The meandering methodology of the Garden Path started with the Stupid School and Apparitional Street Theatre of the Chong in downtown Toronto during the early 70’s. These academies of communal improv street theatre eventually lead to establishment of peace gardens in Canada (Spiral Garden), Sri Lanka (Butterfly Peace Garden in Batticaloa and Kalabala Bindu Garden in Hambantota), and in Cambodia (Mango Tree Garden). The gardens and subsidiary centres of contemplative art in Sri Lanka – the Monkey’s Tale Centre in Batticaloa, Kora Kaputa in Negombo and Step-by-Step Studio in Colombo – stabilized and spread Garden Path methods and practice around the country. In Cambodia there was the Palais des Rats in Phnom Penh, and here in Toronto there is, to this day, Falling Sky Studio and Garden Path Serendipity (GPS Inc). If you want to know more, a detailed account of Garden Path history and pedagogy is illuminated in three books – Beautiful Nonsense (2018), Playing for Real (2022), and Back to Bindu (2024) available for order here on this site <www.thegardenpath.ca> under the publications heading.
Taking on our Demons du Jour
Challenges faced by young people everywhere these days are the primary focus in the Earthwork, Artwork, Heartwork practices of the Garden Path. Funds raised for the Butterfly Peace Garden and Falling Sky Studio by our present initiative will help offset costs for creative encounters with youngsters facing the demons de jour.
Climate Warming
Environmental Devastation
Global Pandemics
Accommodation of Refugees
Racism on the Rise
Authoritarian Politics
War of Rich against Poor
Ceaseless Restless Consumption
Interminable Loneliness
The Seduction of Virtual Reality
Adolescent Drug and Screen Addiction
The Alien Invasion of Artificial Intelligence
Not in Rectangular Cinder Block Cells
Design of today’s prison-like school buildings is inimical to genuine learning and personal growth. It’s fundamental archi-torture bias, based on squares that produce more squares, of which there are sufficient examples already steering us over the existential edge of present-day politics into the abyss. For all their vaunted intelligence, these schools are largely responsible for giving us the dark, violent, faltering world we’ve got today. One has to wonder, how did this come to be?
Garden Path art programs cultivate the ingegno (original genius) of young people helping them meet the apocalyptic menace of these times, ideally outdoors in nature, not in rectangular, mind-numbing, cinder block surveillance cells, if possible.
The Cliché Coma
Prompted by the reflections of wise elders representing different cultures around the world, such as those cited below in the cliché coma, community art and theatre projects are nurtured among local youths on a continuing basis. The collection of these wise sayings, or clichés, spirals on endlessly and may be edited or expanded by participants along the way as suits their time and inclination. They are points for meditation on the malaise of these days, reflection upon which gives depth to programming direction.
In this trembling moment is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world
Barry Lopez
Focus on the main global problems facing humanity.
Care about suffering. Embrace ambiguity,
Yuval Noah Harari
Central to all pedagogical processes on the Garden Path is Mayachitram, or Mystery Painting, which is a means of purging and re-enchanting the traumatized mind through a ritualized magical process of making art, restoring individual mental health by releasing creative imagination.
Jeremy Adamson
You can cocoon yourself against a dystopian world, the chaos outside muffled by Disney and Netflix, or you can face the cataclysm. You can bathe in discomfort and unrest, you can engage with it in your work and your life.
Soraya Roberts
Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect and give up to others. We should be willing to act as balm for all wounds.
Etty Hillesum
The way I saw the educational system from an early age was that it taught you what to think, not how to think.
Joni Mitchell
It’s one thing to despair, but it is something else completely to give up, to become cynical and hopeless.
Robert Reich
If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially in ourselves.
Richard Rohr
34 billion dollars! The amount estimated to provide adequate food, water, education, health and housing for everyone in the world per year is about as much as the world spends on arms every four weeks.
Anon Y. Mouse
In Ilo Uno unum.
In The One we are all one.
St. Augustine
In each of us there is another whom we do not know.
Carl Gustav Jung
Empower yourself with love and compassion.There are no scumbags in the world.
Ven. Samu Sunim
Your job is to find the holy in the mundane, and failing that, to create the holy in the mundane.
Norman O. Brown
If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there.
Anon Y. Mouse
It’s hard. It is so hard to protect your spirit in a world that’s trying to kill it. That’s why we need stories and traditions and practices that heal our soul and transform our minds. Compassion takes practice.
James Talarico
It’s more important to have a dream than to achieve a dream.
Bryan Cranston
We have become robotic. We are more connected, and disconnected, than ever.
Jacob Whelan
It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.
Marcus Aurelius
Wisdom has been chasing you, but you’ve always been faster.
Panhandle Pete
I’m not young enough to know everything.
J.M. Barrie
I’m poor with words like everything else, but I’m so rich with your love.
