The Superdome in New Orleans is holding an eruption of America’s Shadow, a Hieronymus Bosch-like spectacle of all that has been swept under the rug. Our leaders have spent their time and our tax dollars creating their vision of America: key image? an elite strike-force automated military, making no-mess surgical interventions to inject democracy, freedom, and capitalism into backward Middle East countries. They have neglected and even spurned the mundane tasks of infrastructure maintenance here at home, like my brothers who used to prefer playing with their army men to picking up the dog poop in the backyard or mowing the lawn.

Who do we see in the news photos of the hurricane aftermath? Poor people of color, the elderly and sick. Is this why the Army Corps of Engineers budget requests for levee maintenance around New Orleans have not been met for the last 5 years? Their website www.mvd.usace.army.mil clearly states that anything beyond a category 3 storm would overwhelm the levees. This fact has been known since 1970.
Inside the Superdome thousands of people milled around in a setting where sanitation and air conditioning broke down within hours. The L.A. Times reported a thriving black market where next to cigarettes anti-diuretic pills were a popular item, allowing people to avoid the need to urinate for as long as possible. Mothers were told to scrape off diapers and use them again. Five hundred Louisiana National Guardsmen patrolled the Superdome with machine guns; they themselves had also lost homes and family members. The scene was one we are accustomed to seeing when a disaster hits a Third World Country. What Katrina has done (see What Would Kali Do? www.patballen.com) is lift the veil that has obscured the Third World within America, the parallel reality that exists alongside our gleaming cities and rhetoric of democracy.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands folks are shaking their heads. Half the Dutch population lives below sea level. After floods killed 2000 people in 1953 they created a massive systems of hydraulic sea walls to prepare for large-scale storms. However, many scientists agree that worldwide climate changes will make the precarious practice of building on flood plains obsolete soon. Our approach of discounting global warming hastens that day.

The images all around us are art verite. When leaders don’t engage reality for the highest good for all involved but rather for selfish interests and boyish fantasies, artists must come forward to surface the denied images and neglected discourse. When artists don’t rise to the task, the Creative Source itself provides us the images in the primer of everyday life. What would Kali do indeed?

What Do You Do?

Rachel Amenson, an art education student from Philadelphia, got herself down to the Astrodome carrying a suitcase full of markers and paper. She posed as an art therapist and spent the two days before she was to begin her student teaching just being with the kids who were sheltered there and providing a semblance of normalcy. She was a kind face and gave kids a chance to remember what life is supposed to be like. She said they raised their hands when they had questions and called her ‘teacher’. See to read Rachel’s post and see images of kid’s art from the Superdome. (Thanks to my colleague Barbara Fish for forwarding this info)

I suspect reading her story will make some of us feel guilty. What Rachel did was a generous act, clear and simple. What I find most important about her is not the act itself, which was wonderful and right for her, but that she listened carefully to the voice of her soul then followed it. When we do that, things tend to work out and manifest in a clear way. We all hear multiple voices all the time, especially when something big happens. The voice of the ego that says ‘Wow, she’s a hero, I want to be a hero, maybe I should gather up supplies and go down there too.’ The voice of the inner critic, ‘I’m so pathetic, I don’t do enough, nothing I could do is good enough, I can’t do anything’, or the angry projectionist, ‘Nobody really cares, nobody is doing enough, why doesn’t (fill in the blank) the government, SAIC, Oprah…do something’?

Not everybody should jump on a plane to Houston or New Orleans to help. If you hear that call, as Rachel did, and if you can, go for it. The question for each of us to ask is how can I make space to hear the voice of my soul, the voice that kindly speaks and tells us how our best gifts can be given. One of the potentials of a disaster is that it can wake us up to being the kind of person who responds with compassion not just to those far away, but to those we encounter in everyday life. The voice of the soul never asks us to ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’, never asks us to leave our genuine if sometimes boring responsibilities for the high of heroism. The soul does challenge us to listen with discernment to what really matters and to act from that place.

There is a Buddhist concept in which one dedicates the merits of our daily activities to those in need of refuge. It is a mindfulness practice in which we say, for example, ‘I dedicate the merits of my studies, or my work as barrista at Starbucks, or cleaning the kitchen, or doing an assignment for a class, or teaching my students to the greater good of the folks suffering from the hurricane’, or even for the enlightenment of our elected officials. Then you try to carry out each task as fully and mindfully, with as much excellence and care as you are able. It releases us from the clastrophobic focus on our self and how good or bad we are, the swamp of samsara. As Rabbi Tarfon in the Pirkei Avot says: ‘It is not incumbent upon you to finish the work of healing the world, neither may you desist from it.’ We have the tools at hand in every minute of living to make a difference.

