffic black spot." The 30-acre site, which covers five different levels of roads, consists of 18 roads, rail yards, two rivers, and three canals. An estimated 140,000 vehicles stream over it every day.

Now artist Graeme Miller has created "Track," an experiential project in which visitors lie on a board beneath the junction. Assistants pull the boards, each of which is commodious enough to accommodate two people, along over a track, while they peer up at the mesh of concrete and steel above.

Miller, who has described himself as "a composer of many things that may include music," has transformed a blight into a curiosity, turned speeding straight ahead into an experience akin to gazing up at the stars, and introduced wonder into a massive feat of traffic and engineering.

Fracking Quilts

Virginia ("Gina"—pronounced Ginna) Kellogg, a life coach and founding partner of Leadership That Works of Troy, Pennsylvania, began quilting in 2006, as a way of expressing her deep grief after her brother died. Since then she has created dozens of what she calls "journal quilts," works in fabric that are creative responses to emotional states. Now she is sharing what she has learned with others.

Gina formed her "Fracking Quilts" workshops in response to the massive gas drilling that has invaded northeastern Pennsylvania in the past three years. Fracking is short for hydrofracking, a technique that entails blasting a mixture of sand, water, and toxic chemicals deep into the Earth, both vertically and horizontally, to release natural gas. The industry has invaded this quiet, rural area with noise, light pollution, contaminated water wells, exploding gas wells, and leaks in pipelines. It has also caused severe physical, psychological, and social damage to individuals, families, and communities.

So Gina decided to offer women in the area an outlet for their feelings through the process of making a quilt. Last weekend I attended one of her Fracking Quilt workshops. Caroline and I had never made a quilt, Lynne had experience quilting, and Leslie, who had already made a fracking quilt, assisted Gina and offered us guidance.

We began on Friday night by choosing a square of fabric from one of the antique quilts that Gina collects and had already cut up. We then "fracked" that one square and used it as the seed for the rest of the quilt. In the quilt pictured above, the seed pieces are the jagged green shapes that represent the fracking penetrating the land.

Gina has an enormous collection of fabrics that we could choose from. As we worked, she was there to answer questions and provide guidance, but as she frequently stressed, the point was not to make a "good" quilt, but to express our deep feelings . When we got stuck, she urged us to pick a fabric we "hated or would never consider using." It worked! An essential part of the process was to "frack" our quilts themselves—cut them up—after we had gotten the design just where we wanted it. Although most of us felt some reluctance to do so, cutting through the design helped us to realize that we did not have to hold on to what we were attached to.

For the backing of the quilt, which no one would see, we chose a fabric that represented what "has your back," what supports you. Most of us also took Gina’s suggestion to write words or prayers on fabric and insert them between the front of the quilt and the soft batting. Gina herself quilted our designs as we sat on the other side of her sewing machine, directing her about what kind of stitches to use and what color threads.

The quilt I made is above. It is called, "They are Piercing the Earth and All, All, All Is Falling into the Cracks." The yellow and orange bands represent the beautiful hilly landscape in this part of the state and the towns and farms nestled among it. The fracking process is cutting deep into the Earth, and the villages are collapsing. The large striped "crack" that runs from top to bottom symbolizes the extent of the fracking, which fractures not only the Earth but families and communities as well. The circular part on the lower right is still a bit of a mystery. It seems to token life and growth and wholeness, even at the depths, when everything around you seems to be irreparably broken.

All of us felt transformed by this remarkable event. We were able to express feelings about the gas drilling that we had been unable to articulate in any other way. Sharing our stories about both our experiences with the gas drilling and, as we moved through the process, the design of our quilts, made each of us feel less alone. And by transforming fear, grief, and anger into a creative act, we became empowered and ceased to be victims of an overpowering force.

For more information about Virginia Kellogg's Fracking Quilts, contact her.

