Words from Lily Yeh

Last November, the fabulous ORION magazine did a webinar in conjunction with my article, "Gaze Even Here."

Joining me for the hour-long discussion were the internationally acclaimed Chinese-American artist and activist Lily Yeh and Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht. Lily has worked with people in Rwanda, a Palestinian refugee camp, China, Haiti and other broken places to create large-scale public art projects. Glenn coined the word “solastalgia,” widely recognized as the first descriptive term to define and validate “the pain one feels when the place where one lives and that one loves is under assault.” The webinar was hosted by Erik Hoffner of Orion.

Lily has been a keynote speaker at Bioneers and other places, and she speaks with such passion, conviction, and experience that she can rouse you to action and make you fall in love with your world in just a sentence or two. During the podcast, fortunately, we got to hear lots of her gorgeous sentences. For instance: 

“We can enter into the depth of what it means to be human, the human capacity to destroy—and then we have the power to imagine, to create, and then to take action, and this action can lead to change. What gives me hope is that though each individual is very small, we can be defiant in dark circumstances and dare to create beauty in these broken places. It’s like making a fire in the dark night of winter. It gives us hope and warmth and beckons to other people.”

Approximately two hundred people from around the world tuned in for the live discussion. The podcast is available through Orion or iTunes  (see item #10).