As some of you may have realized, I chose to forgo a Sculpture of the Month in December in order to focus on the launch of my new book of sculpture and ekphrastic poetry with poet Cheryl Latif. I hope by now you’ve had a chance to purchase a copy of Reflexions: Sculpture & Poetry or gift one to your friends to inspire them in the new year!
The poems in the book, many written during the height of the Covid shutdown, have a consistently positive, uplifting focus. I feel proud to share this positivity with the world at the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024.
Especially since, entering this new year, we face some of the worst in humanity with the wars in Ukraine and Israel/Gaza. So, for the first Sculpture of Month in 2024, I decided to focus on the potential for soldiers themselves to become a source of lasting peace.
Warrior Opens His Heart
The war in Ukraine continues unabated, with Russia perpetrating horrible war crimes against children & civilians. And now, we’ve become witnesses to another war in Israel and Gaza, with the enormous inhumanity of the initial attack by Hamas, followed by a brutal response from Israel which has killed tens of thousands more civilians than the initial attack.
It strikes me that the these crimes against humanity devolve directly from the actions of soldiers. Although dedicated to ideals they consider worth killing for, to actually do their job, soldiers must shut off all caring for those they’re ordered to kill. This approach often carries over into the relationships of soldiers after the war, when they no longer feel able to relate to others — or even themselves — with love and compassion.
Warrior Opens His Heart comes from my “Rosecrans” series of sculptures, which are based on sketches I created while sitting next to the graves of soldiers who died in our wars while asking them: “How do we get past war?”
As I wrote in my original Rosecrans blog commentary on this piece:
Gandhi understood, it is only when the warrior opens his heart that it is possible to break this [zero sum] dynamic [and change] the connection between warring parties from a self-serving one to a common problem to be solved together.
With this in mind, I pray for such a transformation in consciousness among the soldier-leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Palestine, and Israel. May they realize that might does not make right, but instead, causes the violent de-humanization of all involved. May the soldiers open their hearts.
