TREE CITY - AN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ART INSTALLATION

Tree City is in process.

 1. Humans strive to understand our world, travel, think beyond boundaries, make art, invent machines, make ice cream, travel to the moon.  We have compassion, caring, can think about the biggest picture and the smallest detail.  

2. Yet our minds are also easily damaged by loss, by violence, by loneliness.  The damage leaves us closed minded, small minded, un-creative.  It leaves us without compassion or caring.  It leaves us self-centered.  

3. Closed minded, small minded, uncaring, and self centered are not our true nature.  Every baby is born alive with curiosity, intelligence, an open heart, and love for all.

4. We want to be creative, generous, compassionate.  We never feel we are closed minded, small minded, or selfish.  We feel we are defending ourselves, standing up for ourselves, taking what is rightfully ours, doing what must be done.

5. In our most cruel, violent, selfish acts we feel fully justified to defend ourselves or our loved ones against a wrong committed.  The loss, violence, loneliness that caused the damage has left us feeling we are being harmed even as we cause harm.

6. This is the human condition of we are slowly climbing out of.  A condition left over from a beginning as a species barely surviving in a world indifferent to our survival.  A world that both nurtured us, and killed us.   It is a condition left over from the following centuries of war, forced migration, and genocide.

7. Now we must climb out quickly.  In our damaged confusion we are destroying the world on which we depend to live.  Our home.  We feel wronged, justified, entitled.  We must act generous, open hearted, compassionate.

8. For our survival we must be the most generous to the people by whom we feel the most slighted.  The thing we feel robbed of, we must choose to give away.  We must decide to act for the greater good in the face of feeling wronged and robbed.  We must decide to save our home over feeling entitled and justified. 

9. We must all thrive and flourish.  Anything less is repeating past violence, loss, and loneliness.  Anything less is doomed to fail.  There is no bad human.

10. How do we do this?  We must tell our stories.  As we tell our stories we sob rivers of tears until the rivers wash away the damage left by loss.  We rage hot sweaty tantrums at the violence done to us and our ancestors until the heat of our rage burns off the damage left by the violence. 

11. We must listen to each other’s stories with compassion.   We must listen with an open heart to the person we feel robbed us of our dignity.  We must rage at the injustice done to our ancestors and then walk away from wealth and material goods we feel we are owed.  We must laugh at the fear we will not survive, just as so many before us did not survive, and then give the larger portion to a stranger.

12. For our survival we must choose intelligence, bravery, and compassion.