wishing walls

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-hometown-new-york-20101226,0,6289210.story

This link takes you to a story in the LATimes about a wishing wall in New York City.

I dream of wishing walls in every neighborhood.  It would be pretty easy, I think, to create online wishing walls.  I don't keep up on all the new wonders of the internet but I think it is easy to create collaborative online wiki spaces, open the space up to many -- even to anyone who wishes to show up.  But I'd like to see wishing walls all over.

I have planned and facilitated many events for groups and organizations that have wishing walls, a space for all participants to share their dreams. I'd like to see ordinary people, neighbors who already live near one another, whose lives intersect even when folks might not be fully aware that they do, beginning to wish together out loud.

I live in downtown Berkeley.  Nearby, in a downtown park, there is a peace wall. The peace wall is covered with tiles decorated by children with images and wishes for peace.  I wish I could turn that peace wall into a wishing wall, and put a wishing wall on very corner of downtown Berkeley.

Maybe my wishing walls could be like old fashioned mail boxes, where you drop the mail in to be sent somewhere but instead of mail, people would find pencils and paper and they could drop their wishes into the slot. Only then everyone wouldn't see everyone else's wishes, which I guess is part of the benefit of a wall.

If people could post their wishes on the wall, where others can read them . .  that is a dreamier dream.

Imagine the great wall of china, which stretches many thousands of miles I think, covered with the wishes of humans.

Now I am thinking of the wailing wall in Israel and the Vietnam War memorial in Washington D.C., which is a black slash of grief, holding the names of all who died in that war serving this country.

Let's stop grieving human loss and start wishing and dreaming for positive, hopeful dreams.

I have many positive, wishful dreams. In this instant, I am dreaming mostly for myself.  I have all the love I deserve. I have emotional intimacy, good friends, the devoted love of my only child, the love of my five siblings and one good man, my man, my lover and best friend.  I am so happy.  I wish everyone could be as happy as I am, as beloved as I am.

I wonder how hard it would be to create a network of wishing walls all across one city the size of Berkeley.  I am thinking about the artist Christos who, with his wife (whose name I have forgotten) do large installations, such as once he covered the cliffs of Dover England in cloth or once he create a ribbon of orange cloth 'gates' throughout Central Park in New York City and once he created a fence that snaked through part of the wine country in Sonoma County, California.  His projects do not stay 'up' long. Many people don't realize that the art is not really the drapes on the white cliffs of Dover or the orange cloth of 'the gates' in Central Park. The real art, which is to say the real work, is the network of cooperating humans and human agencies that have to come together to make his art happen.

I think there is much insight into the commons and how it might be restored in Christos' work.http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/rf.shtml. 

The above link takes you to something about Christos' work. His wife was named Jeanne Claude. Like many women mates to famous male artists, her contribution to his work was overlooked for much of her life. Only after decades of him getting all the credit did the art world routinely credit her.








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