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An Interview with Gwen Gordon by Randy Peyser "...A man was reading a newspaper when his daughter came over to play. He wanted to keep reading, so he tore out a section of the paper that had a picture of the earth on it and gave it to his daughter to put together. A few minutes later, she came back with the whole picture assembled. Surprised by her speed, he asked, "How did you put it together so fast?" And she said, "On the other side of the picture of the earth, there was a picture of a person, and when the person came together, the world came together." What do a former Nazi, an Auschwitz concentration camp survivor, a gang member, the Nobel Prize Laureate who discovered plutonium, a Hiroshima survivor, a circle of men who are HIV positive, 1250 children from 42 countries, and members of numerous corporations all have in common? They have all participated in an experience called, "The Big Picture Puzzle," a process involving a giant puzzle featuring the image of the earth as viewed from space, on which are expressed the life stories of individuals from every facet of society, from all over the world. Created by Gwen Gordon, "The Big Picture Puzzle" empowers people to apply their gifts individually and collectively toward their visions of a healthy world. "Each individual gets a piece of the puzzle to represent who they are as a whole, what they bring to the world that nobody else can bring in quite the same way, and what their unique gifts and essential contributions are. When completed, the pieces join together into the image of the earth, revealing our inherent unity and mutual destiny as part of a single living system." RP: How did the Big Picture Puzzle come into being? GG: I was producing media for children with AIDS when my work was interrupted by the start of the Gulf War. I became involved with a group protesting the war. While involved with this community of protestors, I experienced an incredible sense of bonding and belonging through the strength of our shared purpose. I had never felt this sense of belonging before. Up until this time, community wasn't even part of my imagination. I was a first-generation American doing the rugged individual trip and didn't even know what community was. Reflecting on this experience, I thought, "Well maybe this very core and beautiful human need, this sense of belonging, is at the root of the war itself; maybe we create communities over common enemies because we need communities so badly. We construe communities so we belong and they don't." Reflecting further, I thought, "Well, perhaps we, as protestors of the war, were as dependent on the war for our sense of community as those supporting the war." That thought stopped me in my tracks. I asked myself a question, "What is the basis for community that is completely inclusive and creative instead of exclusive and destructive?" I was inspired by the Names Project AIDS Quilt as a collection of soulful stories told through people's own artwork. All their individuality was expressed within the context of a larger whole. But it was a community created over shared grief, over the loss of a loved one. I thought there might be the possibility of creating community through shared joy, by showing how our lives depend on each other and how we are all deeply, deeply interconnected. I had the vision of the earth as a huge puzzle with every piece representing a different individual including presidents, prisoners, nobel prize laureates, people living with AIDS, and every single piece was the same size and equally integral to the whole. I saw each piece as a complete work of art, with the unique and essential contributions of each person expressed in different media from sculpture to photographs, to collage and poetry. The image of The Big Picture Puzzle touched a longing in me. I really didn't know what to do with it, and I felt miniscule next to it. So I just put it aside and realized I wanted to deepen my connection to what would be the source of the work, and also continue in my inquiry about community. So I went to live at Kripalu, an ashram in Massachusetts, and became a student of community for two years. During that time, the puzzle vision re-emerged emphatically, so I did my first one at Kripalu. Then I received National Endowment For The Arts funding for a prison arts program in New Hampshire, and then The Big Picture Puzzle just took off. RP: How did you work with the puzzle in the prison? GG: It was a month long program in which the prisoners got to explore their lives and discover their gifts. They were in prison because they were seen as a problem and they also saw themselves as problems. This was the first opportunity they had to look at their lives for things they could be proud of, to find ways in which they contributed. Stories and oral history were an integral part. They learned to listen to and interview each other, and to draw out the stories that each person had. Then they each created something on their puzzle piece that they could be proud of. They saw themselves connected to a larger community in new ways. For them, seeing themselves as part of the world wasn't very obvious. Many didn't even want to be a part of the world. This was a chance for them to find something they could feel good about being a part of. There was one boy in the prison who was a gang member. He started talking to me about tatoos and I was really interested. He said, "You know, this is the first time anyone's been interested in something I know something about." On his puzzle piece he did a drawing of a tattoo and it had prison bars and a key hole. When I asked