I watched and I listened how quickly our national rhetoric began to change. Suddenly, there were those in Congress like Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska saying, "It's not if we are going to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but when." Words like terror and war and phrases, "You are either with us or against us" began to seize America by the throat with this rhetoric of fear.
As a citizen, I made the decision to speak. I heard myself saying "There are many forms of terrorism and environmental degradation is one of them." And when Vice President Dick Cheney began creating our nation's energy policy behind closed doors, I wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times that said, "America's energy policy may be designed behind closed doors, but come to Utah where it is a ground thumping experience." I wrote about the oil and gas exploration taking place out at Dome Plateau, just outside the boundaries of Arches National Park with 40,000-pound thumper trucks roaring across America's Redrock Wilderness, a protected Wilderness Study Area without any public process. Laws were being violated.
But what really frightened me was that my own rhetoric had become as brittle as those I was opposing. I had lost my own sense of poetry.
I was in Maine, I went down to the ocean, call it a plea or a prayer, I faced the ocean and said, "Give me one wild word and I promise I will follow it." The word the Sea rolled back to me was "mosaic."
How did the idea for Finding Beauty change or evolve from conception to publication? Why Ravenna and Rwanda?
In many ways, Finding Beauty in a Broken World is a book about faith, simply following your instincts as a writer, as a human being. I didn't know where I was going, I was following a word which was "mosaic."
I could never have imagined that in asking for "one wild word" to bring me back into the heart of poetry, I would be led on a path that took me to Italy and the bejeweled ceilings of Ravenna where the west arm of Rome and the east arm of Constantinople shook hands in the new capital of the Roman Empire in 402 A.D. Upon learning the rules of mosaic at a highly sophisticated mosaic workshop, I learned that mosaic is not a craft, but an art form and form of integration. I learned mosaic is created out of community.
When I returned home to the American West, a landscape so familiar to me, suddenly, I saw this sea of sage with the wide horizon line differently. I saw a small vertical figure standing against the horizon. It was a prairie dog. I saw the prairie dog as a tesserae in an ecological mosaic, broken and beautiful.
The Utah Prairie Dog is a threatened species, according to Niles Eldrige part of "the sixth extinction," a species most likely not going to make it to the next century. I wanted to study this animal. And I learned they have a great deal to teach us about community. They are a keystone species which means over 200 other species depend on them for habitat and food, from black-footed ferrets, to burrowing owls, to badgers to mountain plovers.
How did I get from Ravenna, Italy to a Utah Prairie Dog Village to Rwanda? Again, the power of a word and my commitment to follow. I was asked by Lily Yeh, a community artist who had been asked by the Genocide Survivors Village if she would help them build a Genocide Memorial. Lily asked me if I would accompany her and be her scribe. I witnessed Tutsis and Hutus working side by side creating mosaics, literally building a memorial out of the rubble of war.
I could not have imagined this path. It is not something that could have been planned. It evolved through paying attention. I simply followed the wisdom of a word that became a metaphor for finding that which is broken and creating something whole.
I began to see through acts of witnessing, that the extermination of a species and the extermination of a people are predicated on the same impulses: prejudice, cruelty, ignorance and arrogance, all circling around issues of power and justice.
The world is broken. We are broken, whether it is through our distractive, fragmented lives or war. Taking that which is broken and creating something whole is an act of healing and restoration. Call it reconstruction. Mosaic: an art form, a form of integration.
Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find. It is more than the act of assemblage, it is the act of daring contemplation that leads us to action.
To bear witness is not a passive act. To be present with a piece of art, with a prairie community, with a Rwandan mother who is telling you a story of what happened to her children during the war, is to be moved to a different point of view. Empathy is the word that comes to mind. Through acts of witnessing our consciousness shifts and as a result, we can choose to act differently. During the Rwandan genocide, we as Americans looked away. Visiting Rwanda, I cannot look away again. It is not a political abstraction, it is now, deeply personal. We have a son and his name is Louis Gakumba.
How did the mosaic metaphor present itself to you?
There are rules to mosaic. The play of light is the first rule of mosaic. Another rule is there is imperfection in perfection. If you want to create a horizontal light, place tesserae vertically. If you want to create a vertical light, place tesserae horizontally. The background is very important. The distance from which a mosaic is viewed is important to the overall design. Many colors create one color from afar. These "rules" became ideas, metaphors. Mosaic is a way of seeing the world, a way of organizing the world. A mosaic is created by hand. Mosaic is created out of community.
Lily Yeh showed me as a mosaicist that art can become a spark for social change. I witnessed this in the Genocide Survivor's Village In Rugerero in Rwanda. I saw that beauty is not optional, but a strategy for survival. The village, once drab and depressed, came alive with murals painted by the children. This beauty, this vibrancy of color lifted the spirits of those in the Village. It became a point of engagement from which other projects sprouted, even the planting of sunflowers where the sunflower seeds are harvested and sunflower oil now produced through a women's cooperative.
Art is a way of nourishing the spirit so it can re-engage with life. I saw this among the genocide survivors as they made art and a genocide memorial that now houses the bones of their beloved with dignity.
Who do you envision as the audience for Finding Beauty -- and to what degree is this audience distinct from the audience you've assembled with your earlier work?
We are at a transformative moment in time. We have just elected a transformative figure as our president of the United States of America. Barack Obama asked us to consider two words, "sacrifice" and "service." What are we in the service of? I believe each of us are asking how we can engage with hope once again. How can we be of use? We are asking ourselves the very real question, "How do we find beauty in a broken world? How do we pick up the pieces and create something new, together?"
The audience I envision for this book is the audience who gathers together in the name of social change. It is for the individual who wonders how they can participate in a life of greater intention, each in our own way, each in our own time with the talents that are ours. The audience for this book is the audience interested in building community.
Finding Beauty in a Broken World is a mosaic of words created out of community.
The act of writing this book implies hope that we might still repair our broken world, or at least prevent the damage from becoming irrevocable and overwhelming beauty. What three things might your readers do that could be most effective at helping to prevent this scenario?
Pete Seeger says, "Participation is the key to rescuing the human race." I believe him. I certainly do not have any recipe for engagement, I can only share three things that have made a difference for me.
Trust your heart, follow your passion and share it with others.
Become biologically literate -- learn the names of the plants, birds, and animals where you live, extending your notion of community to include all life. Become part of that community with all the rights and responsibilities that it offers, both human and wild.
Create something beautiful.
