The Simple Beauty of an Earth "Exchange"

The signature event of Radical Joy for Hard Times is a simple, personal act called an Earth Exchange.

We call our events Earth "Exchanges" because they are opportunities for us to make an exchange with these places we love and where we live. We go both to receive and to give.

We receive by reflecting on what these places mean to us and what they have given, both in the past and now. In exchange we offer back a simple act of beauty as a symbol of our gratitude and our affirmation that all places are valued parts of the whole Earth.

People do Earth Exchanges formally or informally, spontaneously or after weeks of planning, alone or with a friend or in the company of a whole group. They happen throughout the year and in all kinds of places.

June 23 is our third annual Global Earth Exchange, when people all over the world will be going to clear-cut forests, polluted rivers, oceans where dolphins are threatened, lands pierced by mining and drilling, and other wounded places. They will:

• tell their stories of what the place means to them
• spend time getting to know the place as it is now
• make a simple act of beauty

Please join us by visiting a place you love, rediscovering it, and giving it some beauty and attention. It's free, and we will post the photo of your event on our website after June 23. It's easy to join on our Earth Exchange Network (and you can always change the details of your event later).

Even Rubble Is a Playground

In the photo above, Palestinian children have forayed into and area of their neighborhood that has been destroyed by an Israeli  bombing, and they have discovered that, out of the rubble, they can make a seesaw big enough for several of them to ride at once. (Hopefully the older kids will give the littlest one a chance!)

For children, anyplace can be a playground. Whether the scene of destruction was caused by war, tornado, hurricane, or poverty, all the world is fertile ground for exploration, fascination, and play. As we get older, we tend to see damaged places as so deplorable, so full of memories cut in half that we do not want to see them or even consider them. We fear we will break ourselves if we encounter them fully. Often we simply assume that there is absolutely nothing to be discovered there that can offer beauty or delight.

Radical Joy for Hard Times believes that both mourning and play are appropriate in wounded places. 

The first step of the Earth Exchange, our signature event, which any individual or community can create, is simply to go to a wounded place. Just finding the willingness to face a damaged place with openness and curiosity usually turns out to be far harder than  actually stepping onto that once whole, now broken land. Once there we tell stories about what the place has meant to us, both before and after it was damaged. We spend perhaps 20 or 30 minutes getting to know the place as it is now, looking for what calls our attention, what holds fascination. Finally, we give back an act of  beauty, usually a bird made out of found materials. 

Through this approach, we bring to wounded places both our honest feelings about what has happened and our willingness to be in healing relationship to the place in the future. We bring curiosity, the sense that there is a surprise to be had, something wondrous to be discovered, even under the most tragic of circumstances. And we bring our own spirit of creativity, the willingness to make something beautiful out of waste and destruction.

In this way do light and dark, play and mourning, beauty and destruction balance each other.

An Act of Sound Beauty for a Noisy Place

The Radical Joy for Hard Times Band (aka board) of Directors held our annual meeting this past weekend, April 19-22. Besides reviewing what happened during the past year and planning what we want to do in the months and years ahead, we took time, as we always do, to do an Earth Exchange.

The Earth Exchange is the signature event of Radical Joy for Hard Times. It's called an "Exchange" because people and the Earth both give and receive from one another. It consists of four steps:

1.    Go with friends (or alone) to a wounded place

2.    Sit a while and tell your stories of what the place means to you

3.    Spend time getting to know it as it is now

4.    Make some beauty out of found materials

This year our destination was Potomac Overlook Park, a small park in Alexandria, Virginia. Our intention was to spend some time at the Potomac itself, endangered, like just about every river in the world today, by chemicals of many kinds. However, as often happens when you go into the natural world with a spirit of curiosity and no fixed agenda, something else occurred to us instead.

We discovered that the park was right under the flight path of planes coming into and leaving Dulles Airport, one of Washington, DC’s major airports. Because noise seemed to be the dominant feature of the place, we decided to focus our Earth Exchange on noise pollution.

So we sat together in silence for about twenty minutes, reflecting on what we could hear (surprisingly, that included birds and breeze), what we couldn’t hear, how we were responding, and how noise affected our own lives. After we had shared our impressions and thoughts, the group spontaneously launched into a little percussive music, as you can hear in the video above. 

Left to right above are: Munro Sickafoose, Rachel Light, Christi Strickland, Joanna Burgess, Barbara Bitondo, and Tim Wolcott.

 

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.