him about it, he said, "This is the keyhole to unlock all the hearts of my homeboys, because we're there for each other and nobody else is." That was something he could be proud of. It was something he cared about. Whatever we think about it, there are still some beautiful values in there. This was his contribution to the world, both his art and what it represented to him. He felt this was the first time he was heard and appreciated. His tattoos originally got him into prison and this was a chance for him to have his expression received and not controlled in any way. After the prison experience, I moved to California and immediately worked on The Earth Day and United Nations 50th Anniversary Puzzle. This turned out to be the basis for The Global Community Puzzle, which is the puzzle that was mounted by 1250 children from 42 countries. Each child wrote their message describing the world they want to inherit on the back of each piece, and those pieces came together from all over the world on Earth Day and linked the wishes of the children with the life of the earth. These same pieces are being distributed to people from the full spectrum of diversity, ranging from former Nazis to Auschwitz concentration camp survivors, to fundamentalists, to gay families. I am particularly interested in reaching groups that are polarized. As each person works with the face of the earth, they read the child's wishes, see the image of the earth, and then add their own contribution, their unique stories, beliefs, cultures, and images to the face of the earth as well. This is a work in progress which keeps growing with more and more stories continuing to be added, until it will be a traveling exhibit in the year 2000. RP: What are some of the things the children wished for? GG: A fifteen-year-old-girl wrote, "What would the world be like if no whales flipped their tails, and the ocean wasn't blue? And what would you do if the trees were no more and the air was unbreathable? Wouldn't you miss the flight of an eagle and the rising of the sun? Who would you be if these things were gone? Please save the earth before there isn't one." One little girl said, "My wish is for no animals to be tested on toothpaste or anything else. Why don't we use humans? Animals may not have as much control, but it's not nice." A nine-year-old boy wrote, "We all live under the same sky, stars and sun. Why do we have to keep fighting each other? Why can't we live in peace?" RP: What was it like to have two polarized groups working on the same puzzle? GG: There have been some very powerful moments. Kumi McGeoy, a Hiroshima survivor, met and spoke with Dr. Glenn Seaborg, the 1951 Nobel Prize Laureate for chemistry who co-discovered plutonium. They both contributed to the puzzle and shared their stories together. In hearing each other's stories, their own stories changed. The atom bomb survivor got to hear some of the discoveries that have been made as a result of Dr. Seaborg's work that are truly life-affirming and life-advancing, ways in which some of the trans-uranium elements Dr. Seaborg co-discovered are helping people. The Hiroshima survivor started to see that Dr. Seaborg was a person who had committed most of his life to peace, and for Dr. Seaborg, this was the very first time he had ever been interviewed with a Hiroshima survivor. It was pretty powerful for both of them. RP: Are the puzzle pieces different shapes? GG: The pieces of the puzzle are all hexagonal. They are the shape of a cell. The hexagon reflects the way that objects group in nature, from a honeycomb, to the carbon molecule, to the cellulose in the core of a giant redwood. A hexagon is the shape that allows different elements to work in concert. Just as our muscle cells work together to create movement, individuals work together to create a social movement. The health of the entire organism depends on the full expression of the difference of the cells. It is the same thing with a social organism or group. The health of a group has to do with how much difference it can hold. How much difference gets expressed really serves the vitality and the growth of the group. The puzzle is not just about teaching tolerance; it is a statement about how essential diversity is and how our self-expression is not a luxury. Our groups and our society actually depend on it. Our survival depends on it. RP: Can you give an example of a group that you might customize a puzzle for and how that works? We've created puzzles in communities ranging from the ashram to the prison, to corporations, to healing circles, to schools, churches, and groups of all kinds. We start by customizing the puzzle, so there are the same number of pieces as there are members in the community. Now we're also starting to create puzzles larger than the community so that non-human species can be represented as well. The process links the wholeness of the individual to the health of the community and to the life of the entire living system. We get to see how we can look at ourselves as communities and ask, "What does it mean to be a healthy community within ourselves? And what does it mean to belong to a healthy community? What needs to be there? What voices need to be heard? How do we relate to the entire natural world in a way that creates a healthy living system?" I worked with an HIV+ community, and one of the members, whose partner has a little girl, made a piece representing his new family. He said it meant a lot to him to be able to put his gay family on the puzzle, and in the world. So often gay people don't feel like there is room for them. It was empowering for him to claim his space in the world. RP: What are you