Legacy Lights
In our Legacy Lights Initiative, our elders craft beautiful legacy lamps while sharing wisdom, reflecting on their life’s journey, and holding conversations about life and the gifts they will be passing on. At its core – some of life’s deepest questions: What is one’s legacy? How have we found meaning in life? What have we learned?
A legacy lamp harnesses the potent symbol of light — with its many meanings — with an inspiring reminder of who we were and what we loved. Leaving a legacy lamp gives loved ones something tangible to clasp, providing inspiration and comfort with a simple, but deep message: our light shines on.
“We carve our name on hearts, not tombstones”– adapted from Shannon Alder
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Legacy works traditionally focus on words or objects that capture memories, traditions, and advice: written, spoken, or recorded stories; ethical wills; recipes; photos and scrapbooks; a favorite artifact – such as clothing or a tool.
Legacy lamps bridge these categories and provide a unique approach. As a constant presence and gentle reminder (unlike written narratives that can be accessed only occasionally, or photos whose “realness” may be too poignant for survivors), Legacy Lamps are luminous “tabula rasas” imbued with intentions that transform them from artifacts to meaningful objects.
David Moss, the founder of TIP, tells the following legacy story which helped inspire this initiative: “My Aunt Lil was a beautiful dynamo who lived a rich, active life and generously gave to the Milwaukee community. Her life was filled with blessings and deep loss – her husband and only son lost in a plane crash, her only daughter lost to cancer. Yet she remained grateful and buoyant, calling herself the ‘luckiest, unlucky lady’. On her 83rd birthday, we made a handmade paper lamp together, symbolizing the light she radiated. She was actively involved in its creation – picking out the paper and finding decorative branches. In subsequent years, dementia took its toll, until her vocabulary was reduced to three words, used freely with deep sincerity: ‘I love you’. Her lamp was gifted back to me when she died. Yes, I have photos, some poems and a set of elegant shot glasses that remind me of happy gatherings at her home, but gazing at her lamp links me to her deepest legacy – her deep, fierce love.”
Legacy work includes the production of a tangible product - the Legacy Lamp - but its essence is the process of discovering meanings in our rich, complex, messy lives and connecting with each other through our stories, traditions, memories, hopes, and dreams. TIP’s Legacy Lights workshops provide openings for collective conversations about life and the gifts elders can pass on to loved ones; for intentional art making; for creative exploration and inspiration. These workshops harness ceremony and symbolism and provide the opportunity to honor our fellow elders on a deep level.
Finally, the workshops result in a tangible legacy work – a beautiful illuminated paper lamp that can grace the living space of its maker while embodying the intentions articulated by its maker…and which can eventually be passed on as a treasured legacy.
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Legacy work for elders is a promising field with a growing body of research that suggests legacy work improves psycho-emotional and physical health by addressing emotional and spiritual aspects of aging through meaning-based coping and reinforcing a sense of worth.
Chochinov (2005) found a single session of legacy work reduced suffering and depression, helping patients attain the sense of peace necessary for dignified death. Generativity work (guiding subsequent generations) and Summing-up work (assessing one’s life) are important factors for healthy aging.
“Advantages of such work,” wrote Kunz (2007), “include improved attitudes of younger adults toward older adults and vice-versa, finding meaning in life, improving problem-solving skills, assisting with grief processing, increasing emotional support, strengthening self-esteem, decreasing depression and anxiety, and developing interventions for individuals with dementia.”
Serrano (2004) showed that legacy work participants exhibited fewer depressive symptoms, less hopelessness, improved life satisfaction, and enhanced memory retrieval.
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Legacy Lights workshops utilize art as a key element while producing a beautiful, functional meaningful end-product – the legacy lamp – which can be both powerful and of enduring significance to both its maker and its eventual recipient.
The workshops combine art, discussion and wisdom sharing while fostering connections between the participants.
Light is not just a powerful agent of healing in many cultures and traditions, but also a powerful symbol with many meanings: Warmth, clarity, illumination, understanding, love, healing, hope and inspiration.
The Legacy Lights workshops are a powerful way to honor and celebrate our elders – by taking the time to listen and bear witness to their life stories and the meanings and wisdom gleaned from their rich, complex lives.
And finally, the Legacy lamps add beauty – laden with potent meaning – to the overall community. They are beacons that evoke meaningful conversations and deep sharing.
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It’s easy for an organization to partner with The Illumignossi Project (TIP) in the Legacy Lights Initiative (LLI).
We utilize a subscription business model. As a subscriber, an organization receives all necessary tools and materials to allow workshop participants to create a specified number of lamps. In addition, we provide each organization with facilitator training, workshop materials, marketing materials, and registration and evaluation materials for workshop participants. On a regular basis, we re-supply your organization so that it’s an efficient, seamless experience.
Because the process surrounding the lamp making in our workshops is such an important part of the experience, we provide all the elements of the process or we can collaborate with your organization to create a customized process that meets the needs of your client participants. You need only supply the physical space for the workshops and the facilitators (trained by TIP) to guide the process.
We can train your facilitators locally with all travel expenses paid separately, or your facilitators can train through our training workshops or via web-based instruction. Most organizations will choose to eventually use their own employees or volunteers to staff the workshops.
Although we supply a standard, turnkey workshop model, we can customize our workshops and collaborate with you to co-design a workshop model that meets the needs of your particular participant population.
It bears mentioning that the TIP lamp making workshop is not just another “hobby-shop” art project. Lamps similar to TIP lamps have sold retail at an average price of $110, with a range from $95 to $170. And a TIP workshop includes not only lamp making but also the meaningful and powerful layers of the process surrounding the lamp making. The beneficiaries of a TIP workshop includes not just the participants, but also the eventual recipients of the TIP lamps (some participants gift their lamps to loved ones after completion of the workshop while others choose to retain them before eventually passing them on).
A TIP lamp is a gift that keeps on giving.
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“This workshop helped me to harvest my memories…it’s been a catalyst for guiding me to systematically and deeply think, reflect on my life, my story and what aspects, values and stories I want to pass on to the younger generation.”
”The wonderful flow of two afternoons of creativity, discovery, and sharing has given me a clearer and bolder path, with new concepts and surprising artistic skills. Plumbing my own relationship to aging has extended my way of sharing a legacy of light…”
“You succeeded in assisting us all to deepen our understanding of our life story, to see it as something of deep value and to search for ways to express, capture and disseminate its substance and truth.”- Frank
“Listening to each other and sharing was so valuable…and the group lamp ceremony felt profoundly meaningful. We learned so much from others and learned to appreciate oneself as a person, the love of our families to share, pass on, and bringing the “light” to our families.”
“Legacy is a passing on of knowledge, wisdom, riches you have stored in your mind…and then presenting them-This lamp is to remind my grandchild that my love is constant…to remind others of my presence beyond the physical…to remind myself that every day is an opportunity to create and grow my legacy.”
“We carve our name on hearts, not tombstones.”