This community-engaged performance was first initiated in 2016 by JuPong Lin with
Nicole Oxendine, in response to the removal of many “nature” words from the Oxford
Junior Dictionary. Words that replaced the removed words included; blog, broadband,
chatroom, celebrity, voicemail.

This project resists the values expressed in the decision to replace names of animal and
plant beings with “technological” words. We honor the language and names of our
animal, plant and fungal kin and will speak and write their names in all the many
languages spoken in every part of the Earth.

This community-engaged project offers a way for Earthbeing lovers to insist on the vital
need to keep alive the names by which we call Earth, Wind, Water, Sun & Fire, and all
the many diverse beings who live and move with each other in relationship with our
Beloved Earth. We create a ceremonial space to recover the “lost words” by which we
call our earth and our nonhuman kin.

You can contribute to the project with paperfolds of canoes, cranes or horseshoe crabs
and/or responding to the poetrywriting prompts below. Throughout the month of June
you can deliver these contributions in-person to CitySpace, 43 Main Street,
Easthampton, MA 01027. There are pins in a shell on the floor to attach your piece to
the curtain. Or you can mail your piece to CitySpace and JuPong will attach it.
If you missed the workshop where JuPong facilitated practices of Earth connection
through qigong, poetry and paperfolding, you can view video of a previous workshop on
youtube, with an instructional poem on the canoe fold.