Saroj Sharma
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James Baldwin
You cannot force someone to create.Creation has to be done with consent.
James Talrico
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you really are.
Carl Gustav Jung
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
Anne Carson
My goal is to mature into childhood.
Bruno Schulz
Mind is master. Body is servant. But mind is an entity
that wanders off into anything and everything.
Ajahn Tate
see yourself from the outside in
be yourself from the inside out
poho
Blessed are the days when youth discovers within and above are synonyms.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the end the whole of life becomes an act of letting go. We’ve let go
of all our possessions except for love, kindness and compassion.
Tao Te Ching
Old age is about letting go, travelling lighter until finally, we are unburdened.
Yann Martel
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Death lets us know that there is not always a tomorrow and that if we want to do something,
now’s the right time.
Sammy Basso
nothing matters anymore
if you can’t remember what happened
the moment before
poho
reality is a sound
you must tune into it and not just keep yelling
Anne Carson
There is a kind of seeing that involves letting go.
You do not seek, you wait.
The visions come to you,
and they come from out of the blue.
Annie Dillard
What can be good about a day that begins by getting up?
Susan Schellenberg
Transcend the turmoil of today’s troubles by concentrating on the whole, not the donut.
poho
The meaning of life, if there is one, is desire and pursuit of the whole,
to be one with oneself and the world.
Plato
Hope is not something you have.
Hope is something you create with your actions.
Once one person has hope, it can be contagious.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
You could be good today, but you choose tomorrow.
Marcus Aurelius
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
Socrates
There are times, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all,
we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing.
Thomas Merton
No more chasing the wind once you learn to ride it.
poho
Ping Ping Chong Chong
In early days of Chong, our mantra was Ping Ping Chong Chong, “doing the marvellous in an ordinary way, doing the ordinary in a marvellous way”. In other words, learning to live in the present with prophetic imagination. Kids dwell in their imaginations from day one, which explains why they’re so charming and beautiful, whenever they’re not hell-bent on creating havoc with one another.
With the Spiral Garden in Toronto, the Butterfly Peace Garden in Batticaloa as well as the Garden Path Centres for Contemplative Art in Sri Lanka and Cambodia, we were blessed with the opportunity to both protect and stimulate childhood imagination with the paradigm of Earthwork, Artwork, Heartwork and Healing. In Butterfly Peace Garden the children were natural leaders. We, their elders, learned to follow them in order to help with healing their trauma – as well as our own – and that of a war torn society, with art, storytelling and theatre projects. We had fifty kids per group signed up to attend three days per week over a nine-month period. Programs continue to this day. On September 11, 2026, the Butterfly Peace Garden will celebrate its 30th anniversary. It’s an amazing accomplishment. Congratulations Butterflies!
There is an African (Xhosa) word, Ubuntu, which means, “I am what I am because of who we all are”. This concept aptly describes the philosophy underpinning our collaboration for a period of thirty years with literally thousands of youths. Wherever we are in the world, we try our best to create a greener, healthier Mother Earth for all, and pray the Spirit inclines us away from acts of violence and retribution, opening our hearts to kindness and love.
Through authenticity in communication, symbolism and expression, Garden Path communities create opportunities for young people of all traditions to come together breaching boundaries of otherness by supporting and learning from each other. We are not alone and powerless. We must join together and dedicate ourselves to creating an inclusive, loving and fair society, especially in a world ablaze.
One way of doing this is start with art. We learned through years of working in conditions of war and natural disaster that art is a form of play. Like Brian Eno says, “Play is how children learn and art is how adults play.” No matter how dire the times may be children, under most circumstances, love to play with paint, poetry, story creation, music and theatre. By cultivating the inner world of their imaginations they discover what is meaningful in their lives and thereby how to massage meaningful change into society at large.
Every year we spend trillions of dollars to fund the arms industry in the defence of “democracy, peace and justice”. Much of this may be justified but most of it is just a money grab. The time has come to breathe deeply and balance our budgets. The theatrics of war hypnotize us with our presumed heroism and draw attention away from the pressing demands of poverty, homelessness, education, good childcare and healthcare in a civil society. We err in making a crusade out of war forgoing the wisdom of living simply so others may simply live. There’s money to be made vilifying our enemies, stealing their land, smashing their homes to rubble and spilling their blood, praying to God and praising the Lord while we do it, rifles in hand.
Learning to live in peace and cultivate roots of non-violence and cooperation in the time we’ve got left is actually the only goal worth living for. “We must love one another or die” is how the poet W.H. Auden summarized our prospects back in September, 1939, as war broke out in Europe. It’s the only idea that matters after all is said and done, and right now there are unprecedented opportunities to practice.
The days of YES I NO politics – saying one thing but doing the opposite – don’t serve anyone well and never will. Let’s put them behind us forever.
poho
9/11/25
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