Peace in our Time
In the midst of chaos, I imagine peace. Today I am imagining myself in Iceland for the annual lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower. It is the night before in Iceland and once dark, there is a ceremony to imagine peace and activate peace before the laser light streams out beyond the stratosphere every night for the next two months of the year.
I brought this impulse to Murwillumbah last year with a “peace activation” to coincide with my Iceland art exhibition. This year I am trying something different. I am going to connect with the live stream from Iceland and stream it into my Facebook group. I have never done this before, but I will have a go at making the technology happen.
It’s all in the spirit of Yoko Ono’s “what if”, when sometime in the 1960s, she wrote about imagining a light house “constructed of light from prisms, which exists in accordance with the changes of the day”. It took technology 30 years to catch up to her vision but sometimes big projects take time to come into fruition.
So much has happened in the past 2 years since October 2019 when I travelled on a crowded ferry from Reykjavik to Videy Island for the event.
The world has on the one hand had a pause as daily life has been interrupted worldwide by a pandemic. For some people this has brought a focus back on looking for peace within ourselves. Yet all around us there is division and chaos, in some countries deaths in the hundreds of thousands, war and human displacement.
Our search for peace and love continues nevertheless and the Imagine Peace Tower gives a focus to that impulse, if only for one hour on one day of the year.
I looked at my blog post about this event from 2019 and was instantly transported to the magic of that moment. I’ll share it with you.
“Imagining peace was foremost on my mind this week as I travelled back to Reykjavik on the bus so that I could go to the annual lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower. This was installed over ten years ago by Yoko Ono to commemorate peace and every year it is lit on the anniversary of John Lennon’s birthday. I never thought I would see this event, but here I am in Iceland at this exact time of the year so of course I had to go.
It was a cold night, but not too much wind and I wore my Icelandic knit jumper I knitted 40 years ago for Alex. There was a hush and suddenly the laser lights started to beam upwards from the ‘wishing well’ base as John Lennon’s song Imagine played through the loud speakers. I cried as I knew I would, and I could hear others crying around me, just as moved by the event. “
The blog post continued with my delight at having found out about the Women for Peace forum which was held the following day. This worldwide organisation quietly goes about looking for ways to influence peace in the world. There is an Australian chapter of this group which regularly holds meetings and forums with international speakers.
Here’s what I wrote about the Peace event on October 10, 2019.
“Every year there is a free Women for Peace forum held the next day at the University of Iceland. As it was a Thursday, the winter bus schedule meant that there was only an evening bus back to Skagaströnd so I could go. Imagine my delight when I got to shake hands with the President of Iceland and chat to the keynote speaker Madeleine Rees who just happened to sit next to me. Perhaps the prophetess has blessed me, I know that I feel incredibly grateful to be here at the NES artist residency and be allowed to dream and imagine.” You can read the full blog post here.
At the lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower, 9th October, 2019, in Iceland. The base of the tower has the words Imagine Peace inscribed on it in 24 languages.
My collage on an envelope on the 10/10/2019 with the peace doves and the bus ticket to Reykjavik on it.
