AMOR QUE DUELE

TENSION. PAIN. JOY. FORWARD MOTION. STUCKNESS. UPWARD. INWARD. OUTWARD. HELP! NEIGHBOR. FRIEND. ENEMY.

What is it like to experience tension in this way as a designer? Risky. Weird. Wonderful. Pressure filled. Ultimately, something beautiful came out of the experience. Newfields was both wonderful and difficult to partner with. Being new in an industry and wanting to create beauty but not knowing boundaries yet is vulnerable. My community helped, though…

In an effort to be radically honest and in love all at once, I entitled my piece, which was really just an addendum to Ebony Patterson’s delicious piece in the background, Amor Que Duele. Love that aches, hurts, is wounded, in pain. Love and pain, pain and love. To be in love with this community, the Beloved Community, and to ache at it’s wounds. I’m being vague.

There is not a black and whiteness to this, and yet, there very much so is.

Amor Que Duele was an honest call out of the racism at Newfields that pushed people away. A call to recognize the tension, to sit in it, and to create something from it. I worked with Newfields staff to create a response station that posed the question “Where do you find abundant love?” What I really wanted to ask was “How do you want to hold Newfields accountable for their actions,” but I knew that question came from a seed of anger that would not draw people in toward co-creating something better. To create something better, we must look behind only for a moment; and then we must look ahead and ask ourselves, “what’s possible?”

To move toward collective flourishing, systems must break, be re-examined, turned upside down and inside out, re-examined again; something new will emerge from that breakage. Either that something new will be entirely familiar or entirely new and radical. What matters is not that it’s either familiar or entirely radial, but rather that it’s new. Better. Toward more flourishing, propelling communities toward wholeness.

I was so delighted to receive people’s responses to the question “where do you find abundant love…” I will record them in another blog post and video in a few weeks.

What was healing was getting to witness people’s thoughtfulness around the question…

Also, I got to create an interactive Ikebana design experience. People’s eagerness to learn something new always amazes me.