Shifting Sand

There are certain things in this world that I return to visit, places and people I've seen, and ideas and concepts that I masticate anew with my Western-Eastern mind.

Sand mandala, the Tibetan-Buddhist impermanent art, is a good example.

If you haven't seen a mandala being created, the physical details are this - for several weeks, a group of Tibetan monks will carefully pour sand onto a floor or table space, creating a beautiful and intricate piece of art over a wide area. They work in shifts, starting in the center and working their way ever slowly outward until everything is complete. It can be quite transfixing to watch, this ancient artwork, the monks in teams carefully ticking sand via funnels onto a floorspace bit by bit.

But here's the part that gets me: upon completion, the monks say a prayer, ritualistically remove the entire thing piece by piece, and pour the colored sand or stone into a nearby body of water.

I've seen monks at work on these only a handful of times, but one instance sticks in my mind quite clearly, when Supalak and I stumbled upon a group of monks in a building along the shoreline of Lake Champlain in the city of Burlington, Vermont. I believe it was early in our stay in that city, during the late summer or fall, and we observed them hard at work for a time before continuing on our walk of the day. Burlington, steeped in artistic sensibilities, is the kind of town where these kinds of random, wonderful events happen.

Lake Champlain at sunset

One of the core ideas, I think, about the sand mandala, is that it is a prayer made physical. The work itself could be seen as a variant on chanting, full mindfulness on artistic work, and the pouring of the sand into water spreads that prayer far and wide. I like the thought of this, healing energy made physical, and actively spread out into the world.

Only a few weeks ago, my mind returned to the idea of the sand mandala, and I was trying to link mandalas to human relationships, and how we could see those relationships that have come and gone in our lives as a form of sand mandala, something beautiful that hasn't lasted.

Impermanence

I'm not sure, though, that this holds up under scrutiny. We don't go into most relationships expecting them to be temporary, nor do we say prayers and sweep things up at the end. Relationships that have died, or become ill, rarely end neatly, even though the latter can resuscitate itself over time.

But in other ways, the sand mandala resonates deeply - about the impermanence of beauty, of not hanging on too dearly to “things” (the impermanence of life), or even how we could create things with no expectation of cash value and/or sentimentality, but with the sole purpose of issuing a tenuous bit of beauty into our bombastic world. This last thought really speaks to me as I observe this consumerist fantasy-land we've created in our world, where land, art, stock futures, and everything else is sold with rapacious delight.

It also reminds me very much of the fascinating documentary “Rivers and Tides,” and of the artist Andy Goldsworthy, who has often headed into nature to create ephemeral artwork (clusters of leaves floating down a river, wood piles arranged on a beach), which are expected to disintegrate over time.

Perhaps in its own way, this blog is also a small example of this, for I still intend to end Anno Equus at the end of the Year of the Horse, four months down the road. Everything should have an expiration date. TV shows should quit while they're ahead; movies should end with the audience wanting more.

Think about it for a moment - when was the last time you created something beautiful just for the sake of it, for the sole purpose of raising your voice up into the cacophonous void, to replace the howl of the wind with the sweet melody of your own voice?