Beauty in London for the People of Japan

Eugene Hughes, director of People Brands in London, breached the wall of immobility that so many of us feel as we confront both our sorrow and our compassion for the people and the Earth in Japan. He wrote out the following poem by the great 17th century Japanese poet, Basho, and tied it to all the flowering cherry trees in his neighborhood.

Here's the poem:

If you will let me,

I will willingly wipe

Salt tears from your eyes

With these fresh leaves.

Where's the Temple?

A week ago, a gray, rainy afternoon the day before I left Bali, I impulsively asked my driver. Eka Merta Sedana, to take me to Tanah Lot. I had never been to this temple on the sea, only accessible at low tide, for it is known to be inundated with tourists who come to take photos of the sun setting dramatically behind the open-sided building. But I was curious and needed a lift. I was feeling sad because a Balinese friend is very ill, because the weather in Bali has been so unusually rainy (people blame global warming) that all flowers of the fruits and crops are being knocked off the plants, and because the situation in Japan is so sad and frightening.

What I found at Tanah Lot was not what I expected. The tide was coming in, and people from many places—Java, Japan, Australia, France, Bali, America—were wading out on the rocks to get a photo of the temple, still dramatic under gray skies. But the real drama was elsewhere. As the waves came in and people got splashed, they were shrieking with laughter and delight. It was a scene of joy, childlike play, and a momentary release of all the national differences and personal cares that usually bind us.

When I got back to the car, I was feeling so exhilarated that I babbled to Eka about what I had seen. I showed him the photos I had taken. "Where's the temple?" he asked in surprise.

But I had seen something more wonderful even than the temple: radical joy in hard times.

A Spontaneous Earth Exchange

Sometimes people tell me apologetically that they would love to do a Radical Joy for Hard Times Earth Exchange for a wounded place, but they just don't have the time.

The following story, which comes from Laura Staman, Director of Outdoor Programs at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, proves that anyone can do an Earth Exchange anytime at anyplace. All you need is a place, your own personal emotional attachment to it, and the willingness to bring those two elements together for a few moments.

I’d like to tell you about something that happened recently. It is related to the ongoing gift of hope and listening to the land that Radical Joy for Hard Times represents. In my neighborhood there is a wonderful section of woods I enjoy hiking through. It is a spot of wild in the city of Lynchburg. Well, when I was walking the other day I discovered that a patch of that woods had been cleared to build a home. Though it is not a terrible thing to build a home, I was shaken by the clearing of the woods and destruction of forest growth. At first I dropped my head, said a prayer and walked by sadly. The hardest feeling sometimes is helplessness.

But then I decided to walk back into the space and sit and listen. It was as if the land just needed to be acknowledged... like it was dissociated or something from the trauma. So I sat and listened. Moved into the space and then just prayed to bless this place and help the earth recover from the hurt and the dramatic change. I blessed the home that would stand there and hoped the Beings there could live in harmony. Then I created the Radical Joy for Hard Times bird out of roots that had been ripped from the earth.... and I felt like I had made a difference somehow to the place, and at least to my consciousness.

Change is inevitable, and sometimes destructive, and this time I felt empowered to acknowledge it and to offer peace. The bird, and the memory of the Global Earth Exchanges, gave me a vehicle for doing something. I felt I had a voice and was connected to something larger than myself, therefore not helpless.

As I think back over this simple act I gave to the land and the future home, I reflect on how it is much like the healing I am doing now from a childhood trauma. Facing it, bringing peace into my life, blessing myself, building art out of its roots, and creating a new home inside myself.

Street Arts for the Earth

The Balinese barong has been described as a cross between a lion and a caterpillar. With a carved wooden head worn by one dancer and a long body made of raffia or palm fiber, the far end of which is worn by another dancer, the barong is a benevolent creature that appears at Balinese sacred dance performances to bring peace and well-being.

On Sunday, December 6, at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne, Australia, a different kind of barong came to life, and in a way that well suited this particular gathering, whose theme is “Hearing Each Other, Healing the Earth.”

The World Peace Barong was conceived in 2003 at an international gathering called "Sharing Art & Religiosity," held in the vicinity of the temple Pura Samuan Tiga in Bedulu, Bali. Painter I Wayan Sudiarta from the village of Peliatan got the idea of creating a barong made of materials offered by people from any culture and faith. The mask of the barong was carved by Tjok Alit, a maskmaker in Singapadu, Bali. Elements that arrived from twenty-three other lands to adorn it included prayer bells from Japan, cow bells from Switzerland, feathers from India, and fabric from Assisi, Italy.

As the barong prepared to journey to Australia, parliament officials became concerned that its many natural materials would prevent it from clearing customs smoothly. As a result the World Peace Barong traveled with new black velvet garments. Garuda Airlines designated it executive class. At Melbourne's airport, customs officials greeted it graciously, charmed by its gentle, smiling face. But once the seventeen-kilo barong arrived at the Melbourne convention center, there was no place to put it. The sacred barong actually spent one night in the kitchen convention center, laughed Suprato Suyodarmo, Indonesian movement artist and founder of the Padepokan Lemah Putih school in Solo, Central Java.

The barong danced "Tri Yoni Saraswati" with eight artists from Bali and South Sulawesi for the International Plenary of sacred music. Although it was scheduled for an interactive session with parliament participants in one of the meeting rooms of the convention center, Suprato conceived of another idea.