Pat Allen

I have a hard time claiming the downtime that is essential to the creative process. Instead I spend time jerking around trying and failing to design a business card when I haven’t learned how to use photoshop or something equally unlikely to succeed. It works better when I keep a list of things to do starting from the last page of my journal forward so that when I get distracted while writing or drawing I can just go there and add something to the list instead of actually jumping in and just doing it. These back pages form a sort of index or coda to what I am working on. Sometimes they show me the concrete things I have accomplished. “Revisions of chapter for social action book”, crossed off. Very satisfying. There are categories “shortterm”, “website”, “longterm”. I find that the things that get written down on my back pages tend to get done. If I wrote down “business card” it would begin to occur to me what the necessary steps are and then I could write them down and procceed with more alacrity. The organizer in me, which I think of as a wholly autonomous not-me, what Jung would call a sub-personality, often accomplishes things that I have little or no memory of. A student told me I sent her an email thanking her for submitting an assignment online. No memory. Glad the organizer is so polite. I picture her as cool customer, wears black, has short hair, dark hair, not grey like mine. She’s a younger apparently more efficient version. bangs through the list decisively, yields to no emotional distrsactions, forms no attachments. She will remind me, right before I fall asleep that I read but didn’t answer a certain email. Then she takes care of it the next day.
The importance of downtime cannot be overestimated as a key factor in creative work. Staring at the sky, ambling around aimlessly and repetitive acts all create spaciousness. I find acts of service, the more mindless the better, washing things, sorting clothes for the Katrina evacuees like I did the other day, tends to disengage the mind. they open the space for the unknown; what I haven’t thought of yet can show up. Also, things I am considering doing show up, projects proposed by someone else that I got pumped up about at the time. They come to the mindless place to die. Like a balloon leaking air, I watch them fade as I fold underwear and breathe a sigh of relief. The organizer knows if it doesn’t make it on to the list, it ain’t gonna happen.

When I was in art school in the 1970’s a lot of us were interested in art therapy. Several of the guys I knew went to work in one of the prisons bringing art making to the inmates. They did it a few times and then stopped. One stopped because the prisoners taunted him about his conceptual work: “Don’t you even know how to draw?” They found his crumbled plaster works laughable. My friend was crushed. I remember he started drawing self-portraits after that. The fact was, he didn’t draw so well. But another guy stopped visiting the prison because he said it took too much time and energy away from his own work. I remember when I heard that I was sort of stunned. It seemed, well, selfish. Here are all these men, incarcerated, suffering in prison and all this guy is concerned about is his own work. I was astonished that he could say that: “It takes too much time from my own work”. Selfish; the dictionary links disregard for others to self concentration on one’s own welfare, advantage or pleasure in defining selfish. I ask myself, how did I come to link art and service to others? Where does the whole helping people thing come from? Is it aberrant to connect one’s own creative process with helping others? I knew even in 1974 that my emotional reaction to my male friend’s statement—a mixture of shock, a little bit of shame and a mild sense of transgression—signaled something worth looking at further. What is “my work”? What are the things I privilege above the needs of others? The idea of one’s “work”, something different than a job that someone else pays you to do, is in itself an idea born of privilege. By claiming myself as an artist I am saying that I have something to do beyond whatever it is I get paid to do by others. It has taken a long time to disentangle that “work” from another obligation that I also feel strongly, something about alleviating suffering, being of service. The knowledge of pain and want in the world and the pleasure that I derive from creating is a major tension in my creative process. Lately I find myself feeling selfish, an image of an adolescent boy has shown up in my art work. His eyes are half closed, looking inward. He is unavailable to others. But maybe he is taking in the suffering in another way, digesting it, creating from it, maybe that is a kind of service. Maybe not. My friend got something from the prisoners, he got an honest reflection: “Hey, you don’t draw so well!” I got something from the other guy, a chance to see how I didn’t fully accept the call of my own work. Maybe service doesn’t always look like what we expect it to.

