Sri Lanka: Tsunami Recovery A friend reports on his inter-faith project in Batticaloa

Butterfly Peace Garden of Batticaloa - Tsunami Report No. 8

The Garden Path Sadhana
Monkey Arrives

We have long dreamed about creating a Batticaloa-based centre of education and active research in response to the many requests that come to us from people in Sri Lanka and abroad. This will be a place where we can unpack and elucidate the process and poiesis of the Garden Path for everyday understanding and application. In some measure it will answer the long-standing riddle of Butterfly Garden replicability. As of the beginning of this month we took possession of an old Batti house at number 37 Pioneer Road. With imagination, commitment, hard work and grace this house may become the centre about which we have been dreaming: The Monkey’s Tale Centre for Contemplative Art and Narration.

We like the name of the street where the Monkey’s Tale begins to unwind because we feel we are pioneering something by bringing art into the nation’s peace and reconciliation process as a sustained practice, not a one-off monument, painting, sculpture or gallery exhibition. We have been engaged in contemplative art and play as a healing strategy for ten years at the Butterfly Garden. Now we juggle the terms of reference a little so that more adults and youth can join in. Basically we will be doing much the same as we have been doing in the Garden all these years, but on another level. This is what makes it new and why we can justify calling ourselves pioneers – though that may just be a conceit, the convenient excuse we have at hand when things run amuck, as almost inevitably, they will.

The cards are always stacked against us here. You have to carry yourself “like an egg”, that is, carefully. You are an egg filled with light and love. At any moment you may crack open and be born into the world, a solar hero; at any moment you may crack and die, the reviled spawn of some enemy ‘other’, solar slime.

The axis mundi of the Butterfly Peace Garden is a venerable old mango tree. A bucket sways awkwardly in its branches. The bucket has several holes in it, holes plastered over with duct tape and goop. It hangs there to remind us that that Garden is like a bucket with holes: the holes of indifference, neglect, dishonesty, selfishness, lack of energy, commitment, imagination, humor. We have to work very hard simply to be able to offer the children the best of our dubious selves. This is how I thought when I first started working at the Garden. Later I came to believe that it is impossible to successfully fill all the bucket’s holes due to structural poverty, violence, social alienation and the general brutality of life in a war zone like Batticaloa. No sooner had you plugged one hole but another appeared. Since the tsunami I see that this entire metaphor needs revision, or perhaps, replacement.

Batticaloa these days, and the Garden itself, is not a bucket with holes in it. It is a hole, a black hole, with pin-prick buckets of light pouring their contents into the void. These are the people who keep it from completely imploding. Among them are the stars whose energy and light guide the Garden and its children on their perilous journey. This journey which they have chosen to make is a “sadhana”, a practice which allows them to constantly renew themselves so that the children may realize they truly have a home here - the home they find in their own breath, being and creative imagination. That may be the only home they have. They will have to endure many hardships during the full span of their years but they will always remember how to come home to themselves.

In the meantime, the numbers seem to be running in our favor. There is a strong tendency in Battticaloa toward numerological propriety and the address of Monkey’s Tale Centre is as proper as it gets: No.37 Pioneer Road. 3 + 7 = 10. 1+ 0 =1. We are infants again at the Monkey Tale, babies, toddlers just learning to walk; little voices heretofore unheard in the crass cacaphony of brass bands, bullets, bullies, and blood feuds. Here we stand, wobbly and unsure, about to utter our first word. The symbology of these numbers is easy enough to comprehend but the way forward remains dark and fearful. How can we say anything intelligible, let alone intelligent? We are called upon to listen deeply and attend mindfully at this moment of opening and utterance.

Monkey Unpacks

We have started to paint, decorate and renovate the Monkey’s Tale centre according to our dreams and inspirations. The frescoes which adorn the parapet wall facing the Superintendent of Police Office and the Divisional Forestry Department, contain the splintered ends of astral entities encountered during our Kovil Kulupam Neram workshop last month in the Garden. Through a process of splitting and stretching the criss-cross geometries of stars created by the animators in the final meeting of this workshop, Kularaj, our artistic mentor, devised rectangular signboard icons in bold green, gold, terracotta, pink and grey hues. When you see them inscribed on the walls at Monkey’s Tale you may think of Mahdya Pradeshi, Kwa Ndebele or Arabian graphics from the Rijal Alma or Asir region of that peninsula. The signage is bold and distinctive, but not of this world - nothing in these parts prepares you for it. The fact is, however, that these diamonds were found in the dust of the Butterfly Garden. They are as indigenous to Mattakalappu, indeed to the Garden, as the children’s smiles.