He had noticed a strange figure, dressed in black and bearing a dire warning, who stood all day every day at the entrance to the convention center. Benny Zable, of Nimbun, New South Wales, and Woodstock, New York, wore a gas mask and a long black cloak on which were painted the words, FOSSIL FOOLS and THERE ARE NO JOBS ON A DEAD PLANET. Day after day he stood there, his hands rising and falling in mute supplication or despair. A few people stopped to look at him, but most rushed past.

Because Suprato Suryodarmo is interested in the relationship of sacred theatre and the natural environment, he asked Zable if the World Peace Barong could join him on the plaza. Late on the afternoon of the 6th, when most of the parliament participants were attending sessions inside the convention center, Suryodarmo and Diane Butler, an American dancer who has lived and danced in Bali for many years, carried the barong out to the front of the convention center and arranged it with offerings on the pavement. After sitting on the ground and praying softly, Suryodarmo rose and began to dance. His feet moved with slow-motion precision, turning in perfect balance. His hands and long fingers created mudras, formal patterns of meaning. Then Benny Zable began to move in response. Both the Indonesian dancer and the Australian street artist moved in harmony, their movements reflected in the tall plate glass windows of the convention center as the barong stared benignly out at the passing crowd.

One dancer brought a message of peace through the form of a figure from an ancient religious tradition; the other delivered a message of environmental urgency through artistic improvisation. One was dressed in traditional ceremonial clothing, one in a hand-made costume. Together they wove a message that religious leaders of many faiths were attempting to spread inside the convention center all week: in matters of environmental stewardship and peace among nations, it is only through creative collaboration, the willingness to listen to others, and the invention of new forms of expression that change can occur.

Playing In Traffic

A friend of mine who lives in Boulder, Colorado recently bought a small house in a new neighborhood. Shortly after Mary and her two daughters moved in, they had a rude awakening. It turns out they are much closer to the freeway than Mary had realized when she was first looking at the house, and now she can hear the distant hum of the traffic all the time.

She has thought a lot about how to deal with this situation. In moments of extreme frustration, she has considered moving. Yet she likes the house and the neighborhood, and she finally has enough space for a garden. She’s shared her concern with her neighbors. One woman told her that she tries to ignore the noise and pretend it’s the sound of the sea, and she advised my friend to do the same. “But this is Colorado!” Mary exclaimed. “The sea is nowhere near here.”

Instead she has chosen a third alternative: she is exploring ways to live with the situation. When she gets distressed by that relentless assault on her stillness, she adjusts her thinking and considers what the noise says about the society we live in—how insistent we Americans are on our right to be mobile, how constant is the outpouring of carbon gases into the atmosphere.

Consequently, she is also adapting her behavior. She has started riding a bike wherever she goes, so she herself does not contribute to the problem. As she works in her small yard, she focuses on paying mindful attention to the beauty there instead of feeling that it is sullied by the noise.

Mary’s approach to living peacefully with the stream of traffic is a model for how we can live in a mindful, soulful way with many of the environmental problems that surround, challenge, and frustrate us. We can’t fix everything. Sometimes we must learn to co-exist. One way of doing so is simply to acknowledge what is happening and refuse either to turn our backs on it in denial or confront it in rage. We can love the nature that is before us and allow ourselves to be captivated by its persistent thriving. We can devote attention and discussion to determining how we want to be in relation to our changing Earth. And wherever we go we can look for—and find—beauty on that Earth.

Cross Bones Graveyard

The goal of Radical Joy for Hard Times is to bring beauty to orphaned places, that they may once again become part of the cycle of life. The story of Cross Bones Graveyard http://www.crossbones.org.uk in southeast London is a remarkable example of how giving that kind of attention to a place and its people satisfies a deep human need to sooth old injuries.

Near a London Underground station a metal gate in the midst of a brick wall is adorned with ivy, colorful ribbons, some with prayers written on them, flowers, feathers, bundles of dried grass, and other gifts. Inside the enclosure a small garden features a heart-shaped topiary and carefully tended flower beds.

This is Cross Bones, a graveyard where prostitutes were buried for hundreds of years beginning in medieval times. The women, known as “Winchester Geese” because they were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester to work in legalized brothels, could not be buried in hallowed ground.

The land was sold as a building site in the 1880s, but nothing was erected there until more than a hundred years later when the London Underground built a power sub-station on the land in 1990. It was when they began excavating that they unearthed a few of the old skeletons, which they estimated to total approximately 15,000.

Since then this place of anonymity and ignominy has been beautified and commemorated inside and out, informally and formally, through gardening and ceremony and simply through respectful attention.

John Constable, author of a series of poems and plays, The Southwark Mysteries, based on the imagined life of one of the women, writes:

“We've conducted many rituals and community events at the graveyard. The rituals are simple, inclusive and non-dogmatic, emphasising respect for ‘the Ancestors’, and honouring the spirit of this particular place. The Halloween of Cross Bones has been observed every Halloween night since 1998, with hundreds of people making the candlelit procession to the site, to honour 'the outcast dead' with candles, incense, songs and offerings.”

Members of the community pick up trash and replenish the impromptu shrine on the gate with fresh flowers. They are currently working to get permission to dedicate at least part of the burial ground as a memorial garden.

What is most remarkable about the attention and care given to Cross Bones is that it is ongoing. Because people in the community have cared for a wasteland and for forgotten women in simple, beautiful ways, the place has become what it never was in the past: hallowed ground.