Today’s guest has a simple yet profound mission: to nurture creativity, foster a love for learning, and ignite a collaborative peace-building spirit within individuals and communities. Through her innovative brainchild, the Singing Tree Project, Laurie Marshall has brought people from all corners of the world together to create powerful murals that reflect their collective hopes and dreams. Laurie is an educator and the founder of the Unity Through Creativity Foundation. In this conversation, she shares her incredible journey of empowering youth and adults through collaborative and artistic endeavors. Listen in as Laurie discusses her passion for harnessing the power of art and creativity to address social justice issues and build a more inclusive society. Discover how Laurie’s work is not only transforming communities but also teaching us to identify our non-physical needs, communicate effectively, and envision a brighter future. Her insights and stories are a testament to the healing and transformative potential of creativity and collaboration. Join in for more!
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Listen to the podcast here
Unity Through Creativity: Promoting Peace-Building Through Art With Laurie Marshall
With us is Laurie Marshall. For many years, Laurie has been an author, innovator, and artist and has empowered youth and adults through creative collaboration. She practices peace-building through art inspired by nature. A visionary educator, she has served mostly low-income children, families, and their schools as an Arts Integration and Project-Based Learning Specialist. Her mission is to nurture creativity, a love of learning, and a collaborative spirit. She’s the Founder of Unity Through Creativity Foundation and The Singing Tree Project. Welcome, Laurie.
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I am so excited to have Laurie Marshall with us. Laurie has been a great friend of our center here at GW. Laurie is an educator. She’s the Founder and President of the Board of Directors at the Unity Through Creativity Foundation. Laurie, you’ve been a creative educator for many years now in the space of social justice and indigenous education. In fact, you have come from the Bioneers Conference this 2023. I want to start with a question. What moves you in the work that you do?
Love moves me, love of being alive, of being a human being, of being a woman of this Earth, of the sun, of the planets, and the trillions of stars that there are for every human being on this Earth that we know so little about, and of dark matter, which is 96% of the universe, so we only know 4%. Love energizes me and nourishes me.
Easter of 2023 was the birthday of my beloved husband. He was born on Easter, and it’s the first day that Easter has been on his birthday in years. Easter is the time of the return of the green, the blossoms, and of the story of this man who believed in love as the most important thing, who spoke the three hardest words ever said in the human language, which is to love your enemies. I got to be with my two grandsons and hold them close and feel the magic of children who we don’t know who they are. They don’t know who they are. They’re the mystery. We’re still the mystery unfolding.
I want to pick up on one of the phrases that you said in that response about children being the mystery. I had seen a video you made that your Singing Tree Project came from a question that a little girl asked you. I teach dreaming and a very ancient tradition of dreaming. For us, dreams are a question. They provoke something.
This little girl asked you a question that was an image question, “What would happen if the whole world painted a picture together?” One of the things that we teach in the dreaming tradition that I teach is that the question provokes, but dreaming is two steps. The second step is that we have to manifest whatever creativity, whatever spark, whatever came from that question or that dream. I wonder if you can tell our readers. When that little girl asked you that question, what moved you to actually respond to it in such a huge way that you have as opposed to dismissing it as many people might?
As an extreme extrovert, it takes me a long time to process my feelings. I jump into action. It took me about a decade for somebody to say back to me, “What happened inside of you when that happened?” What happened inside me was I have this deep longing for human beings to live in peace and have a place where everyone can give their gifts and be respected.
It seems insane to me that there’s this needless suffering of people being denigrated, not having their gifts supported, and being divided. It met this deep longing I had. I grew up in the Cold War and I had a dream that I was sitting between Khrushchev and Kennedy, helping them solve their problems so we wouldn’t have a nuclear war. I saw Martin Luther King when I was ten at a Quaker Conference in Cape May, New Jersey and he said, “People of all colors can live together like sisters and brothers.”
That message was very resonant and cellular. I loved my sisters so much and my cousins. I let the creator blow through me. The universe opened up. Meredith Miller, who I am still in touch with, was a guest at our 20th anniversary in 2022 and works for the labor department, is still part of my forest. She was the one who said, “What if the whole world made a painting together?”
