Joanna Macy

Last week I received a special present. Ulli, a dance therapist who is assisting me for several years in different workshops, gave it to me as a sign of gratitude. She also has been in my evenig classes of WTR in July. She knows the story of the elm dance since 2 years. Being assistant is always a much sought-after job, so she was thinking about a very special sign of "thank you".

This year she got the idea and asked her Dad to work for her. Ulli?s Dad is retired and had severe surgeries because of cancer. Ulli is always worried about him. His profession is carpenter. Ulli told him the elm dance story and asked him to make a bowl of elm wood for me. It is not so easy to find applicable elm wood, so Dad started in autumn to work on the bowl, when he finally had got the wood. He owns a special turning lathe, which runs foot-operatedly. He saved this precious turning lathe, when he had to flee from East Germany to the south in the last days of the second world war. So he was turning the wood when suddenly the lathe was blocked. He paused and looked. A small pea-sized piece of metal had stopped the lathe. He realized: the part of elm wood, he had found for the bowl, had been "injured" by this metal. He had worked with a "hurt tree". Inside the tree was the violation. He went on turning the wood and "healed" the injury. He made a wonderful bowl and he took the metal piece and put it into a small black pouch of leather for me. He was very touched because something like this had never happened to him before.

Coming home with this beautiful wooden bowl, my husband, who is a blacksmith, immediately recognized what the pea-sized silvery glimmering metal was: a shell splinter. Most likely from second world war. It had waited within the elm tree for a long time to be cut, to be discovered, to speak about war and to be healed by turning and turning. Ulli did not know anything about my kind of despair work in the Intensive in August this year. And she did not know about my challenging time in autumn with a long time of disease, "desintegration" and emptiness. In a jiffy I knew what this bowl is for: It will be the center of each elm dance I will dance in future. And it will be the symbol of expressing emptiness in the truth mandala. I hope that many people will hold this bowl in their hands and realize: emptiness can be filled.

Dear Joanna, this year 2009 was not an easy one. I did a lot of despair work: I had a very challenging time of "burn out" with the basic feeling of "emptiness". This bowl is like the essence of this year. After such a lot of "despair work" the "seeing with new eyes" will take place: Healing is possible, if you face reality - the fact of war and all other disasters of mankind - and if you go on turning, turning yourself to new dimensions, new insights, new ways. This is how it goes in the great turning!

Barbara Hundshammer as shared with Joanna