As a rosy dawn broke over the city on September 11, Josh and I caught a taxi to Lincoln Center to be in good time for an early morning silent dance remembrance vigil by some of New York’s best dancers. A large crowd gathered at the center and the dancers formed a circle around a water feature and began a lyric dance cycle to the hum of a bugle player and the beat of a drum. We watched these dancers, all bathed in white, as they gestured upwards (response to the towers falling) and toward us, with white plates in hand (let us find our humanity and community). For me, what was especially poignant was a dancer in a wheelchair who kept time to the drum through her wheeling and gracefully managed to hold and perform with the same objects as the other dancers – it was courage and resilience in motion.
On the Friday night we’d walked past a fire station in Greenwich Village where they were holding a commemorative event for the firemen who had died during September 11. The American flag was raised, flowers were placed in a communal vase, food was shared and people were embracing each other as they entered the space. These smaller events were being staged all over the city without the fanrfare of the official 9/11 events. Across from my work, at Bryant Park, were thousands of chairs, facing the absent towers, each chair commemorating a person who died, with people leaving flowers onto the chairs as their own gestures of remembrance.
Early Saturday morning, I walked out of my apartment on my way to yoga and spotted another of the glorious peace bikes that keep appearing in our neighborhood. I had a camera with me this time and I showed a man who’d been sleeping rough how to use it so that he could take a photo of me (attached here). At my yoga in the park class, our yoga teacher told the story of a man who hadn’t even known his neighbors before 9/11 and how, as a result of what happened, all the neighbors in the apartment block formed a close bond. He thought, if this can happen for me here, then imagine what can happen if we intentionally seek to create community in a bigger space. So he started ‘Meetup.com’ to get people off the internet and into growing local communities and it’s been a huge success. “Let us celebrate finding, making and sustaining community”, my yoga teacher said. What was gorgeous was that, while we were doing yoga, so many people stopped at the gates to the gardens (which were closed to the public at the time we did yoga) and watched us. People smiled and gestured and explained to their children what yoga was as we did our salutes to the sun under a canopy of trees, with dragonflies and butterflies flitting round.
I walked back to my apartment and, again, was struck by so many dog owners who looked like their dogs. It’s becoming one of my favorite pastime to look at the owner first and guess what kind of dog is being walked at her/his feet. This is such a doggy city, with dog menus at outdoor cafes and every kind of dog walking, dog clothing and dog grooming service available. Formal dog services aside, the antics of dogs and puppies do make for great entertainment on the streets.
A couple of days earlier, Michaela, my new mentor, had invited me to two other events linked to 9/11. One was the launch of a new movement called ‘Groundswell’ – an interfaith fathering to create and shape a new social agenda for America based on respect for diversity. One of the four electric speakers was a Muslim man who talked about an occasion after 9/11 where he and his wife took their three year old daughter to ToysRUS in Times Square so she could choose a birthday present. He was following his daughter at a distance – watching her wide eyed with excitement at all the toys she saw. He followed her around the corner where a man looked at this little girl and spat ‘Terrorist’. This father said at this moment he felt he had a choice about whether to be bitter or whether to be better and he chose the latter and committed himself to doing more to bridging understanding between cultures so that his daughter would have the best chance of living in a more tolerant and cross-culturally connected world.
The following night was a celebration of diversity at the UN with Michaela speaking about her pioneering role as a woman driving a microfinance movement. Michaela spoke about her role in life as a troublemaker, which seemed to resonate with a lot of the people in the room who cheered. While I’d been waiting to get into the UN that night, a mother and her young daughter stopped outside and the mother explained to her daughter that the UN was a place where countries came together to create peace and programs to benefit the poorest in the world. I watched the little girl as she looked at the building and at the many people entering and leaving. She was quiet, her face solemn as she took it all in. I waited to hear something from her, perhaps something like ‘maybe one day I could work there, Mummy”. She did finally speak but her focus was much more of the moment: ‘can we go and buy my doll now, Mummy?’
Work has been incredibly busy. Another few grant applications completed this week, training sessions planned for the Board and reports to donors completed. Thanks to my continuing link with Columbia University, I’ve been invited to the First Global Symposium on Gender in Media with Geena Davis so I’m looking forward to being part of that discussion in a couple of weeks. We completed another report on our research work in women and microfinance –it’s a compelling study on how a conscious focus on women and girls delivers very different results to applying the same kind of approach to men and women without any recognition of their different needs, circumstance and access. We also soon launch a new soap opera in the Dominican Republic this month — it’s a soapy drama with all the love interest that also weaves in information women accessing credit and savings facilities to help them start their own business to make enough money to put their children through school and get healthcare as well as opportunities for themselves.
I miss Australia so much and yet I am finding community here too. I walked into the magazine shop next to my apartment the other day. The owner was playing Mozart and piping the music onto the street while entertaining a couple of policemen inside. They smiled at me and left the shop and the owner danced me around the shop in a happy waltz. Outside the door a tiny puppy peeked in and, seeing our dancing feet, bounded through the door. In flew his owner, and in flew a bird, and we laughed and danced and I felt alive in a community of a more than human world.
Jane