Somebody gave me the book The Singing Tree by Kate Seredy. In that book was this beautiful story that I never get tired of telling of Kate Seredy’s father from Hungary, who crawled all night long on his belly with a battalion of soldiers to escape the Russians. Everything had been destroyed by war. In Wonder Woman, there’s a good portrayal of the destruction of war, like we’re seeing on television every night with Ukraine.
When the dawn came, one tree had survived. In that tree were birds who weren’t normally together, singing a song that had never been sung before. Somebody gave me that book right after Meredith’s question and I saw this image of the Earth as the singing tree of the galaxy of a tree on the Earth in space. We used trees as the model for the way we could expand where everyone making a painting together as we can all be trees and be in a forest.
I expanded the story when a dear friend gave me a book called A Story Like The Wind by Laurens van der Post, who is South African and spent time with people in the bush and learned of a story of a tree of life deep in the forest that sings. This singing tree stopped singing when the colonizers came. The story is that it will sing again when the colonizers leave.
I’ve developed a visual aspect of the singing tree and have a longing to develop the singing part of The Singing Tree Project. A Seneca elder said that the trees have stopped singing because we’re not singing to the trees. I’m organizing the International Day of Peace here in El Paso at Keystone Heritage Park and I am enlisting a choir of high school kids who sang at Carnegie Hall. Their teacher, a student at UTEP, was brilliant enough to recognize their gifts and say, “Let’s go to New York City.” They went. I’ve invited them to sing to the trees and for us all to sing to the trees to complete that cycle.
You’ve been using The Singing Tree Project now and brought it to many spaces. Many people from around the world have been painting together. That manifestation, that vision, has become true. You often use this process. You’ve used it with our own students at the coaching program at GW as a way to reflect on their own learning and as a way to build community and many government agencies. I’m particularly curious, given also this new story. You’re doing a lot of this work with youth as well. I’m curious. What are the stories that you’re hearing from them? What are the images? What is their vision for the world?
Youth is a big category. I made The Singing Tree to Heal Heartbreak at the Bioneers Conference with about 35 kids from Alaska, Louisiana, China, and Northern California. They listed out their heartaches. They were suicide, species extinction, lack of gun control, lack of rights if you’re transgender, and racism. They have a lot on them. We made an image of a bonsai tree with rays of light coming down. They wanted the light to pour through the tree. Under the Earth is a young person with the Earth on her back.
At the center of the Earth is a heart that leads out to a spiral and up to a door and a tree. The tree has windows in it because it’s home. It’s a safe place. There’s also a winged unicorn horse drinking from a bubbly tea. This young girl from Germany who was on an exchange said, “We have to have our humor here.” They are seeing a lot and it’s tough. Their creativity is immense. To not have places to express this inner experience is deadly to the human race and teenagers. Rudolf Steiner said, “World War I happened because people could not express their souls. They were working in factories.”
I hear in that story the expression of what is right now. I also hear two things about what can be one with all these windows of home. I also hear that the windows are perspectives and there are other perspectives we can open out to. The girl from Germany who draws the unicorn with the tea, evokes the play and the humor of the imagination, that, to me is the creative space.
I saw a documentary on a comedian in Ukraine who started an organization to rebuild people’s houses. He’s also still performing. There was a clip of one of his performances. He said, “It’s inherent upon us to keep creating because creating is the antidote to destruction.” I lean into the creating and I know you do too. Maybe you have some other creating projects where people are putting images of possibility out there as well.
As you said, we use every singing tree to acknowledge the heartbreak, to start there, and to envision the future we want. It’s very important not to jump over that heartbreak because we all need to express it and we need to grieve together. Our Western civilization started with the story of Adam and Eve, which is a story of homelessness and alienation from the land, not the story of indigenous people.
Their creation story is you don’t get cast out of the garden. The garden keeps teaching you. The trickster coyote keeps teaching you. Western civilization was Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden because they wanted to know. We in this country are a country of homeless people and everybody but indigenous people left their homes and the land they grew up on.
We go into this individualism, and almost all of our cultural stories are about one person saving the day, maybe two, but the whole community never saves the day. We don’t get that story where everybody’s needed with their different roles. That’s the new story that we need. When we make a singing tree, we get to see what everyone’s energy coming together creates.
Almost all of our cultural stories are one person saving the day. It’s never the whole community saving the day.
