The we web:  a peace-weaving

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an interactive community sculpture

initiated by art + faith STL together with Lyndsey Scott

for september 9  2012

narrative

On receiving the call for art that celebrates diversity, the web of life came to my mind’s eye. “When I move you move, just like that” says Ludacris.   “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe, “ says John Muir.  Deeper still, the words of Chief Seattle:  “ Humankind has not woven the web of Life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”              Yes.

To me, this sacred web is at once a call back to the Earth and a call back to each other.  Nature makes space for us to feel and to heal.  And to celebrate diversity, first I have to root out and heal racism in my very own heart – though I cringe that it exists, I know our culture has powered itself by oppressing us, each uniquely isolated in a fear of separation.  When I bravely seek to find what is blocking true intimacy with others in my experience, I bring awareness and compassion to the dark. Then with breath and commitment, I practice a new way – daily, like water with a stone. Gently with persistence.  With practice, I am welcomed back to the whole of All That Is.

As best as the material world and these hands can ask, this creation is an invitation to do that work, a symbol of our togetherness-in-process.    I humbly ask the wisdom of Asibikaashi, Spider Woman, of the Ojibwe people, as well as their facility with and reverence for the natural world: guide my hands.   Let the wisdom you carried again direct our ways.

You + Me.     Self + God.      Dark + Light.      Known + Unknown.       The weavings fill two interconnected circles, a venn diagram, with the space between left empty.  The mystery, the god-seed, this divine silence that inhabits the space between: “where two or more are gathered, there I Am in the midst….”   We ask for divine surprise to fill this space between, and the grace to inquire whole-heartedly. Listen intently.

The ribbons, held in each of our hands, will tie on to stand in for each our personal commitment to walk into our own work.  Softly with self-compassion.  Uniquely to each our journey.   May our co-creation be an image that lives in our guts to guide us each and, by extension, our city into the mighty healing work of releasing the legacy of “-isms” that lives in our histories and in this land, that we might be fully free to experience the diversity and power of our combined, divine light.