343 members of the FDNY from 75 separate fire companies made the ultimate sacrifice on 9/11. More than 100 have died since then from illnesses directly related to their work at Ground Zero. The number grows every year.
Rachael Watt had just accepted a job as Hotel Manager of Acre Resort in Los Cabos, Mexico. The good life became routine in the Baja. Until Fate left a box of little beating hearts on the property’s edge, for Rachael. Deliveries of sick and abandoned street dogs without futures, landed in her lap daily.
I invited people to stand in an alley against a city wall, to let me write the word LOVE across their ribcage. What transpired would move me in a way that I wasn’t even prepared for. I saw acceptance, I saw vulnerable, I saw joy, I saw calm. I felt trust. I saw living, breathing, loving, humans. Being.
Like anywhere else we have been, we were met with astonishment, excitement, delight, confusion and playfulness. People from blocks away laughed, amused onlookers whizzed by on public transit and BIGLOVEBALL was squeezed tight by those we’d never met.
Meet our 44 four footed friends. These family members are a combination of rescue dogs, show dogs and no one knows dogs. One is blind. One has 3 legs. One of them taught us that dogs donate blood to other dogs…who knew? They all are loved.
Our big city became a neighbourhood as 28 of us proudly marched, danced and played with the crowds while handing out YOU ARE LOVED notes by the thousands. We boldly carried signs that read HAVE THE BALLS TO SHOW YOUR LOVE and COME OUT AND PLAY, flaunting our love light amongst 500,000 friends.
Potbellied, or “mini pigs”, were trendy in the ’80”s. People were either confused, misinformed or short sighted when wrapping these beings in boxes with bows and taking them home like toys. Many were left abused and abandoned upon realizing the commitment of caring for them into adulthood.
Though he stands just 2’7”, Spencer West is a giant among us. Born with a severe deformity of the spine, his legs were completely amputated from the pelvis down at the age of five. This did not stop him from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. On his hands.
White dresses of every era, dudes in dapper hats, opera singers, dancers, beauties on stilts. The field morphed into a pointillism painting. Guests floated about our BIGLOVEBALLS and posed with champagne on the hood of our car. Someone proposed marriage at the base of our fifteen foot high love sculpture. Love was abundant.
Women stood as mothers, sisters and daughters and friends. Without raising our voice in decibel we amplified our message: when we create unity amongst ourselves we can be of service to humankind. If BIGLOVEBALL is a metaphor for the world, we are using PINK as symbolic for the intrinsic strengths and abilities of women.