Beauty Heals in Troubled Times – Signs of the Beautiful

For many years, I joyfully decorated the outside of our New York City coop. Although the world seems to have darkened and darkened because of the beginnings of COVID, I continue to decorate because I believe beauty heals most everything.

Our building is located near a busy intersection with major bus routes. It suffers through the onslaughts of public space with accumulated litter, theft, occasional graffiti and omnipresent gum wads polka-dotting the sidewalks and other onslaughts of public space.

To honor and protect private space near a public arena, one must claim it. The best way is to mark the area with beauty.

So, I designed gardens on both sides of the building with Curb Your Dog signs that used poetry and inspirational sayings. After the author’s name, I added my own thought.

(See my posts: Curb Your Dog-Signs of the Beautiful, and How to Make Signs of the Beautiful).

 

 

“The best friend of earth, of man is the tree.”

Frank Lloyd Wright

Please curb man’s other best friend

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We were unable to stop all vandalism, but it was greatly diminished. People also started photographing the signs, sending them to their friends, and sometime posting them on websites. People from all over the world would come into the lobby and tell the doormen what the signs meant to them.

At some point, I would see people lined up to take pictures of each sign and we knew that we had touched something in the human heart.

It was a joyful time to interact with these visitors. Then COVID hit with darkness for so many people.

 

March 2020 – Signs of Determination

New York City was one of the first in the United States to get hit hard. We saw the hospital tents raised in Central Park a block away. We heard the promise of the hospital ship approaching Manhattan docks. I began to hear of the deaths associated with people I knew.

At the urging of our grandchildren, we left the city for a small farmhouse my husband and I have in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. Before going, I had to plant the spring gardens and make signs that reflected emotions around the pandemic.

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Another sign featured my favorite saying:

“The heart’s the only house of safety, my friends: It has fountains, and rose gardens within rose gardens. Turn to the heart and go forward, travelers of the night.” – Rumi

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“We must have the courage to live with paradox…of not knowing the answers…to listen to our inner wisdom and the wisdom of the planet which begs for change.” -Maureen Murdock

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“My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them.” – Mitch Hedberg

Our gardens are real. Treat them with care.

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December 2020 – Signs of Dark and Light

Remotely I continued to design the gardens and made new signs. In the early fall of 2020, our building was scheduled for a two-year long facade repair. An ugly scaffolding with ropes and nets surrounded it. Flickering fluorescent lights lit the sidewalks at night. During the day, the area was awash with the grayish-brown sludge from sandblasting. Little light entered the apartments, and there was no light for gardens to grow. Eventually the snows fell. In typical New York fashion, the white snows immediately turned gray.

We were still living in the country (with its frigid temperatures) in a not-so-insulated farmhouse. It was too cold to visit friends, and vaccines were unavailable. During those very dark times, friends and family buoyed each other’s spirits by phone or Zoom calls.

Because of the dismal scaffolding that enveloped our building, our flowers died and darkness blocked our windows. The virus tried to take the light of joy from our souls, so I decided new signs should embrace the dark.

Turning to Friends

A friend in San Francisco joined me on a quest to enable beauty to heal. Three thousand miles apart, we talked and emailed each other sayings on light and darkness. What do friends do when they cannot hug each other, when it seems so cold, lonely, and hopeless? Poetry is one solution.

Over the next two months, we vetted hundreds of sayings on light and dark. We had already joined a website, Andrew Harvey’s, which gave us a Rumi quote a day. As always, I searched for the main inspirational quote, the Buddhist or Rumi saying, the one with an ecological idea, the humorous saying (yes, especially in times of darkness!), and a special saying  at the bus stop where people board the bus to the inner city.

I don’t remember which of us found which saying, but I do know when I discovered a Mary Oliver one. I had told my friend that I did not know who Mary Oliver was, so he sent me her book, Devotions. Knowing that aesthetics can heal in the deepest of a dark winter, we selected nine signs that recalled light to dissolve despair. Still, we also embraced the beauty of darkness

 

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“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”  Mary Oliver

Scaffolding Blues! Don’t make it worse… Curb your dog.

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“In a time of destruction, create something.” Maxine Hong Kingston

Just not another scaffolding!

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“Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.”

Joan Chittiste

Scaffolding Blues. Don’t Make it Darker. Respect our gardens.

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“I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, so that there is only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as light.” – Barbara Brown Taylor

So how now, dark snarky scaffolding, what is your lesson?

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We chose poetry of light and darkness and watched as beauty healed…

… I mailed them to my building to be placed in the gardens….

… my neighbor decorated them with dried flowers to negate the blackened snow…

… I had great joy…

… the lines of people still formed…

…someone whispered that beauty heals…

… the pictures were taken and posted on websites…

… everyone was lifted as they realized the beauty of darkness…

… I had even more joy…

… then…

…and then I found out that my friend in San Francisco had died.

It was not COVID, but a mysterious lung disease that mimicked the virus and eventually took his breath away.

So I have to do DARK all over again….this time without him.

God, I miss him. He was so, so much fun to do “dark.” I was always impressed with his ability to live without judgment or fear. As a highly enlightened being, he had the right spiritual advice for any of life’s troubles, and if that didn’t work, he always had his bag of jokes.

In my prayers, I talk to him, asking for his insight on one more problem or the catharsis of one more joke or the genius of one more insightful piece of poetry. In my dreams I want to believe I hear the answers. One thing I know is that he would never want me to stay in the dark too long.

Sometimes, through the murmur of my babbling thoughts, beyond the rustle of my art papers, or in the whisper behind a breeze I can almost hear him saying to me,

“Light?…..Dark?….. Aren’t they the same?”

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In loving memory of Lawrence “Goombah” Kelleher

1943-2021

 

Amanda Gorman

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