Students in Oakland, California, made the East Oakland Boxing Association Singing Tree of Strength And Happiness. On the day that the project started, there were six people shot in the high school that the kids’ siblings go to. On the last day of the project, somebody had brought a gun to school. I asked the kid who shared that somebody had brought a gun to school.
I said, “What do you think was behind him bringing the gun to school?” He said, “Ernesto said he needed help.” It was so simple and insightful. The kids at the East Oakland Boxing Association made a dragon that was spilling hearts over these playing children. The dragon was the guardian and the protector. That’s what lived in them. One of the kids said, “I didn’t know that all of this big whole mural lived inside of us.”
None of us know how to go forward in this time when no one has lived before.
Laurie, you spoke about acknowledging where we are because that’s the starting place. Through creativity, people can self-express. You mentioned Rudolf Steiner talking about World War I which happened because of people not expressing their souls. In building this new story or in co-creating this new story for humanity, creativity is part of it. What else? What other skills? What is the picture you’re holding? What kinds of things do we need to be practicing more and doing differently?
One of the things we need to be practicing more is identifying and requesting our needs. My grandson will do big chaos and I’ll ask him, “Do you need power or do you need attention?” He can’t answer yet, but that’s a very helpful distinction that we all are wrestling with. Paul Chappell is an amazing former Army captain who’s written seven books about peace.
He’s applying what he learned in the military to waging peace and founding the Peace Literacy Institute. It has a curriculum K through college that helps people identify their non-physical needs and look at what’s under aggression. It’s feeding all of us with our emotional intelligence and helping us identify needs, asking for what we need, and doing the same with each other, training kids as they come up.
What happens when we make a singing tree and each lead design team designs a tree on the Earth in space and then we look at them together, we take brilliance from each part, and put them together? We see that the more vision that we have, the richer our solution is. Making a mural is a very concrete goal that can be achieved. It demonstrates that larger things can be achieved in organizations, in kids’ lives, and adults’ lives.
As you were speaking about seeing the richness of what each person puts in about the little boy saying, “I had no idea this was in us,” the hearts, the dragon, the beauty, the solution, as you put it in the adult language, but in the imaginative language, the other way of seeing things. It’s nice.
Is there some kind of call to action or is there something you want to leave our readers with?
My call to action is to celebrate International Day of Peace, which is September 21st, 2023. The whole week is dedicated to peace. The UN has its official day, September 21st. We here in El Paso are going to be celebrating it on September 23rd, 2023. We’re focusing on restorative practices and pointing a light on all the people doing restorative practices in El Paso, restoring the land, restoring our relationships, restoring ourselves, and using that day to share practices.
I recommend everyone sign up for the organization Pace E Bene‘s nonviolence newsletter, where weekly, Rivera Sun shares nonviolent actions that are being held around the world, many with success, some without success. They cataloged over 4,000 events in 2022 for the International Day of Peace in our country. They are keeping tabs and it’s a wonderful focal point to make that wave be everybody working together.
That’s a way to think about restoring your sense of self, the community, and the world and placing that attention into a collective sense of consciousness, a collective way of being. Thank you so much, Laurie. Bonnie, did you want to ask anything else or anything coming for you?
I want to say thank you again. I first met you doing a singing tree with Ina in the coaching.
Yes. I remember. The Banyan Tree.
We did that. It was our first cohort. Right in the middle of our cohort, COVID had hit. I found this particular activity to be an extremely heart-opening, relaxing, and rejuvenating experience in many different ways. It’s great to go from there to now talking to you. Thank you for the work that you do.
You’re so welcome.
We’re looking forward to having you back with this new cohort, Laurie. I know you’re going to come do a singing tree with us. Thank you again.
Important Links
- Unity Through Creativity Foundation
- The Singing Tree Project
- The Singing Tree
- A Story Like The Wind
- Pace E Bene
- https://www.UnityThroughCreativity.org/videos
- https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=oAkwJ_sxGR8
About Laurie Marshall
For 35 years, Author, Innovator, and Artist Laurie Marshall has empowered youth and adults through creative collaboration. She practices Peace-Building through Art, inspired by Nature. A visionary educator, she has served mostly low-income children, families, and their schools as an Arts Integration and Project Based Learning specialist. Her mission is to nurture creativity, a love of learning, and a collaborative spirit. She is the founder of Unity Through Creativity Foundation and the Singing Tree Project.