I have I few books that I find inspiring on my bed side table and my desk. They could be classified as self-help books/ career-help books/ spiritual-help books (just choose the label that you like, that is if you like labels).
I usually open a page, often at a time when I am frustrated or struggling with something. Today I opened the page and read this:
“Can’t we ever realize that it is not for the old to judge the young-that it is the young who must judge the old?
To award prizes is to attempt to control the course of another man’s work. It is a bid to have him do what you will approve. It affects not only the one who wins the award, but all those who in any measure strive for it. It is an effort to stop evolution, to hold things back to the plane of your judgment. It is a check on a great adventure of human life. It is negative to the idea that youth should go forward. It is for the coming generation to judge you, not for you to judge it. So it must happen, whether you will it or not.
If you want to be useful, if you want to be an encouragement to the serving young artist, don’t try to pick him or judge him, but become interested in his effort with keen willingness to accept the surprises of its outcome.”
“Le vent me semble qu’il est libre pour s’en aller dans tous les directions. Il sent le vert. J’aime comment qu’on peut voir les chemins pris par les gens, par exemple o
ù l’herbe est aplatie. J’espère qu’il y aura des choses qui poussent ici dans l’avenir et des gens qui viendront pour aider.”
On November 1st Green Dream visited a wild green space in the Mile End in Montreal. This is the only unmanicured wild space in this area of the city, and it is nestled behind a few monstrous old industrial buildings.
The fate of this space has been at question. However in the last few years it has enjoyed a lot of cultural activity and community attention, especially after an artist Emily Rose Michaud started an earthwork installation, le Jardin Roerich. She used the Roerich symbol, which was created by the Russian artist and mystic Nichola Roerich, who proposed the red circle with three dots inside as an international symbol to mark museums, schools, and similar cultural landmarks to prevent destruction by aerial bombs. Emily with the help of the community has been maintaining the Roerich garden within this wild green space for the past two years.
le Jardin Roerich
With recent developments in the Mile End and the upcoming gentrification of the neighborhood the fate of this little space is uncertain. I with the help of two Green Dream volunteers visited the field to create a community map and capture people’s relationship to the space and their contemplations on it. Click on the blue dot to see each person’s reflection.
View Green Dream Map, Mile End Montreal in a larger map
photographs by Wayne Egers and Maia Iotzova
If you have any reflections you would like to add to this map you can e-mail them to greendreammedia@gmail.com
At the end of my 90 Day Love Challenge, after interviewing many people about Love and contemplating it myself, one thing was sure. Whatever nicely figured out description I had of Love I had to let it go. And what better way to do that then through a broken heart.
I dressed up as a Broken Heart Fairy for Halloween. Before I explain the fairy part I will explain the Broken Heart part. (the one that gets lots of, oh what…poor you…?) Green Dream started with a broken heart, or to be more precise numerous broken hearts: over nature, over an urban park I loved, over a man, over always leaving my home and finding a new one, and over Green Dream being constantly rejected. The time has come for me to cherish the numerous times my heart was broken, accept the pain and allow it to transform. And since all the broken hearts have been blessings to help me grow, I though I would be a broken heart fairy.
I had a box where people can put their own broken heart stories. I do feel that acknowledging your pain is the only way to let it transform.
An interview with Ingrid Veninger (Hotel Vladivostok, Gambling Gods and LSD, Picture of Light) which totally made me inspired. The woman has fire and love.
I have been hoping to find a filmmaker who approaches their work with the sensibility I approach mine (or at least the sensibility I am developing). I was delighted by this film and Peter Mettler’s meditations on life and the world. He masterfully captures the invisible into layered yet simple, poetic, ‘juicy’ visual experience.
le Jardin Roerich
