“Gathering”
“Gathering” - created August 11th, 2021
THE MANDALA PROJECT - How it came to life
If you know someone whose day would be brightened by this Mandala, please pass it along! Even more magical, with a love note from you!
The Mandala Project: #53
On a road bike ride one beautiful summer evening, I noticed a hidden stairway leading to the rocky shore of a deep and ancient lake. The lake I knew well, the stairway I’d never encountered. I’d set out to pedal a paved loop above the lakeshore but the stairway pulled me off course.
As is often the case with the muse and the mandalas, my planned trajectory was interrupted by the unexpected.
And as is always the case, the call was non-negotiable.
Leaving my bike at the top, metal cycling cleats clattering across steep, slippery rock, I made my way down to the waters edge.
The moment my feet hit the shoreline the small stones in this mandala began singing, encouraging me to gather them up and bring them along to the edge where water and rock met.
Something I love about shorelines is the impossibility of defining a clear point of separation between the fluidity of water and the solidity of earth. They’re places where boundaries are blurred in a conversation that’s been going on for centuries.
In these spaces, notions of independent experience dissolve, and you can feel the collaborative, co-creative nature of life.
The Power of Gathering
This got me thinking about the invitation we have to create intentional relationships with everything we come into contact with. And how we’re perfectly positioned to do it, because we reside at the very heart of all of our experiences.
This includes that which joins in intimate circle with us as well as whatever is moving through or resting on the edges of the space we’re co-occupying. And it’s not only living beings but also the emerging thoughts, ideas and emotions that come into our field of awareness.
We are gathering because life is gathering us.
We meet, sometimes for a brief moment, sometimes settling in for a while, but always impacting each other and then shifting, changing and becoming something new again.
Like this little collection of stones that were scattered on the beach and then arranged by me in a call to echo the deeper patterns in the bedrock beneath them, we come together because currents of aliveness are drawing us into proximity.
And like these stones, we are born of something bigger and more ancient than whatever form we’re taking in this specific moment.
We are fluid, unique expressions engaged in a conversation with the creative power of life rearranging itself.
There is wisdom in knowing that inevitably the wind or tide or some other force will act upon us and usher us on to currently unimagined encounters and arrangements, calling us to meet them with the love of our full presence.
This is the challenge and the opportunity of being alive.
If we choose to, we can let ourselves be moved by life, sharing our beauty and our imperfection with wherever we are, and trusting we’re collaborating in a process that’s been unfolding since the beginning of time.
“Lake Minnewanka”, known to the Stoney Nakoda First Nations people as Minn-waki or “Water of the Spirits”, has welcomed humans on its wild shores for well over 10,000 years.
Want to collaborate to create some magic in your life?
“Flow” - The Mandala Project: #55
Flow is what you feel when you’re holding a stable, steady centre while the currents of the universe are swirling around you with infinite possibilities of disruption.