October was Breast Cancer Awareness month. Pink ribbons were emblazoned on posters, ads and worn by actual people. This bothers me. The ribbon for awareness thing began with red ribbons for AIDS awareness. Created in New York by Visual AIDS in 1991 as a global symbol of solidarity, the red ribbon was sent to celebrities who were appearing on the Tony awards show. Only Jeremy Irons wore one that night. However, Easter Monday in 1992, 100,000 ribbons were distributed during a Freddie Mercury concert for AIDS Awareness at London’s Wembley Stadium. It is estimated that 1 billion people from 70 nations watched that show. Today with yellow ribbons to remind us of soldiers in Iraq and colors for almost every disease known to man, along with colors for every type of cancer, no one can keep up with all the meanings; many colors have multiple designations. There are websites offering bulk rates on ribbon pins and offering to personalize your ribbons for your cause. This sort of short-hand communication, ‘buy this magnetic ribbon and let your car tell what your cause it’ isn’t new of course, we have been wearing tee-shirts for years trumpeting our politics, favorite bands, vacation sites and offering free advertising to multi-national corporations who may have employed sweatshop labor to make the shirt and now have you doing their sweat shop marketing except instead of being paid a pittance, you are paying for the privilege.
It seems at first glance that no one can argue that if selling these things raises money for a ‘good cause’ then they should be above reproach. I struggle with this basic capitalistic notion. For one thing, once someone has created a business and is selling a product and making a profit, he or she by definition has a stake in the continuation of the phenomenon his product is allegedly fighting, in this case, breast cancer. If we wear these icons are we contributing energy to the normalization of the phenomenon? How soon does ‘awareness’ fade? Does awareness lead to action? By wearing a ribbon do we convince ourselves we actually have done something and therefore do nothing of any consequence beyond a meaningless consumerist pseudo-political act?
Sometimes the intersection of the commercial world of illness and pop culture products can be staggering. Three women, all cancer survivors diagnosed in 1997, began a website called Choosehope.com. One has since died and the two others soldier on, saying “Some day we’ll win this war”. They promote a line of products bearing the message: “Cancer Sucks”. Patients and loved ones can purchase hats to cover chemo-balded heads, pens to fill out their insurance forms with, sweatshirts and other items emblazoned with this slogan. We are told that to wear such a tee-shirt to your doctor’s appointment, will “Make his day”. How? In the Dirty Harry sort of way? Will the cancer patient so dressed also pull out a gun and shoot her doctor out of frustration of undergoing treatment that tries to almost kill her and then bring her back to life?
I have been a thoughtful spectator at the theater of cancer since 1960 when I was eight years old and my mother was first diagnosed with breast cancer. I have been aware of the element of commerce intertwined with the cancer world since I was fifteen and the American Cancer Society contacted me, fresh from finally losing my mother to the disease, to ask me to collect door to door for them. Their idea was that I, a compelling cancer waif, would pull the heartstrings and loosen the purse strings of my neighbors for the cause. Just think if I had little pink ribbons I could have given out for each donation!
I couldn’t stomach the job and threw the collection can away, though at the time I couldn’t have explained exactly why.
My associations to the ribbons are not wholesome. Are women like decorated war heroes? Do these ribbons celebrate ‘survivors’ who should be thankful for every day they get beyond their surgery and therefore be damn thankful to modern medicine and not waste their energy asking why the hell are cancer rates still going up? Why are we searching for a better form of chemical poison instead of looking at the roots of this epidemic? How can it be a sane idea to declare war against our own bodies?
I think also of the yellow stars designating Jews in Nazi Germany. How do they relate to these plucky little ribbons? For a woman to wear a pink ribbon does not create in me a hopeful feeling. It makes me think of how our status as healthy, vibrant, functioning human beings is being threatened on a daily basis by environmental factors that are blithely ignored in pursuit of profit by corporations worldwide. A 50-page report issued by the Boston University School of Public Health and the Health Initiative of U Mass Lowell called “Environmental and Occupational Causes of Cancer” reviews 175 recent scientific articles and concludes that we continue to ignore factors of immense proportion affecting our risk for cancer. How can this be? This is stuff we have known since Rachel Carson’s devastating book Silent Spring published in 1962. We are poisoning our water and soil with pesticides, our food with hormones, and our air with uncontrolled emissions. So to me the pink ribbon, like the yellow star speaks of incipient destruction, to wear them is to say, yes, we are marked for death.
So I guess the ribbons don’t only make me nervous, they make me angry too. We must awake from the trance that puts profit above all other motives, that allows us to remain disconnected from the simple truth that all of us are endangered by bargain prices of factory farmed foods; the tax we pay is in our health. I told my hairdresser that the studies show an extremely elevated incidence in bladder cancer in hairdressers, among other groups of workers. The chemical treatments to color, perm and straighten hair are extraordinarily toxic. She changed the subject. By rights, anyone who goes in for highlights and a manicure ought to be paying a tax to fund the health care of these workers who will one day pay the cost of day in and day out exposure to poisons on our behalf unless we are willing to demand safe products. This is one simple connect-the-dots, there are countless more. Dr. Samuel Epstein, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the carcinogenic effects of toxic and industrial pollutants in the workplace and consumer products, says most cancer deaths are preventable. His response to the query: Why are cancer rates increasing? “I think the answer is terribly simple. Parallel to the escalating incidence of cancer, there has been an explosive expansion of technologies – particularly in the petrochemical industry, which really took off in the early forties. Between 1940 and 1990, the total annual production of synthetic organic chemicals increased from 1 billion to more than 600 billion tons” p. 6 .
Epstein points out that there are a number of things women can do to lessen their risk of breast cancer, for example, such as avoiding birth-control pills, hair dye, estrogen replacement therapy, and ingestion of high fat animal and dairy products which are heavily contaminated with chlorinated pesticides. He advocates for full disclosure and every citizen’s right to know the hazards they accept in every day life. Refuse to pay your water bill, Epstein suggests, unless you also get a full disclosure statement of contaminants contained in your drinking water.
True education about cancer prevention would endanger any number of highly profitable industries from the drug companies that make tamoxifen to the fast food corporations who’s Happy Meals deliver a chemical payload with each burger and shake. What is the image we need to wake us up? Not a nice, polite little pink ribbon, that’s for sure. This is not about pointing fingers in any one direction; there is no one—no farmer, corporate executive or government official—who started out to maniacally threaten our lives, no, this was all about progress. But with a thousand deaths every day from cancer our lives are indeed threatened. No, this is about the power of the image to wake us up or to put us to sleep, to reassure us or prod us to think, ultimately to save our lives or lull us toward our comatose death. What image comes to your mind? Let’s print it up and distribute it for free. Let’s wake up and live.
Seriously, if you have an idea for a wake up image, please send it along.

