Page 120 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Lily:

I want to tell you the story. Dandelion School, it's far out on the outskirts of Beijing. And I thought,

"Okay, you have some influence there." But a group of young women from Darien, Connecticut, from a

very prosperous wealthy community, they visited China. They spent one day in Dandelion School and

they were so impressed by the environment, by the creativity of the people. They didn't know that

academic environments don't have to be just whiteboards and books.

And so they came back empowered. They formed an art club and they demand to have their voices

heard through painting. So they created the mural to color. And this is in Darien High School.

Caroline:

My late great friend and master Wu Bong when we’d drive around would go, "Looks like a prison. Must

be a school." And so you're transforming these schools, these hardship places.

I want to also speak to beauty and danger. There's a wonderful lecture that Peter Warshall, late great

environmental ally, was doing on nature and how beauty and danger are intertwined in the evolution of

this planet in some serious way.

He says octopi in the sea create magnetize biofluorescence which is very beautiful and other little

creatures go, "How beautiful!" And then they eat them. We know everywhere in our own personal and

collective lives old structures are collapsing and we can either go waily-waily or we can view it as an

opportunity for liberating ingenuity to redesign the world.

And you have such medicines for now because you go into broken collapsing places... That's the

extreme version of what's happening everywhere. And you go, "We're going to make beauty out of this.

What if crisis is an evolutionary opportunity to become more intelligent and more beautiful?”

Lily: So well described. I would like to reverse the order and say danger and beauty. It reminds me

one of the most powerful moments that I experienced when I walked into the dumpsite community in

this place called Korogocho. It's twenty minutes outside of Nairobi. And the community of 100,000

people wanted to build the shanty around a big dumpsite with a dead lake in the middle.

Nobody in their right mind would walk into such a place full of poisonous air and the pollution and the

violence of poverty. And yet, when there is nothing else one can do and one starts to bring color, bring

creativity and invite children, adults come together to imagine what their world can be. And when we