August 6. We lie down on the cement patio in front of the Peirce Memorial at Bangor Public Library. Firsthand stories of the Hiroshima atomic bomb and a deep felt hope for a nuclear free world have been shared by Masanabu Ikemiya, a family member of survivors. Letters read from others. The message of reconciliation voiced as a word of hope. Honoring the thousands of individuals who survived the bomb blast only as a shadow on the pavement where they had stood, people lay down there in the sun. Outlines drawn around the bodies… I lay there on that beautiful Maine summer day, warm, protected from heat by clouds drifting overhead, eyes closed, thinking about what it must be like to experience your city/community in flames. Ilze Petersons would ring a bell at the end of the remembrance and invite us into the Library for a story and film. Almost on cue as we lay there, clouds moved and the intense heat of the sun pierced through. It radiated from the cement, burned from the sky, penetrated the pores, giving a glimpse of how intense heat can be. “Ring the bell that still can ring, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…” The bell was slow to ring… time to wonder what the bell asked of us… time to think about hope and the power of reconciliation…
The bell does ring, we get up leaving our shadows on the ground. We are present, able to celebrate the crack which lets the light in, able to be ambassadors of nothing more than the joy in living, nothing less than hope for a nuclear free world, and nothing more earnest than a quest for gentle living on this world planet. So many things we don’t know as a people… the mystery of living, of the unseen, of the source of being, and yet we don’t need to know the mysteries of the wind to sail effortlessly in the world. We need only ring the bell that still can ring, leave shadows of our work, be part of the symphony of hope.
Well, life has its irony too. It did not go unnoticed to me that as we lay on the cement, just a few blocks away, Bangor’s newest music festival was getting underway… Wouldn’t you know it is called the KAHBANG Festival! What’s the probability Kahbang would start on August 6, the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb. Gotta love life as it comes! Oh, and then there was the disappearance of the shadows on the cement. Leaving the library after the movie “Railroad of Love, Spanning Australia and Japan”, one noticed that the chalk marks had been erased. Nothing was left on the ground from the remembrance. I guess we need to ring the bell loud and hard to keep its sound alive over the din of Kabang!
No comments:
Post a Comment