Happy New Year

Is there anything better than lying in bed under a mound of covers listening to wind whip and rains lash the trees outside? The mountains in the distance are obliterated in the white out of fog and clouds, this visitation of winter on the valley. This is the third year I have left Chicago’s brand of winter for that of California. It is not, as many of my Chicago friends imagine, ‘getting away from winter’ at all, although the seasons that first year were marked mostly by the presence or absence of certain vegetation. There are abundant oranges and grapefruits on my trees in the winter; the apple and apricot trees stand bare. I have yet to be here at the precise moment in spring when the apricots are ripe. So far the birds have not had to share them with me. There were cloudy days and at night at least it got cold enough to warrant a sweater and a fire in the fireplace.
Thanks in part to natural earth changes and in part to human hubris, weather all over seems to be growing more extreme. This year and last California is experiencing punishing rainstorms whose damage is made worse by the landscape denuded of trees due to summer’s wildfires. Last year storms hung over the coast for days and refused to move. In Chicago I had never heard rain pelt down hour after hour around the clock like this. It had a methodical mind-numbing consistency that after seven or eight days seemed like water torture. Today trees dance and winds howl adding rich counterpoint to the pounding rain. This storm is more like the hurricanes I remember from my east coast childhood that closed schools, emptied the streets and downed power lines making even homework undoable with only candlelight to see by.
I like the fact that SAIC has a winter term that allows a space for those who choose it to just lie fallow for a bit, an essential part of the creative process. Wouldn’t it be great though, if there were winter term offerings of hibernation, retreats, maybe at Ox Bow, where students could sleep late, read novels, eat warm soup and let all ambitions fall away? In any yoga class I have ever attended, following a period of intense work is savasana, the “corpse pose,” when we let our body absorb and integrate what our muscles have just learned. Otherwise learning just stacks up like planes awaiting a space to land in a crowded airport, using fuel but we never make it to our destination.
I am relieved that the holidays and their trumped up activity are over, the sales they trail after them to lure me out into commerce don’t entice me. I skipped at least one Hanukkah party this year and New Year’s Eve felt more like Shiva as we counted down the time until midnight. Instead of escaping winter I find myself escaping into winter and the promise it holds for retreat, recovery and restitution. Somehow here in California, away from Chicago, that even a really good snow storm only slows down momentarily, I am able to embrace the season’s purpose: to pull inward, to dream, to incubate: all crucial parts of the creative process. Since I have arrived here my sleep is deep, my dreams vivid and I am finally learning to be instructed by the season.

