The State
Amelia Gustafson wants you to know 2020 has been a hard year.
She misses her friends and her grandparents. She hasn’t seen her great-aunt in a long time because of the germs and the coronavirus.
Most of all, she misses going to school without a mask.
As she started to list another struggle, the light caught her eye.
Slowly and softly, like a flower bud beginning to bloom, the word “Hope” appeared on the trunk of a palmetto tree in downtown Charleston’s Theodora Park. Nine seconds later, it disappeared.
“You have to remember,” said 8-year-old Amelia, nodding toward the tree, ”have hope.”
She beamed beneath a string of globe lights as more words began to appear around her. Her 5-year-old sister, Ann Cate, giggled as she tried to catch little laser lights.
On a brick building, the phrase “Peace be you” was soon joined by the wisdom of the Dalai Lama. “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” On the chimney, the words of Martin Luther King Jr. made two passers-by stop and read, “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”
David Rawle, the man who dreamed up this light display and was the visionary of this very park when it opened five years ago, smiled on a nearby bench.
“Sometimes we need to see the words that we want to say,” Rawle, 80, said.
In a year that brought both a once-in-a-century pandemic and a summer that laid bare the racial injustice that still exists in America, Rawle said he wanted the park’s holiday light display to be different this year.
In previous years, the 4,200-square-foot park only featured the globe lights and the little laser lights that project sparkles of red, green and purple onto the ground. The words of inspiration are a new addition, and, according to Rawle, it will be a “one-time only” offering — just like 2020.
“This year left a lot of anxiety all around us. I thought maybe we could add a dimension to the display that would reinforce the park’s role as a place of renewal, reflection and inspiration,” Rawle said of the quotes he picked.
Rawle came up with the idea in October and enlisted the help of many, including Rhys Williams, vice president of production at Work Light Productions.
Williams, a former production director for Spoleto Festival USA, said the small display still took a high level of precision and care. For example, to make words appear 9 inches wide and 6 feet tall when projected onto a tree, someone had to create a tiny image of those words that measures roughly a quarter-inch by an inch.
Williams, 58, said he isn’t surprised people have strong reactions to the lights.
“The sun rises every day and sets every night,” Williams said. “There is a core zen, or whatever you want to call it, about our need for light.”
Trisha Gustafson, Amelia and Ann Cate’s grandmother, called it therapeutic. Her 71-year-old hands rested on Amelia’s shoulders as she looked around.
“It just brings a smile to our faces, and there’s not been a lot of reasons to smile in the last months,” she said. “The lights bring hope, but then when you read the wonderful thoughts about what we can do with a smile, or to be positive, well, we just have to keep telling ourselves that,” she said, looking down at Amelia.
Amelia looked up at her. “It will be over soon,” Amelia said.
“We hope,” her grandmother replied.
The light display will stay at Theodora Park through the end of December and will disappear when 2020 does the same.