Happy New Year to everyone. It feels right to launch my blog at Ceremony Heals with a story of ceremony, used to dance a community through fears and anxieties.
The video on my website featured a still photo of myself and my family, in front of a beautiful model of the Earth. This Earth globe was the culmination of a special weekend retreat, and was designed and executed by a community of thirty-two people, ages three to seventy two!
Back in the fall of 1999, people were becoming very worried about a potential computer crisis that became known as “Y2K”. In the fall of 1999, no one could really say whether or not the theory that all our computers would crash at midnight December 31, 1999 was valid. In retrospect, it is easy to downplay our concerns. But at the time, our fears were real; and we weren’t seeing much on the news or in the media to allay our anxieties.
I had participated for years in a women’s support group. We six decided that we wanted to offer our spouses, our children, and our families something constructive to do with all the anxiety we were experiencing. We called this our “dreaming a world” project.
We reserved a lovely bed and breakfast in Plainfield Mass over Thanksgiving weekend, and invited our loved ones to join us in creating a three dimensional prayer for our world. The globe in the photo is the result of that weekend.
The youngest member of our group requested that special white sparkles be placed over the South pole area. My brother carefully pasted flowers all over the area of the Ukraine poisoned by Chernobel’s radioactive fallout. Other children present glued food stickers all over Africa. In between prepping the PT ball (covered with canvas) and painting and waiting for the globe to dry enough to add the sparkles and the stickers, we drummed together, sang together, played games together, and had a fine old time making ourselves a huge thanksgiving feast.
Inspired by our weekend retreat, we decided to meet whatever might come at one minute past midnight on New Year’s Eve head on. Most of us—fueled by our weekend retreat in November—decided that attending First Night Boston that year was as good a place to be as any if the grid came crashing down around us!
We reserved a couple of rooms in a downtown hotel, just in case we couldn’t get back to our suburban homes easily. We even asked for rooms on one of the first seven floors, in case elevators didn’t work after midnight.
The completed globe was hung over the stage in an auditorium as part of First Night Boston 1999.
And then we partied, like it was 1999. Which it was!
And we survived to tell the tale!
Our Dream for the World currently hangs at the Emerson Umbrella in Concord, Mass (see www.emersonumbrella.org) .
