Kenneth Bush:In this session we will hear about an initiative on the east coast of Sri Lanka, the Butterfly Garden by Paul Hogan, who is the Artistic Director of the garden.
Paul Hogan: Thanks Ken. I am an artist, and I guess what you would call a practitioner. I don’t know that much about evaluation, so this is very much learning experience for me and a very important one because our garden at this present moment faces a lot of challenges and I think if we had a way of evaluating ourselves that made sense it would be very helpful.
The butterfly garden began as a health and peace initiative for the Centre of International Health at McMaster University in Canada in 1994, and it was intended to provide a healing space for kids affected or traumatised by the war in Sri Lanka. Since then, over a 14-year period, over 3000/3500 kids have participated in its core nine- month programme. This is for both youths and children, and 11,000 kids have taken part in shorter residential programmes. Some 2000 children have participated
in village programmes that we have and many thousands of others have visited the garden from school programmes that last for just one day or a morning. We also have adult training at our centre in Batticaloa on the west coast of Sri Lanka in which over 500 people have participated. After the tsunami in 2004 the garden opened two satellite smaller gardens: one in a Muslim village called Kalbela and the other in a Hindu village called Tiramadu. These run year round, and we opened a centre for adult training called the Monkey’s Tale Centre for contemplative art and narration in Batticaloa. We have a new garden in the south in the Sinhula area called Cala Balla Bindu which is Singhalese for something like ‘Zigzag zero garden’ and another centre for adults in Negombo on the west coast called the Crippled Crow Centre.
Each and every one of these centres seems to open an empty space; to allow a new dream to be born: the dream of transforming the culture of violence and destruction that has dominated Sri Lankan society for more than a generation with one of compassion and creativity. While different methods are employed in the centres dedicated to adults and those that serve children, the main concern is a wish to awaken the original heart, and to encourage people to open up to the creative engagement that is available for them in this world. The idea of discovering one’s originality in the company of others who may formerly have been foes is central to the healing paradigm of the garden path. The means that we use to accomplish this is storytelling and story creation. What I am going to talk about mostly here is story creation; that is a very important tool in the garden, in making up the stories and fables based on animals. The biographical details of their life are not what we are looking for, primarily, in the Butterfly Garden.
So speaking about the story ground of the garden: the creative flow of the garden as it intermingles with the grim reality in which it is embedded is the matrix of its poesis. This is a field of paradox, and to engage it in a beneficial way requires more than passive presence: it must be a generative presence involving concentration and considerable intellectual discipline on the part of the animators of the garden. These animators know only too well the oppression of living in a militarised society, having grown up there themselves. But through the same practices of the garden path, they tap into a countervailing stream of images and stories which nourish and replenish the soul. So there is a practice in the garden: quite an elaborate practice, which the animators learn and have learned, and actually formed themselves over years of working with the children. This is what we call the seed practice of the garden: it’s quite elaborate, but there is a structure, and within the structure it’s completely free for the kids and the structure is largely something that gives the animators a common purpose, a map they are following.
They share the stories they find through following this process of the garden path, and elucidate various means they use to uncover these stories within themselves. The animators encourage children to open up and to share what they know, and indeed at a deeper level to reveal who they are and to fearlessly be who they are. These garden stories are exchanged in a variety of ways; some as straightforward as telling an imaginative tale found in the day’s play, or sharing a personal tale with an animator in the ‘cuckoo’s world’ which is a part of the garden set aside for one-to-one interaction. So there is a space in the garden where kids do tell their biographical stories to counsellors: animators too are trained in accompaniment counselling. But more often these stories are told in costume: in mask, theatre; music; song, dance, painting, performance, games, ritual and ritual games; all of which are original. They make up everything: the songs they make up, the stories they make up, the costumes they design. These might be built with artists: all the animators are artists, so that sometimes when kids can’t actually do some of the things that they think up, they are helped in this process by the artists.
This interaction is playfully spontaneous but what rises to the surface in these exchanges, whether between the children themselves or between adults or between adults and children, is a sense of their own agency and ability to experience and engage with a radically altered way of being in the world – quite different from that other side which is very subservient, very oppressed, very obedient.
Some of the impacts, the altered ways of being that we encourage in the garden is that they experience a shared sense of beginning again. Very often in Batticaloa, because of the war, and because of the tsunami, we have experienced everything being broken, and that was a policy decision of the military to break people’s lives. How do you inspire a sense of courage and perseverance in kids? This idea of beginning again is something that we encourage and I can give examples of that. We encourage the children to find a way to enjoy the experience of their own originality. They witness and delight in the originality of others within their own group or on the other side. They think and act for themselves instead of passively following orders of others and accepting their lot as given. They find beauty, and they can see beauty, and be able to create beauty around themselves in spite of the desolation that they may experience. They make friendships with people who are different from themselves, children who are different from themselves. They make bridges between broken and isolated parts of themselves and their communities. They develop and nurture an environment of compassion, not only for other humans but for all beings: there are a lot of animals in the garden. They take care of the garden, of all the flowers and the different animals that live there. They become more comfortable with uncertainty, change and states of insecurity. They see through difficulties and see difficulties through to a deeper sense of meaning and mission rooted in compassion. In a word, in the garden, the children discover the reciprocity of the garden and it gives them
what they need to realise its gifts and then share them with one another and with their community. With this new- found ability to engage these healing aspects of themselves on behalf of the community, they no longer need to be victims of scripts written by others, scripts which are inevitably exclusionary, one-sided, and self- serving.
The new stories that the children find in the garden include children of other faiths, traditions, and ethnicities, and these new stories include difference, and they celebrate diversity. Right now, in Batticaloa and in the Trinco areas of Sri Lanka there is supposed to be a whole policy of reconciliation but in fact nothing much has happened and what they are seeing is quite the reverse; so the government is very authoritarian and its aims are not to encourage reconciliation although they use the language of it very often. So this whole thing about duplicity came out in the garden recently when the children found a white crow. A white crow, as you may or may not know, if you release it, is destroyed by the black crows. So they had to keep it in a cage. They had a choice of either the bird dying or keeping it in a cage, so they made a very big cage that goes through the trees and has two snake heads at either end. He lives in there, that white crow with a black crow. They’re friends, and they live at either end of this duplicitous arrangement that they have. And they made an opera about this bird.