Art Critique or The Art of Critique: Part One, Safety

I have been asked to speak on a panel for next year’s American Art Therapy Association Annual conference on art critique. This is not a common subject at our meetings. Along with several colleagues I have been asked also to offer a critique to volunteers who will bring along an art piece to New Orleans where the conference will take place.

The topic of critique has always fascinated me and like many artists I have an attraction/aversion to the whole enterprise. I have been ruminating about this topic since my last post. Guilty for taking so long, I developed an aversion to even writing about the topic. I believe that any subject that inspires me to veer from one end of the mental spectrum to another is capable of generating lots of creative energy. Where to begin?

My earliest memory of critique is at about age four or five. Having colored in the legs of a piano in my coloring book making one face of the leg black and the adjacent a lighter gray, I heard adults peering down at me murmuring at how brilliant I was to indicate shadow and the fall of light that way. I filed the comment away in my little mind and kept coloring.

In my Creative Process as Art Therapy class here at SAIC I assign a personal art history essay and often hear similar experiences from my students. A teacher, or a parent, or a teacher enthuses to a parent, about some remarkable little detail that sets a kindergarten art project apart from all the rest. One student added melting drips to a cut-and-color template of a Popsicle and her teacher declared genius to the student’s mother. That parent took notice and began to see my student differently, as special, as ‘artist’. In every essay there is at least one person cited who affirmed an artistic specialness of the student via a positive and specific critique at an early age that eventually landed them here in a prestigious art school.

You may object to my classing effusive comments to preschoolers as critique but I assure you that is precisely what they are: the rendering of judgment due to specific attributes of created work. In some ways, these two examples indicate creativity under trying circumstances: educators and therapists often castigate coloring books and templates as the enemy of free expression. Each child in these two examples was given clear and specific feedback on what made her art work effective: tapping into and rendering genuine sensory details, and conquering the mundane.

Critique requires specificity and also safety. Art schools are not always places of safety, nor should they always be. Our job is to provide students with sufficient challenge to grow and develop. Yet I believe we must also offer the safety that arises from an intention to create the highest good for all involved. Students should feel confident that their work is treated seriously and with respect. No student should worry that he will receive a personal attack or insult in lieu of constructive commentary on his work.

It is useful to consider that in addition to the students and faculty present at a critique, double that number of ‘virtual’ critics is also present in the form of introjected experiences each of us carry. If the inner critic of the teacher or student receiving the critique is toxic and harsh, an unsafe condition arises. Our ‘inner critics’ are not just psychobabble but are an amalgam of all the past critical exchanges we have had in life and are often conducting a simultaneous translation of what is taking place in real time, rendering whatever is being said into the painful contours of a previous exchange. Psychologically this phenomenon is an attempt at mastery. We tend to recapitulate difficult experiences to create opportunities to heal them. Healing, however, requires consciousness on the part of at least one person in an exchange.

When I was an art student more than thirty years ago I found critique perilous and avoided it when I could. I was aware that I lacked sufficient ego strength to undergo rigorous critique of my artwork. My art reflected my systemic weakness, lack of confidence and fear of life. I have no doubt that this insight both prevented me from finding a true mentor in art school (too risky) and also steered me toward art therapy where I intuited I might cultivate the core strength that would allow me to be a ‘real’ artist.

I watched many of my friends rely on drug and alcohol use to quell the inner critic and dull the barbs of the real life ones. By creating a space of ‘white noise’ obtained by getting high they carved out a space in which to work. Few of them remain artists today. I took the path of therapy, specifically a Jungian analysis, to meet my inner critics, which proved life and art saving.

A major part of my teaching is about providing a safe space along with sufficient challenge to create the conditions necessary for creativity. In such a space we can experiment with a form of critique that relies on honest witness with the intention of the highest good for all involved. More on this in the next post.

Last Friday I had the opportunity to offer a workshop “The Practice of Chaos in Art and Life” involving two favorite ideas of mine: chaos and community. Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, WI sponsored a daylong symposium on the theme of “Constructing Creative Community”. I continually find the space between individual endeavors and community involvement a place of tension, especially in regards to creative work. I hold being in community as a value and yet have often experienced a kind of exhaustion sets in when I fail to assert or am unaware of my particular needs when in a group situation. Balancing my creative needs and my desire to hold a space that welcomes others to co-create has been a central theme in my career as an artist and art therapist.