Programs at The Monkey’s Tale Centre are scheduled to begin by mid-August 2005. Initially we envisage working with a group of 10-20 youth comprised of alumni of our YEP programs and youth from local tsunami resettlement camps. The program goal is to encourage creative capacity and imagination in these youth, stimulating them to think in terms of a vision which will inspire their involvement in the arts, community development, peace and environmental action for the rest of their lives.

We also hope to provide programs in creative animation for people already working in the psycho-social arena who are currently pre-occupied with the needs of resettlement camps in and around Batticaloa and with new communities such as those being developed at Katharavelai in Vacharai, Pasakuddah / Kalkudah and the Thiraimahdu (Lighthouse) area of Batticaloa where transitional communities are currently being built for survivors of the tsunami by various local and international NGOs.

There are plans afloat for the Butterfly Garden, through funds donated by War Child Canada, to build study halls and provide desks and tutorship for children in the town-based tsunami resettlement camps at the Paddy Marketing Board and Sinhala Mahavidayalayam where, due to cramped conditions, noise, and the general prevailing chaos, conditions are unfavorable for home study. This project would be monitored through Monkeys’ Tale with the study shed sometimes doubling as a space for Butterflly Garden clown theatre (Komali Kuthu) and community entertainment.

The core curriculum of the Monkey’s Tale has five integrated components which we call the Five Motivating Measures to Restore Creative Imagination, Health and Well-being. Where there is systemic poverty, political paralysis, and serial traumatization, as there is everywhere in Batticaloa and throughout Sri Lanka, it is difficult to know where and how to begin living a ‘normal’ life again. The anarchy of the situation militates against simple self-motivation, with people abandoning hope for the return of even a modicum of civil sanity. Their lives, for all intents and purposes, are completely out of their control.

Garden Path centers such as Monkey’s Tale open a neutral space and offer a catalytic process for healing and renewal with like-minded people from all constituencies. The focus of these centers is ultimately the innocent children of the community but their immediate objective is to educate youth in the use of techniques honed over years of animator training in the Butterfly Peace Garden of Batticaloa. Youth trained at the Monkey’s Tale later will be supported in taking the practice of poiesis as they come to know and understand it to their own villages, resettlement camps and transitional community sites.

Monkey Meditates

Five Motivating Measures to Restore Creative Imagination, Health and Well-being

Meditation – encourages the motivation to connect with sacred reality within. The Garden Path teaches a form of centering meditation which is ecumenical and respectful of all faith traditions. We emphasize the cultivation of relationship on four levels: relationship to one-self which is self-affirming; relationship to one’s neighbour which is mutually empowering; relationship to the planet which emphasizes our interconnectedness to all elements in the biosphere; relationship to the sacred (God, the Great Mystery, the Divine) in complete surrender. It is an important feature of the Garden Path vision however that, as an intermediating secular structure, it secures and empties a space where people from all faith traditions (or none whatsoever) can meet to cultivate relationships which foster the possibility of individual and collective growth and healing.
Mystery Painting – encourages the motivation to see ourselves more clearly in relationship to both inner and outer processes and to stretch our imaginations through practices that draw on both image cultivation and image relinquishment, allowing creation and its discourse to unfold in a completely natural way.
Mythography – encourages the motivation to create, remember and tell stories, to narrate the sadhana - the journey - we are undertaking as we re-connect, re-member and re-story our lives. Narrative connections move us from the purely personal to the shared space of community.
MettaMapping – encourages the motivation to connect as a community with the sacred in all beings, at all times, by means of a process of exploration of the universal unconscious using images collected from various cultures around the world, in many different times and places. The process moves through four stages ultimately to arrive at a completely original action plan for renewing and regenerating hope in the defeated imagination of any given community. The four stages of MettaMapping include (i) research into the proposed journey to be made; (ii) mapping of the journey; (iii) finding the right path, and (iv) making the journey. Since MettaMapping is site-specific, it motivates a community to find symbols, images and protocols which specifically address the collective malaise and through compassionate and creative intervention, initiate a healing process.
Marketing – encourages the motivation to share the fruits of discovery by bringing the harvest to market, setting up a stall and offering the goods to others. There is no use in hording the treasures discovered on this healing journey. Nor is there any use in trying to cash in on them, for the souvenirs of this journey are simply too silly and too sacred to sell. Who would want to buy them? That’s Monkey’s business and he’s busy drawing up a wish list and making a business plan. At Monkeys’ Tale we will make medicine bundles inside of which are wrapped healing toys for the gods. Then we will give them away to the children. Monkey considers this a suitable strategy for straddling heaven and earth and not falling headlong into the abyss of global consumerism.

