How to Fill a Hole
What do you do with a big hole? Do you negotiate around it? Do you figure it’s beyond repair and try to ignore it?
Or do you take the RadJoy approach and fill the hole with beauty?
Three years ago, when Radical Joy for Hard Times offered Global Earth Exchange participants hand-spun and dyed yarn for their event, the Israeli artists of Mind the Heart, Maya Gelfman and Roie Avidan, drove hundreds of miles on their creative tour of the U.S. before finding the perfect home for their yarn: a hole in a sidewalk in Fargo, North Dakota.
Rways find a way to make some beauty for the gap.ecently, indigenous Ngalia elders in Leonora, Western Australia have been filling thousands of mining holes with large, colorful rugs that they are weaving from discarded fabric. The project, Reclaim the Void, was inspired by comments from the elders that their greatest pain was “those gaping mining holes left all over our Country.”
No matter who we are or where we live, we are never far away from holes in our hearts, holes in our lives, and holes in the places where we live. We can take inspiration from the elders of Ngalia and from Mind the Heart and acknowledge those holes when we encounter them. And with a little effort and imagination, we can always find a way to make some beauty for the gap.
—May 4, 2022
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