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Musketaquid Arts & Environment Program: Responding to the Call

by Morwen Two Feathers

photos by Mark Dannenhauer
illustration by Jeannie Abbott

These days, awareness of global warming is spreading, locally, nationally, and worldwide. Al Gore’s voice is one of the loudest issuing the call to awareness, but he is only echoing the call of nature itself. And if the world’s scientists are to be believed, that call is pretty urgent. If we can’t figure out how to clean up the mess we have made soon, not much else will matter for us here on this blue and green planet that is our home.

How can we respond without feeling overwhelmed or guilty? Can we hear the call and notice the need for our response without shutting down or rejecting the message?

That’s where the arts come in. Engaging the playful, non-linear part of the brain, the arts speak to our emotions, to the inner child whose connection to the earth is not yet mediated by economic necessity. Art may have a serious subject, yet its mode of operation is to bypass rational analysis and go directly to understanding. Therefore art is a powerful educational medium, a way of expressing and communicating intense realities while preserving their ambiguity and multiple levels of meaning, a way to reach across differences in background, experience, and worldview.

In creating opportunities for groups of people to share uplifting emotional experiences, the arts also build community, establishing deep bonds between individuals whose personal passions grow into something more when creatively connected. One shared experience creates a sense of camaraderie; repeated exhilarating, heart-opening experience among the same people forges bonds of community that may persist for generations. It is no accident that the most resilient cultures on the planet are those with strong arts traditions, whose members sing, dance, and make music together, whose crafts are created in community, whose storytellers are honored. Herein lies part of the power of Musketaquid’s annual Earth Day celebration: In coming together each year to express our passions artistically, and to take our creations to the street in a spirited celebration of this corner of the planet that is our home, we have laid a strong foundation of local community.

And here, too, is the answer to the naysayers who would deny the importance of responding to global warming and reject “the new moral order” of reduced consumerism. Certainly it is not a denial of pleasure to engage in local community and thereby curtail driving and flying, nor is it unpleasant to support local commerce and food production and thus reduce our carbon footprint. The cultivation of local community, supported by abundant opportunities for playful creativity, is the most effective (and perhaps joyful) way of addressing the challenge before us. Indeed, as Al Gore has said: we need to “release creativity and initiative at every level of society in multifold responses originating concurrently and spontaneously.” I’m proud to think that Musketaquid is a part of that. In fact, when I read Gore’s speech, I couldn’t help but feel that he was talking directly to us.

The Musketaquid Arts and Environment Program began in 1990 as a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. Now a program of the Emerson Umbrella Center for the Arts, Musketaquid still organizes an annual Earth Day event that has become a local tradition, which welcomes more than 500 people each year for a River Ceremony, Giant Puppet Parade, and Arts and Environment Expo which showcases dozens of local environmental organizations and groups. Musketaquid’s mission is to link nature and art, and to connect the local community to the specific place that is our home.

Perhaps the most important thing about our Musketaquid Earth Day celebration is that we do it together. We come together for serious play, we fill the riverbanks and the streets and the Umbrella lawn with our exuberant expressions, we learn from nature and from each other. The whole of our response is so much more than the sum of our individual actions. I’m looking forward to co-creating the event with our local community again in the coming months. Please check out the opportunities to get involved at www.emersonumbrella.org and come join us!

Morwen Two Feathers is the Coordinator of the Musketaquid Arts and Environment Program at the Emerson Umbrella Center for the Arts in Concord, MA.

Musketaquid Arts & Environment Program
40 Stow Street
Concord, MA 01742
United States
Phone: 978/ 371-1736

www.emersonumbrella.org/i05.html

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