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Time is
Love is
Death is
And the wheel turns,
And the wheel turns,
And we are bound to the wheel.
Each year, for
the past seven years, I have installed Medicine Wheel at
the BCA, creating an environment that encourages people
from all walks of life to reflect and participate in a meaningful
way. During a 24-hour vigil from midnight to midnight on
December 1st, people meditate, leave offerings (personal
objects, letters, pictures, jewelry, poems) and lead songs,
dances, rituals, or prayers. At the end of the vigil, offerings
are catalogued and entombed in one of the 36 pedestals that
make up the wheel.
This year, we
will consecrate Medicine Wheel with 16,000 buckets of sea
water to honor the 16,000 people infected with HIV each
day. We intend to form a human chain from the sea to the
BCA passing buckets of water to fill a moat that surrounds
Medicine Wheel. To succeed, we will have to add eleven buckets
of water to the moat every minute.
Although the
disease no longer seems as lethal or rampant as it did a
decade ago, we should not be deluded. The 1.5 million people
infected in the West is just a drop in the bucket of the
40 million infected worldwide. We hope the Medicine Wheel
will help to remind and engage all of us in understanding
the harsh reality of this epidemic.
In the early
eighties,when we hadn’t heard much about AIDS, I was
invited to be part of an art auction called ARTcetera. I
volunteered for a couple of years full time, thinking that
I was doing good works. A woman on the ARTcetera committee
said to me one day “You could probably help people
affected by HIV and AIDS more by doing your art work”.
I didnŐt have a clue what she meant.
Shortly after
that I was a little disenchanted with some of the folks
on the committee and left , with just a bit too much resentment.
In 1992 I had
an idea to build a Medicine Wheel in the Cyclorama, at the
Boston Center for the Arts. I had been building some box-like
shrines with handles that made me think of portable gods
and of a scene in The Aeneid, where Aeneas carries
his father on his back while his father carries the household
shrine on his.
The idea of using
a wheel or a circle appealed to me for many reasons. The
circle has been used by many cultures as a place for ceremony.
The ancient Celts used Stonehenge, the Indians the Wheel
of Salvation, Buddhists the mandala, and Native Americans
the Medicine Wheel. Many folk dances are done in a circle
such as the Hora of Israel and Rumania. Children play games
in a circle. People often refer to their friends as their
circle and people often hold hands to pray in a circle.
The word chakra in Sanskrit means wheel or disk and is used
to describe the seven power centers in our bodies. The circle
with no beginning or end is a way of honoring the connections
of all life through prayer, dance, song and ritual.
I wanted to create
a sacred space for the healing of the earth. I built 12
portable shrines that sat on twelve pedestals. I invited
people to leave offerings that connected them to the earth.
I told everyone that it didn’t matter where they put
things, that the placement they chose would be right. My
best friend left a carved wooden box of peppercorns. He
placed it on the floor in the east slightly to the right
of the base of the pedestal. I had a very hard time resisting
moving the box. I thought it should be symmetrical. I didn’t
know how lucky I was that I didn’t move that box. The
Boston Center for the Arts invited me to do my Medicine
Wheel on World AIDS Day the next year. I suddenly realized
what the woman from the ARTcetera Committee had told me.
My life was about to change.
About a month
later I had a vision of myself as an eight year old boy.
In the vision I had a pet bear, whom I always kept muzzled
and on a chain. I took this bear with me wherever I went.
I never let anyone see him. In this vision I was walking
up the driveway of my parents home, the home where I grew
up. Out of the corner of my eye I could see my father starting
to walk around the garage counter-clockwise. I hid the bear
in the garage and started to walk around the garage clockwise.
My father and I met face to face behind the garage. We were
both now thirty-seven years old. Over my father’s shoulder
I could see the bear running around the yard without his
chain and muzzle. I gasped for air and shouted “Who
let you out!” My father looked at me and said “It’s
all right Michael, I let the bear out.” The vision
ended here. I went into the house and we started to play
cards with my mother. During the card game my sister called
because she was having trouble with her two-year-old twins.
My mother said to my father “Tommy, we have to go help
Beth.” My father responded, “No we need to stay
here with Michael.” I donŐt remember anything else
from that day. I think the three of us eventually went to
my sister’s. Ten months later I told this story at
my fatherŐs funeral. The day of his funeral was the third
birthday of my twin nieces. The next year we carried the
Medicine Wheel through the streets of the South End. My
mother decorated one of the boxes for my father and slept
at its base. The next year my best friend brought another
beautiful box to the Wheel. This time it contained the ashes
of his lover who had died from AIDS.
It is a great
sadness to me that AIDS, no longer a front page story, is
still a taboo subject for many drowning under its weight.
In my neighborhood, South Boston, it is never mentioned,
and for years the black community only whispered about it.
In the summer of 1998, I worked with a group of South Boston
teenagers. One young man had a mother dying from AIDS. I
saw him at the bus stop one day and told him about Medicine
Wheel. About a week later, his mother died. At the wake
he came over to me and said: “Can I help you with that
wheel thing?, I can’t let my mother be forgotten.”
His comments reminded me of why I build the Wheel. Last
year was also the first time that a significant number of
people of color used the safety of Medicine Wheel.
Michael Dowling
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