By Heidi Bailey, Pikes Peak Courier

This phone will never ring. It is connected by love to nowhere and everywhere. It is for those who have an empty place in their heart left by a loved one. Say hello, say goodbye. Talk of the past, the present, the future. The wind will carry your message.

These words are printed on a phone that stands on a hill overlooking Green Mountain Falls. It is a wind phone, designed to give people a place to speak to someone they’ve lost.

The phone is an old-school rotary phone that connects people to something beyond a traditional phone line. It offers a way to begin a conversation, whether the words are spoken quietly, remembered privately or shouted into the wind.

The wind phone is accessed via the path to the Skyspace on Red Butte.

The idea originated in Ōtsuchi, Japan. Garden designer Itaru Sasaki installed a rotary phone on a hilltop garden to help him grieve his cousin’s death. Because he could no longer speak his thoughts over a regular phone line, he wanted them to be carried on the wind.

In 2011, an earthquake and tsunami struck Ōtsuchi, killing more than a thousand people. Sasaki made the phone available to the public as a place to mourn.

The idea made its way to the United States.

Jake Shannon, the artist who designed and installed the wind phone in Green Mountain Falls, is a general contractor in Denver known for his custom woodworking. His work can be seen in places like the History Colorado Center.

Shannon is also the executive director of Lynda’s Phones, a nonprofit that assists with the design, construction, installation and maintenance of wind phones across the U.S. Their goal is to provide comfort and healing through the grieving process.

The nonprofit is named after Shannon’s mother, Lynda, who had terminal cancer and advocated for Medical Aid in Dying. This is a legal end-of-life healthcare option that allows a mentally capable, terminally ill adult to self-administer prescribed medication to die peacefully. Medical Aid in Dying is currently authorized in Washington, D.C. and 13 states. Colorado is one of these states.

In the last year of her life, Shannon’s mother embraced the wind phone idea to help her family talk about death and process their grief. On Jan. 4, 2024, she passed away with the aid of prescribed medications, surrounded by family.

“Grief is so many different things,” her son said. “Some days grief is laughing. Some days it’s crying. In our society, we’re told to repress it. We don’t make space for grief, so we yearn for expression.”

A wind phone makes space for conversations that never happened.

“There’s so many conversations we didn’t get to have,” Shannon said. “Go to the phone to say hi or goodbye. Say you’re proud of them. It doesn’t have to be good. Call and scream at them.”

Shannon said someday he’d like to know the science behind why wind phones work. For now he speculates, “Processing grief is like learning spelling. We need to see it, read it, write it, say it. Saying it out loud transforms something inside of us.”

One thing Shannon has learned through this journey is to change how he responds when a person tells him they lost someone. “Instead of being awkward, I ask, ‘What’s their name? What did they do?’ Make them live again. Try it. You’ll see. It’s a whole different experience.”

Shannon is excited to see where wind phones go in the future, but is concerned about companies planning to commercialize them. Like Sasaki, the wind phone’s inventor, he believes it doesn’t work to just install a phone box anywhere and call it a wind phone.

“They’re built for a specific place, person or desire. This is the essence of what makes them unique,” Shannon said. “I’d like to see it grow in a way that’s sustainable and remains true to what a wind phone means.”

Green Mountain Falls resident, Lisa Huizenga, hikes by the phone frequently. “Picking up the heavy receiver to the old rotary phone is nostalgic itself,” she said. “And then to think of the people in my life that have passed and are available on the other end of the phone is … well … you can imagine. It’s a lot.”

More information at greenboxarts.org