I’m in Peru with 100 clowns at the annual Belen Festival; a community health project now in its ninth year. We clown in the streets, hospitals, a prison, shelters, old-age homes and orphanages, and we offer children’s workshops (puppetry, percussion, theater, circus arts, gymnastics, dance), perform health promotion skits, paint murals, and support local service agencies.
We also conducted mental-health clinics in the streets with clown/health professionals, where we talk to people in school yards, loading docks, shelters, and marketplaces… listening to anybody who wants to talk. I’ve described these street clinics in detail ( http://www.clinicalpsychiatrynews.com/index.php?id=2407&cHash=071010&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=138185 ), and this year we added a new dimension.
My friend Dario is not a health professional; he is an extraordinary, openhearted Gesundheit! Clown who spreads his loving energy to people all over the world. Dario asked me what I thought about him coming along to the clinics to do his healing work. He wanted to sit face to face with people looking them in the eye and opening his heart to them in complete silence.
My initial response was one of uncertainty; I knew Dario’s power to connect with people at a soul level, but I also thought maybe it was a little to woo-woo and might scare people away. However, we are all clowns, and it is our function to stretch limits, provide new ways of seeing, lift the mood, share a unique perspective, tell stories, offer wisdom and humor, so we tried it out. Dario put up a sign on the back of the chair that read
Prueba una
MIRADOR DE AMOR
Toma asiento, por favor
Try a
LOOK OF LOVE
Please have a seat
While the patients were signing in, I thought I’d share the experience and sat looking into Dario’s eyes. It didn’t take a minute before I started talking. This is what I do, I am a storyteller, words are my medium of expression, but Dario remained silent.
While I’m talking I saw his eyes water, and told him that seeing his tears reminded me how difficult it was for me to cry publicly. I told him a Native American wisdom story that if someone cried in front of you, it was customary to say thank you, because they were speaking the truth from their heart, and doing it for all of us who have trouble doing it for ourselves. While I’m flapping, I feel my tears and that’s when I finally stopped talking. We looked each other in the eye in silence for a long time, and his loving heart opened mine.
Dario saw adults and kids at every clinic, and many were as touched as I was.
Carl, Your story about Dario lit a familiar flame for me. As a quick-sketch portrait/caricature artist, I’ve gazed into many thousands of sets of eyes. Some people feel nervous and start to talk and share what they may later decide was too much. A few are unable to maintain eye contact at all. Others feel very calm inside, and on and on. It’s one of the best parts of my job – that unspoken communication. Something always happens when strangers gaze into each other’s eyes in silence. I would love to gaze into Dario’s eyes.
Barbara
You would enjoy each others amazing glow, :O)
Wonderful account!
It reminds me of a book (fiction) I read …maybe 35 years ago. “The Listener” by Taylor Caldwell. In it, there was a single-roomed structure built in a community. A simple sign invited persons to come in one at a time and stay as long as they like. Inside they found a chair facing a curtain. And that is all. The story progressed by describing the visits of several people and their paths, inside that room, to finally come to a place of quietness. All left, meeting and physically hearing no one, yet feeling they had heard something profound and life changing.
One of the few books that have “stayed with” me over the years.
Thank you, Father, for my tears of joy on hearing your story! Love you!
What a wonderful story and what a wonderful offering Dano makes! And I’m glad you opened to his sharing.
I love you, my dearest SoulFather. My love is flowing out of my heart embraced in tears in this very moment – because I’m full of it – because your existence, your presence in my life fill me up every moment we are together in spirit. Thank you.
I’m finally starting to process what happened during these last months and weeks, so more words to come.
Ti amo. =)