132 NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
the challenges of our time. This way of being in the world takes
us from being sideline spectators in a disconnected drama to full
participants in the arena itself, creating and enacting an ethic of care
for the human and more-than-human world.BRINGING THE EARTH INTO OUR HEARTS:
AN ACT OF RESPONSE/ABILITY
Nature-based expressive arts calls on our capacity as sentient beings
to open our hearts to the Earth, that is to see, feel, hear, experience,
and know what we know. By extending our openness and taking the
Earth into our hearts, we allow ourselves to be moved and touched by
the world around us. Our human capacity to transform our sensory
and emotional experience into conscious action is our greatest
response/ability as nature-based expressive artists. We don’t sit idly
by waiting for someone else to do the work, but instead harness
our ability to respond courageously, constructively and creatively to
effect positive change in and around us. Our anger and grief and our
praise and awe become the raw elements of our alchemy.
Lily Yeh, whose life and work is the subject of the film The Barefoot
Artist (Holsten and Traub 2014), illustrates the creative alchemy of
honoring darkness and despair in a way that brings beauty and new
life. Yeh works in places of pervasive trauma, fragmentation, neglect
and pollution. An abandoned urban lot in Philadelphia, the Genocide
Survivor’s village in Rwanda and a vast garbage dump in Kenya
become her canvas. Through the power of community, imagination
and art she empowers transformation of place and person by
honoring the resilient spirit of the people, Earth and cultures where
she works. Collectively imagined and co-created community gardens,
murals, mosaic curving walls, dance and ceremony, and sanctuary for
bones to rest “make special” (Dissanayake 1995) the land and lived
experience of those who call on this “barefoot artist.” Through her
work with others, Yeh reflects that it is her own darkness and the pain
brought by generations before her that she is healing and repairing.