For the workshop I gave each person a brown paper bag containing a few random items such as bottle caps, text from magazines, twine, ribbon, small toys, twigs, pebbles etc. There was no rhyme or reason to the contents of the bags. There were no tools or construction supplies like glue, scissors or tape. A few bags had means to make marks, a crayon or marker. The workshop took place in an art therapy classroom so there were abundant supplies and tools in the room. Groups of five to seven people sat at five different tables. After some warm up activities to engender a bit of chaos, they were invited to sit down at table together, each table constituting a community, to explore and pool their resources, to create an intention as a group and to make something together. They could use other materials and tools if they chose. I always participate in workshops that I facilitate so I took a bag and worked alone. I had several intentions: to see what it felt like to work alone while I engaged others in working together, to observe how these ‘communities’ evolved, and to hold the space responsibly while all this unfolded. To add an element of chaos I played a Miles Davis CD rather a bit too loud so it wasn’t easy to speak to each other. There was a lot of talk and I could hear that values were emerging in the communities, rules were being established, leaders were stepping forward, controversies arose and were resolved. The groups were amazingly conscious of how they chose to proceed.

The Studio Process that I teach requires both intention and witness as elements of any creative experience. In this case, I asked community members to each write a witness to their community creation separately and to read them to each other. This reading was a wonderful element of chaos. I walked around during this segment of the workshop and enjoyed hearing the phrases and words wash over each other as the reading of the groups overlapped and the sound of the words rose and fell. Then each person chooses one sentence or phrase from her individual witness and a scribe from each group wrote down the sentences and in turn each group read what became a community poem to the whole workshop.

A common element noted in the discussion was the fact that each person had initially felt very attached some item or other in their bag of resources and had considered holding it out from the group or insisting on it’s particular use but then let go of that desire. I am very interested in this impulse to save, to hold, to have, one that is very familiar to me as an artist but is in conflict with my art therapy values of equality, communal effort and sharing in a non-hierarchical way. As artists we often collect things that at some point find their way into our art work but until they do maintain a cherished place of value. This impulse to honor when held too tightly may also be the basis of hoarding, of consumerism and of greed. Chungya Rinpoche, founder of Naropa University, wrote an intriguing book called Dharma Art, which defined spiritual materialism as a danger for the seeker of higher consciousness. The collecting of sublime or ‘spiritual’ insights can be a trap similar to having the best car or coolest electronic device.

Only one group made an express intention to safeguard the individuality of its members as they worked together. I had stated that working alone while together in a sort of parallel process was indeed a perfectly acceptable solution to the task presented. Their intention stated: “We maintain our individuality while contributing to the community”. This choice of words defines the community is an independent entity to which they can cede some if not all their resources. Another group decided right away to limit themselves to the aggregate resources in their bags, no one would go searching for tools or additional supplies, they would make do with what they had. This group also decided that they had to use everything they had, including the bags that their resources were contained in. In fact, they twisted the bags into tree or figure forms and arranged the other materials to create rich visual environment where each ‘tree’ form was connected.

My impression was that this group, also the largest group having seven instead of five members, had the most satisfying experience. Having set certain mutual goals and having accomplished those goals seemed to create a great sense of camaraderie and joy. Some members of the group who held their individuality out as the higher value expressed disappointment in their experience, saying that after hearing the other groups describe their experience, they questioned their own value of closely guarding their individuality. Other participants shared their private reservations about surrendering to the group but noted that in the end their emotional needs were met and their personal intention was satisfied, though paradoxically, they had let that intention go while working to create a group piece. Several people stated that the final creation of their group was more than they could have expected or accomplished alone and had some indefinable quality that “made the hair on my neck stand up”.

I couldn’t have asked for a better mirror of my own issues. I make no pretense of these observations being anything more than anecdotal and completely biased by my own lens, but they made me think a lot about these issues of chaos and community. For one thing, just the idea that we can take or leave communities at will is pervasive in our very affluent, mobile culture. ‘If you don’t like it, leave’ is an anthem that grows out of our commitment to individual self-actualization. Yet, sticking with a group until resolution occurs, being committed to something greater than individual satisfaction, these too, have meaning. More on this later.