Writing on Water

This public peace offering took place on Sunday, October 4th 2020 at the Dammrich Rowing Center in Skokie, Illinois. The event was organized by the Year of Kindness and Nonviolent Action, a Public Art and Community Engagement initiative that uses the transformative power of the arts to unite Evanstonians around a common goal—creating a more inclusive, peaceful and kind community.

Peace offerings are a traditional practice where leaves and flowers are sent out into the rivers and seas as gestures of hope and restoration. For this event, members of the community had the option to participate by inscribing the leaves with messages of hope or by submitting their messages online and having the organizers inscribe their messages for them. The resulting leaves were joined together in different patterns and then launched into the North Shore Channel of the Chicago River. Together, we watched the offering float south.

This project is a part of The Peace Studio’s 100 Offerings of Peace Project which uses art as a catalyst to foster dialogue about peace and non-violence. Other partners of the event include Evanston Made, Family Focus, Evanston Public Library, Kids Create Change, Open Studio Project, and Evanston Art Center.

Where Sky Meets Water

Organized by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs’ Public Art program, Where Sky Meets Water was held at the Chicago River by the Michigan Avenue Bridge in October of 2007.

Where Sky Meets Water is rooted in the South Asian tradition where offerings of leaves and flowers are sent out into the rivers and seas of South Asia from China to Japan, Bali to India. These offerings act like prayers celebrating the harmony and relationship between the physical and spiritual, the ordinary and the transcendental. I saw Where Sky Meets Water as a ritual of hope and restoration and a prayer for peace.

Over the past 2 years I painstakingly incised the sacred Sanskrit syllable, Om, which embodies the wholeness of the universe, into hundreds of canna leaves.

In the week preceding the event, on Saturday, September 29 at 11 a.m., participants decorated their own leaves in a free workshop at the Chicago Cultural Center. On October 6th, some participants gathered in canoes in the river by the Michigan Avenue Bridge to float the leaves while others collected on land by the bridge write their own leaves, casting them in the river. Others joined hands in this ritual of peace and listened to the leaves as they soundlessly chanted Om, moving slowly with the current gradually disintegrating to fulfill the third aspect of all life, dissolution.

What remained for all watching was the knowledge of one’s own potential for meaningful artistic expression and how nature has the potential to heal and restore us.