Check this out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vOhf3OvRXKg
A friend sent it to me on Sunday. I watched it over and over, captured by the passion of the artist and the appearing and vanishing images on the unlikely inspiring medium of an illuminated sand table.
The artist, "Ukraine's Got Talent", Kseniya Simonova, 24, with her lighted candle and hand strokes, offers her interpretation of how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. The Great Patriotic War, as it’s called in Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.
I didn’t have to think while watching Simonova. I am not an expert on Ukrainian history. I am not sure if the faces that appear in the sand are political or metaphorical. I cannot translate the words that she writes at the end. Watching this I only know what I feel; without specific historical details, I plainly know what I know.
Bad things happen. Bad things happen to good people. It is painful to recognize and accept, critical to acknowledge, important to light a candle in reverent remembrance.
My friend, Leslie, owner of The Triad Wave (www.thetriadwave.com,) says that our knowing brain is much truer and powerful than our thinking brain. She encourages people to “get out of their head,” where encumbered by logic and ego, we are limited and blocked.
Consider, the head …
Headache.
Headed for trouble.
Head in the clouds.
A head case.
Head up your butt.
Heads up.
Head wind.
Heady.
Head strong.
Hard head.
Air head.
Bone head.
Butt head.
For all its many titles and accolades, the head, the IQ, will only take us so far. It is the knowing, the emotional quotient (EQ,) that deepens our journey, arousing within us something great or possibly even something fierce.
If Simonova had been thinking or explaining her art, it wouldn’t impact us the same way, which is why art can bless and move us. Perhaps it is what isn’t explained that brings about the most change. Maybe it is what we feel that often propels us to live beyond what makes sense in our minds.
***
A few weeks ago, after hearing her older sister repeatedly practice a Holocaust themed monologue for drama class, my nine-year-old crawled into my bed unable to sleep. With tears streaming from her navy blue eyes, Ryann asked why all those innocent people had to die in Germany? How do you answer such a soul rattling question? How can you reassure without building false safety in a broken world?
My best answer to my daughter was … “Baby, I don’t know why it happened. I just know it was very, very wrong.” I held her tight until her tears slipped into slumber. I watched her breathe, thankful for, although fleeting, that moment of safety and peace.
We can think ourselves into or out of anything. As the TGI Friday’s chocolate cake ad reads, “Let the justification begin.” There are those who can justify war and genocide. People like Pat Robertson can even justify an earthquake in Haiti. Then there are people like Simonova who replace tragedy by creating a work of honor, letting beauty serve fortress-like as a historical bookmark by feeling her way through the rubble.
Being honest with what we know to be right … that is where our truth rests. Even when we can’t think it through or explain it, I have to believe that on some level … we know. That path may be less traveled, but it is there for drawing in the sand, ablaze with a candle called hope.