World Wheel: Theater Of The Earth

Vijali is a wonderful healing artist whose life and work heals, herself, others, and the earth, at once. Her work is deeply spiritual and is without separation from Her. We will build a site that encourages Vijali�s work to expand and brings you into it as much as you wish. She is making a new world wheel for the Millenium that needs all of our help to continue. She also visualizes people embodying her first wheel to make it alive as the second wheel will turn. This site will post her plans for her second wheel and how you can join her, and how we can embody her first wheel again. Art As A Healing Force is proud to be part of Vijali�s beautiful work.

Her work, the World Wheel, in her own words �is an artistic forum for global understanding consisting of twelve monumental stone sculptures and ceremony performance events circling the globe on the 35th latitudinal parallel. It focuses on spiritual ecological issues activating an awareness of the interrelatedness of all life. Through active participation with local artists, performers, and the community, World Wheel addresses the people�s deepest personal and social concerns, working creatively with them to resolve cultural conflicts. World Wheel provides a transformative experience for the community.

The first turning of the Wheel took seven years beginning in Malibu, California, and continued on to the Seneca Reservation, New York�Alicante on the Mediterranean Sea of Spain�the Umbrian Forest of Italy�the island of Tinos in Greece�the desert of Egypt�the banks of the Dead Sea in Israel and Palestine�a tiny village in West Bengal, India�a cave in Shoto Terdrom, Tibet�a national park in Kunming, Western China�on the banks of Lake Baikal, Siberia. In October of 1993, the culmination of this journey was in Japan at the ancient Shinto shrine of Tenkawa.

The motivation for theWorld Wheel came from an experience in the mid-�70s when my perception of ourselves and the world shifted, and the Unity of life stood revealed. The next few years were a search for a way to live within this web of life that connects all life. Specific ideas for the World Wheel came to me in a dream; I saw myself carving sculptures out of the living rock and involving people from many cultures in a process of ritual in a giant circle around the world. The circle itself represents Unity in the sense that each spoke of the wheel has a quality that is unique, distinct from every other spoke of the wheel, and yet it is from these differences that harmony arises, from these differences that the whole is created.

As soon as I arrive in a country, I ask each person I meet, three questions:

1. What is our essence? 2. What is our sickness, our imbalance�.personally, communally, and globally? 3. What can heal this sickness, what can bring us into balance?

Their response to these questions forms the art and ritual performance. Each earth sculpture serves as the performance space and is left as a gift and permanent installation to be used by the community, continuing to connect them to the concept of Unity of the World Wheel.

The world became my studio. I was a pilgrim who made offerings and gave voice and form to the spirit of the earth and the people I met along the way. I kept expanding the borders of what sculpture was, what art was, integrating it more and more into life itself�the people around me; their problems their hopes, their dreams of the future. I saw that at the root of these problems is the misunderstanding of ourselves as separate, isolated beings needing to exploit the earth and each other for our gain. This dualistic way of thinking is the direct cause of our ecological and social problems which are rapidly leading us toward global disaster.