The Cosmic Dance
The theme of this year's How Weird Street Faire is Bollyweird: The Cosmic Dance.
The Cosmic Dance represents the movement of the universe, from the galaxies and planets, to all life, to subatomic particles.
According to Hindi mythology, Shiva is the Cosmic Dancer who performs his divine dance to continue the unfolding of all existence, and create harmony in the universe. The Cosmic Dance of Shiva is called “Ananda Tandava”, meaning the Dance of Bliss. It symbolizes the cosmic cycles of creation and destruction, as well as the daily rhythm of night and day.
"Dancing is an art in which the artist and the art created are one and the same, thought to evoke the oneness of God and creation." Explains Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy in "The Dance of Siva". Shiva's dance is "the clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of."
According to Fritzof Capra, “the Dance of Shiva symbolizes the basis of all existence. At the same time, Shiva reminds us that the manifold forms in the world are not fundamental, but illusory and ever-changing. Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter."
"According to quantum field theory, the dance of creation and destruction is the basis of the very existence of matter. Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction. For the modern physicists then, Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter, the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomena.”
In a spirit of cross-cultural appreciation, this year's How Weird Street Faire will feature music and art from India and beyond. The faire will end with our version of the “Cosmic Dance”. We will attempt to break the world’s record for the Largest Bollywood Dance, a tribute to Bollywood’s role as the largest film genre in the world.
This year's center intersection, the faire's legendary urban crop circle, with feature a Temple to Shiva and the Cosmic Dance. In the middle will be a two meter tall statue of Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of Dance.
On June 18, 2004, a two meter tall statue of the Indian deity Shiva Nataraja, was unveiled at CERN, the European Center for Research in Particle Physics in Geneva. The statue was given to CERN by the Indian government to celebrate the research center's long association with India.
In choosing the image of Shiva Nataraja, the Indian government acknowledged the profound significance of the metaphor of Shiva's dance for the cosmic dance of subatomic particles, which is observed and analyzed by CERN's physicists. CERN represents the cutting edge of technology, from creating the World Wide Web, to operating the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest scientific experiment.
The plaque on the statue concludes with a quote from Fritjof Capra, "Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our time, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art, and modern physics."
Raising our consciousness and understanding leads to peace.
Shiva's dance at CERN, a global center of technological innovation...
Mother's Day and Peace
Mother's Day has its origins as a peace holiday, so it's appropriate that this year's How Weird Street Faire (a peace celebration) occurs on Mother's Day. It is also fitting that the 10th annual How Weird Street Faire was on May 10th last year, as the first formal Mother's Day was also observed on May 10th.
The history of Mother's Day is rooted in peace. In 1858, Ann Jarvis, a young mother from West Virginia, started organizing Mother's Work Days. These were initially focused on improving sanitary conditions. After the Civil War, they focused on reconciling former enemies of the Union and Confederacy, and honoring mothers who had lost family in the war.
Inspired by the work of Ann Jarvis, and the traditional British day of Mothering Sunday, social activist Julia Ward Howe championed the cause of a national day for mothers, to unite women against war. Jarvis was popular at the time as the author of the words to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic". She was horrified by the death and suffering of war, especially the recent Civil War and Franco-Prussian War. In 1870, she wrote the Mother's Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament. By 1873, women in 18 cities across America celebrated Mother's Day for Peace. While Julia Ward Howe failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace, she sowed the seeds of a national day for mothers.
When Ann Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter Anna Jarvis took over the task of creating a memorial day for mothers. The first Mother's Day service was celebrated on May 10, 1908 at the Grafton, West Virginia church where Anna's mother had taught Sunday School. The holiday was intended to be a sacred day. It quickly caught on and spread throughout the country. In 1912, West Virginia became the first state to make it an official holiday. And then on May 8, 1914, the U.S. Congress passed a law designating the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day. President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother's Day in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.
Unfortunately, the holiday was soon coopted by commercialization. Anna Jarvis was devastated, and spent all her inheritance and the rest of her life fighting what she saw as an abuse of the sacred celebration. She stated at one point that she "wished she would have never started the day because it became so out of control." Well, now it's time to take back Mother's Day for peace.
From the words of Julis Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation...
"From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: 'Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.' Blood does not wipe our dishonor, nor violence indicate possession."
So in honor of all mothers, and all those affected by war, we gather in peace.
(Mothers Day for Peace)
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Code For A Cause
The World Peace Through Technology Organization recently affiliated with a technology user group, the Chicago Drupal Meet Up Group (CDMUG), to help inspire community-building and world peace through advanced technological tools.
The Chicago Drupal Meet Up Group organized Drupal Camp Chicago's (DCC) educational and philanthropic activities. Drupal Camp Chicago was held October 24-25, 2008, with over 180 attendees. The program included the second Code for a Cause event.
Code for a Cause (C4aC) volunteers work in small teams on specific real-world applications, addressing identified needs within the non-profit community. Projects are led by CTC staff that have years of experience working on non-profit technology projects. C4aC creates innovative applications for non-profit organizations that would have difficulty funding such robust projects by themselves.
Code for a Cause is a Chicago Technology Cooperative (CTC) project that brings together volunteer web developers and designers to build sophisticated social web sites and applications for small non-profit organizations, using the Drupal content management system and other free and open source software.
Drupal is a leading open source content management system, which allows anyone to create and organize online communities with no programming expertise. In fact, the World Peace Through Technology Organization web site (peacetour.org) is built with Drupal.
During Drupal Camp Chicago, Code for a Cause volunteers built a prototype website for Skoolade.org, an online repository of educational resources for parents and teachers working with students with autism. The site allows users to upload, categorize, rate, and share autism resources.
The inaugural Code for a Cause event was held in conjunction with the 2008 Flourish Conference at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Code for a Cause Hack-a-thon was a two day coding sprint where Flourish attendees had the opportunity to contribute to small development projects to create applications for local non-profit organizations and community groups.
The event was extremely successful with approximately two dozen active participants and another 50-60 observers who visited the Hack-a-thon to learn more about the use of open source software in the non-profit/volunteer sector. The participants developed an online homeless shelter search for Chicago, a prototype website for a non-profit organization called Green World Campaign, an online survey management and reporting tool, and a screen scraping tool for website migrations.
The World Peace Through Technology Organization is excited to be working with the Chicago Drupal Meet Up Group and supporting Code for a Cause. We hope to bring some events to the west coast soon.
How Weird Street Faire CD Vol. 1
The How Weird Street Faire CD Vol. 1 was produced in 2003 from songs provided by artists who have played at the Faire. The album is a diverse collection of electronic music, with the intention of inspiring peace.
01. Om Tare Tu Tare - by Irina Mikhailova & Todd Christensen
02. Let The Rumpus Begin - by Adam & Eve
04. Give Peace A Trance - by Quasar
07. Biomagnetic Podes - by Biodegradable
08. Fortuna (4:20 Myx) - by Kode IV
09. Green Shake - by Waterjuice
10. Ananda Enchanted - by Bassnectar
Feel free to listen to the songs or download them. If you want to give thanks, please support the individual artists and the WPTTO. We want to thank all of the talented and creative artists who have shared their work with the world. Art is a very effective way to communicate, teach, and inspire.
The album is licensed through Creative Commons.
Use requires: Attribution, Non-Commercial Application, and Share Alike Licensing.