working on with corporate clients? GG: We're developing a tool that will help corporations use The Big Picture Puzzle to see their corporation as a community and to ask the question, "What is a healthy community?" Why do we want one? The Big Picture Puzzle helps create a culture in which people can bring more of themselves to their work environment. Using the puzzle, people look at what it means to be authentic in the workplace. We look at what is meaningful for each individual, and how that part that is longing to live life, that engages our deepest sense of meaning and utilizes our gifts, can be expressed in the workplace. We are also doing puzzle exchange programs, for example, where a corporation creates a puzzle experience and mounts the puzzle pieces for a residential at-risk youth center. Each person participating from the corporation thinks of what they would say to a teenager in trouble. Then they get to give that gift to that group. This helps individuals within corporations begin to form more personal connections to a larger sense of community. Then we expand that to include the entire natural world. When we look at the larger sense of community, connecting all our puzzle pieces in the image of the earth expands our sense of individual identity to include the natural world, so that caring for all of life is a natural part of our own care. The puzzle starts to generate the interest in what it means to live in the world in a way that honors all of life and our connection to it. We look at practices that make our workplace sustainable. We start to engage some of the kind of thinking that asks, "How can our business be part of a healthy world? How can we live in harmony?" RP: How has The Big Picture Puzzle affected you? GG: I'm changed by every single experience. What is amazing to me is that every group I imagine is separate from me, the puzzle has brought me into contact with. I've worked with Vietnam vets suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and it looks like we'll be working with the CIA. These are people I would have no other reason to meet, and who are a part of my world and a part of me. In listening to their stories and working with them around the puzzle, I feel like I'm retrieving my own wholeness. There are groups in the world that get cut off by our culture, and when I remember them and begin to include them, I become more whole. We cut off groups and individuals in the world that represent some sort of shadow, like the prisoners and the Vietnam vets. It's scary to care about them. It's scary to listen to their stories and really open my heart and realize that this is a part of me, that we're not separate, because my heart truly breaks. I start to care about people whose lives may not work out. What I realize is in that pain of my heart breaking for lives that are struggling, for people who are bent and hurt, that when I allow myself to feel that pain, I feel incredible hope, because it shows that we aren't that separate. Almost every night in the prison I would cry. It was incredibly hard. The reason it hurt is because we're not separate. In remembering and feeling that we are not separate, I feel a tremendous sense of strength and courage and authority to the work of The Big Picture Puzzle on behalf of all the voices. RP: What are your future plans? GG: The vision for the work that we're doing is that The Global Community Puzzle will be a traveling exhibit in the year 2000, with accompanying documentation of the stories behind each of the pieces. It will be traveling to communities, particularly those that are in areas of conflict, to make it more poignantly clear just how interconnected we are and to support any peace efforts through conflict resolution processes going on in that area. We will also work with communities. We would like to go to the Gaza Strip in Israel. There is a school there called Neve Shalom, where the students are both Palestinian and Israeli. We may also go to South Africa. With all the diverse populations represented in South Africa, The Global Community Puzzle would really make tangible the vision they have for their culture and their emerging society. RP: Is there anything you need in order to continue this work? GG: This whole program has been possible due to the generosity of organizations offering in-kind services and the efforts of hundreds of volunteers. We are a grass-roots organization that has become a runaway business as a result of a recent article, and we need help in the form of business direction. We also need start-up funds in order to become self-sustaining. RP: How can people access your work? We've been overwhelmed by calls from teachers, ministers, corrections officers, girl scouts, and community groups from all over the country requesting Big Picture Puzzle Kits, which we're now offering. The kits range from 32 to 350 pieces with a facilitation guide which allows people to create their own Big Picture Puzzle experience. The facilitation guide offers activities and a way to do the puzzle that helps build community, fosters an appreciation of diversity, inspires creativity, and deepens our understanding and appreciation for ecology, and our connection to the natural world. People can also order a video that documents the past three years of puzzle-making through the stories of participants. It's very touching and powerful. "The Big Picture Puzzle seems to tap into both the collective and personal longing that we have at this particular time in our history. The puzzle process touches a longing in our hearts to know ourselves as whole and part of this sacred web."
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