Monkey Dreams On

If you catch hold of Monkey’s tale he might squeal in protest and offer serious physical opposition to being pinned down. So let’s not pin him down. Let’s indulge him and learn to dream. Monkey seldom uses words, though, images, dreams and visions continuously flood through his imagination. That is why he is sometimes celebrated as the Monkey God, Hanuman, an archetypal symbol of the restlessness of creative genius, the trickster. We will simply have to learn to dream along with Monkey and see what happens.

The dreams Monkey has are as lucid and clear as the mirror-like surface of a Himalayan lake. If he looks at the lake he sees the sky. If he looks at the sky he sees the lake. Little people in stone canoes glide across its icy azure depths. They come from the great granite shield north of Lake Superior in Canada but they are here in Sri Lanka now. There are here in Monkey’s mirror. Other canoe people went under with the tsunami, those who lived in Navaladi, Mutur, Kalmunai, Kirinda, Galle. They have joined the stone canoe people and are now communicate in dreams.

The stone boat people are accomplished dreamers but, unlike Monkey, they are intensely shy. You must never look upon them directly or, if you do, you must pretend you have not noticed their presence. They will of course know that they have been touched, for human gaze is utterly excoriating – always wanting, always needing, always seeking containment, closure, control. Monkey is completely one with the stone boat people. They share a common dream: the dream of dreaming and of teaching people to dream, so that their hearts may open and life may flourish.

For Monkey dreaming is not a matter of falling asleep and watching inscrutable movies in the cipher cineplex our supine corpse. Rather, it is something you simultaneously do and have done to you. It is impossible to know where the dreaming begins or ends. Like breathing. Like making love. When Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I have a dream” - his of justice and freedom for all men - he was dreaming the way Monkey dreams.

There is a way of learning Monkey dream poiesis which depends strictly depends on creative imagination. It is essential to practice and cultivate the arts and, in the beginning it helps to learn and, and to begin seriously to practice Five Motivating Measures to Restore Creative Imagination, Health and Well-being. This is where the Monkey’s Tale begins.

Often, in precious idle moments, Monkey sees a big bunch of bananas dangling from the moon. He likes to reach out and pluck them one by one. He peels them carefully. His breathing slows, his eyes roll around in their sockets, he shudders, he bites, he chews, he savors each morsel and swallows. With one bite he built the Great Wall of China. With another he threw up the Pyramids in Egypt. Another bite brought on Michelangelo and the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. Then there was Aku Aku, the aeroplane, Bollywood and the Internet. Some say he’s losing his touch.

Oh Monkey, Monkey, never mind all those bananas! You must get busy now and make our dreams come true. That big bunch of bananas hanging from the moon is only your wish list. There is so much work to be done.

There are big wishes and little wishes and some that should ideally happen before others. Monkey knows the steps to making any wish come true. First you have to hold a clear picture of what it is you wish to accomplish firmly in mind. But that picture is only a seed image. An image is a static category like a photo or a painting. You need to animate it with breath and concentration, and you must practice this round the clock until you don’t know whether you going forwards, going backwards or standing still. At this point you transcend yourself and all your suffering and doubt. You have become a dreamer. With dreaming the images develop a life of there own; they begin to resonate and move with primordial energy. Finally with vision - which you in no way possess but which thoroughly possesses you - these seed images come fully to life. Some call this “make believe”. When Monkey goes bananas he makes himself believe. Once he believes the deed is already done. What he dreams comes true. This, of course is a double edged talent. Sometimes Monkey gets it all wrong.

The Monkey’s Tale Centre for Contemplative Art and Narration, given plenty of time, loving care, imagination and competent organzational management will become an urban ashram known locally and internationally for its practice of healing broken dreams (and dreamers) and restoring creative imagination to children and young people suffering from the brutality of war and the sterile monoculture of consumer salvation now being served up by the neo-liberal global fundamentalists who control the planet as the answer to all the world’s ills. Monkey’s not so sure. Monkey dreams on.

Paul Hogan
Batticaloa Sri Lanka
Poson Poya 21/06/05







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