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Pebble Walks
Two young men,
best friends, were working on building cairns to mark the
path at No Man’s Land. One used to call the other Grasshopper,
mimicking the Kung-Fu television show. One day Grasshopper
didn’t show up. Michael asked the other to be the Zen
master. The idea was that we would gather pebbles one by
one, contemplating each pebble, and then build a path. Michael
knelt in front of the young man and began picking up pebbles
one by one saying that he could fill a bucket. The boy told
him “no way!” As Michael continued the boy started
to tell his life story, how his father was out on disability,
how his brother had been in an accident, how he had dropped
out of school, how he missed his friends, how he had experimented
with drugs, about his sexual explorations, about his life.
The day wore on. By 5:00 p.m. they had built twenty-five
feet of path pebble by pebble. Later that week on a field
trip to the Rose Art Museum they watched a video concerning
a project using thousands of live bees. The project involved
a mechanical failure and the bees all died. The artist went
to get a broom to sweep them up, but the bee keeper said,
“Don’t sweep them. They are not trash! Pick them
up one by one.”
This boy’s
story inspired the next Medicine Wheel, where every hour
of December 1, starting at midnight, buckets of pebbles
were carried into the Cyclorama and dropped pebble by pebble
creating a path on which we all walked, while chanting the
name of someone lost to, living with, or affected by HIV
and AIDS. The goal was to raise awareness by moving a mountain
of stone. |
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