Ceremony Afterglow

Photo: Don Sorsa

WE INVITE YOU TO POST

YOUR REACTIONS, REFLECTIONS, LINKS, AND PHOTOS

TO SHARE WITH ALL WHO GATHERED

AT PROSTRATIONS FOR PEACE

IN BODY AND SPIRIT.

Organizer Don Sorsa's beautiful photography.

Photo: Don Sorsa

Contributor Tracey Ostrand's photos.

Organizer Jessie Tierney's photos.

Join Us Now for the After-Ceremony Celebration at Heartland Cafe

Join us now at the Heartland Cafe (7000 N. Glenwood) for an after-ceremony celebration honoring Emergency USA.







(PHOTO: Michael McColly bangs the 1,579th gong of the celebration, commemorating the 1,579th day of the War in Iraq -- today, July 15, 2007)

Today on Chicago's North Shore Beach, Rogers Park

We're on the small pier right now, performing sun salutations, prostrations, and bows. Meditating. Offering prayers. Making peace flags. Building an altar of flowers notes, incense, candles.

And striking a gong for each day of the War in Iraq -- 1,579 days total.

We are here till sunset.

Please join us afterward for a celebration at the Heartland Cafe (Glenwood and Lunt) for Emergency USA, a humanitarian, neutral, non-profit organization that provides high-quality treatment, surgery, and rehabilitation to civilians in war and post-war areas around the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan. Emergency also trains medical and non-medical personnel in these areas.

MAP and DIRECTIONS

HOW TO GET TO

PROSTRATIONS FOR PEACE

North Shore Beach (aka Pratt, aka Peace) pier

We encourage you to carpool if you must drive, as there may be a limited number of parking spaces on Sheridan Road and along side roads. See our map at GoogleMaps to search for directions.

If you are coming from the suburbs, you may use the Metra or Amtrak rail systems, hop on the Red line North toward Howard, and exit at the Loyola stop. You'll find Prostrations for Peace across Sheridan on the beach.

If you live in Chicago, we encourage you to use public transportation by going to the CTA's Trip Planner.

Prostrations For Peace is located off North Shore Avenue (1055 W North Shore Ave, Chicago IL 60626) on the small pier.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any additional questions. 773.362.9362 -or- 312.413.9013 michaelmccolly@hotmail.com

After the ceremony, there will be a party held at Heartland Cafe,

7000 N Glenwood Ave, just a few blocks from Prostrations for Peace.

Download Fliers and Spread the Word

The fliers posted around Chicago are spreading the word nicely about the July 15 ceremony.

Please click the links below to download PDFs of the fliers and distribute them in your neighborhood or city:

PDF: Prostrations flier (with tear-off address strips)
PDF: Prostrations flier (color version)

Thanks!

Calendar for Prostrations for Peace

ORGANIZATIONAL MEETING
Thursday, July 12, 2007, 6:30 p.m., at North Shore Pier, then moving to Heartland Cafe (7000 N. Glenwood, corner of Lunt and Glenwood)


PEACE CEREMONY
Sunday, July 15, 2007, from 5:00 a.m. (sunrise) to Sunset

AFTER CEREMONY:
CELEBRATION FOR PROSTRATIONS AND EMERGENCY
Sunday, July 15, 2007, 8:00 p.m., at Heartland Cafe

The Birth of Prostrations For Peace

Next week I will reach that milestone of adulthood and turn fifty. How and why a day on a calendar has come to have such psychological and almost spiritual significance, I’m not sure. Most people in the world don’t even live to fifty nor have the time or money to consider making a to-do about it. I’m HIV +, and I remember that I didn’t even think I’d turn 40, but here it is.

When my sister turned 50 two years ago, my brother-in-law had a big party for her. It was a joyous and raucous evening, friends and family coming from afar, toasts by her children, gag gifts, funny then emotional speeches. I was happy for her, but inside I dreaded the whole idea that in a year it would be my turn.

As the months passed, the date loomed, and I had no plans, no money to travel, which is usually my way out of all birthdays and holidays as a single man.

Then, Memorial Day came. I was sitting on the pier off of North Shore Beach in Roger’s Park, which is where I spend almost every morning doing yoga or resting after taking a long swim. I was feeling energized and grateful for this beach and the lake and my neighbors I see out here everyday. Over the years no matter where I have lived in Chicago, the lakefront has always been a sort of refuge for me in difficult times. Often it’s not so much the wide span of blue that changes my mood but watching the effect it has on other people’s bodies, especially children and older people.


Later, that day I read through the headlines of the suicide bombs exploding and saw the photos of the shrieking Iraqi women with their hands to their mouths. On TV, there was more of the same as well as the now familiar scroll of American dead, most all under the age of twenty-five and from unknown towns across America. Then I saw the name of a town in Indiana not far from where I grew up, where old aunts and uncles still live. And a rage came over me and all at once I’m feeling the awkwardness of my birthday and my loneliness and all of my problems begin to feel like bombs exploding now inside of me.

Once again, the news from the war has sucked out the sunny day and the buoyancy in my body.

That night walking along the lake one more time with the families and the couples strolling along the beach, I had an idea—a crazy idea.

Why not use this day to have another kind of ceremony? Why not invite my friends and family, all my neighbors, and, in fact the whole city of Chicago to this beach where I seem best able to cope? Why not invite them to confront with me the suffering of this war? Why not ask them to come and create a kind of organic altar to peace? To pray, bow, offer flowers, or whatever they feel in their heart they need to express?

The audacity of this thought made me laugh. But the next day back at the beach I told a friend of mine, a man I met strangely enough one morning far out in the lake as I swam by him and his wife. To my surprise, his answer was swift and serious. “Great idea! Let’s do it!”


A week later several of my friends are sitting around me at the Heartland Café, planning a ceremony that had nothing to do with my neurotic fears about my 50th birthday.

My friends and I don’t have the answers to this endless war. But what we do know and feel is a need to express our frustration and sadness, our common sense of grief and outrage at the useless suffering this war has brought to the people of Iraq, to our soldiers and their families, to our nation, and to the people of the world.