Six Ways to Look Beneath a Wave

This wonderful image is from the Indonesian artist Ferdi Rizkiyanto. What it shows has a lot in common with Radical Joy for Hard Times:

• It's important to look deep into the "hidden" places where ecological devastation often goes ignored or undetected.
• When you do look there, it doesn't have to be with the eyes of an expert. You can bring a child's sense of wonder to the process.
• Beneath the beauty, the Earth is wounded.
• Beneath the wounds, the Earth is beautiful.
• You never know what you're going to encounter when you look beyond the obvious.
•  There are all kinds of ways that you can make beauty out of the non-beautiful.

How to Greet the "Enemy"

June 23, 2012 is the third annual Global Earth Exchange of Radical Joy for Hard Times. On this day, people all over the world go to wounded places to make a simple act of beauty: creating the RadJoy bird out of found materials. In this way, they give back to a place they love that has given so much to them and offer up a vision of wholeness, healing, and beauty.

Here's a story from Meredith Little, co-founder of the School of Lost Borders, the preeminent wilderness rites of passage organization, about her 2010 Global Earth Exchange near her home in the Owens Valley, eastern California. 

What Happened: 1913 the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) began draining this large alkali lake, formally a sea bed, diverting the water into their aqueduct for the growing city of Los Angeles. When the wind blows, which is often, it lifts one of the worst dust pollutants (PM-10) in the country through the long, narrow Owens Valley. Incidents of asthma and lung disease are high in the towns up and down the valley. For decades the Valley has taken DWP to court to do something about the situation. For decades DWP has delayed action by spending millions on “studying the problem.” In 2001 the courts ruled that water be sprinkled onto small areas of the lake. Alkali plants have been planted here and there. But when the wind blows, clouds of dust still blanket the valley.

 

Act of Beauty: After smudging and crossing our threshold, members of the group separated out onto the floor of the dry lake, strewn now with ditches, puddles of water around sprinkler heads, patches of salt brush, and vast areas of alkali soil crunching under my feet. I notice my inclination to quickly look for the beauty here … the signs of life.

Beauty. Look for beauty. Of course somehow everywhere. And then I begin to feel sick and nauseous. I sit down in the dust. What’s this? It is anger … not so much at “the wound”, but at the feeble, chaotic efforts to “heal it.” Pipes sticking through raised banks in vain attempts to spread the little bits of controlled water. Hedges of dense salt grass. Lines of sprinklers scattered across the distance.

I’m angry for the pretending and false promises that this takes the wound away. I hear myself inside saying … nothing can “pretty up” the wound. First we must acknowledge that this wound is real. No more lies, no more false promises of “fixing” it … and I am constantly connecting this with what we do with each other and our own personal wounding stories.

I’m sitting now on a cement block where the water is regulated, looking down on one of the small pools being spilled a bit of high sierra water from the mountains. A chant of sound begins to spill from my mouth, a rhythm that is new to me. I sit softly following its voice, and finally feel like I’m here, just sitting and witnessing, giving company, being in the truth of this wound. For the first time I feel like I’m really seeing what’s here, with curiosity. I walk to the puddle of water and want to put my hands in and see what’s in the dark clay soil just under the surface. Thousands of lava, wiggling, rising up. I see dead or shed exoskeletons that pile above the waterline. I see the little miracles of beauty clinging to what remnants there are of possibilities. I build a very small stone pile of pebbles, and bend a very old piece of wire into the Radical Joy bird to leave by its side.

I look up, and down the road a DWP truck is coming slowly, stopping to make adjustments at the water regulators. I stand, and the sprinklers stop. I walk slowly back to the road. I recognize my tension around the DWP driver. Is he the “enemy”? I feel my resistance to him as he drives closer, then passes me with a blank face. I let in this feeling of “us and them.” The truck turns to return up the road, and I wonder what I’ll do. I suddenly break into a smile, and wave. His face transforms into a very big smile, and a very big wave. We share this wound and this wounded area.

I think how very loud a wounded area speaks. I wonder why I have avoided walking here before.