100 Days for Mandalas -Session Three- REMEMBER-Part Two
August 26th, 2013
This is the second week of the third session of 100 Days for Mandalas. The inspiration for the first two weeks is the word REMEMBER. This beautiful mandala above is a prayer to remember the gifts of life. My favorite line of this mandala is – “be grateful for the gifts of the trees”. This mandala and the following two are shared by Pat Huemmer, an energy healer.
This mandala is certainly a remembering of the healing and creative power of hands and all they do.
“Remember you hung the stars and the moon.” Perfect.
In the last blog I shared two mandalas using yupo paper. I created two more with the theme of remembering. After the mediation, I found memories of childhood and young adulthood, that shaped me and helped me remember who I truly am. The words and images combined with the round mandala shape make my remembering stronger.
The butterfly above was created on a scrap of a garden design I created on graph paper. I became a garden designer in part because of my Mother’s love of gardening and my Grandmother’s gardens on the family dairy farm in Wisconsin. My Dad also loved being outside creating things for the yard.
I have so many memories of my grandparent’s farm and the time spent there. Each year my mother went berry picking with my Grandma and two of her Aunts. I felt a spiritual (although I didn’t call it that then) connection from an early age to nature in the woods and farm land. From my earliest memories of time spent on the farm, it always did and still feels like a fairy land to me.
The peacefulness I felt is just like this postcard of cherry trees and Mt. Fuji that my Dad brought home from his time in the service in Japan, after WWII. This mandala holds the connection I feel to nature.
This is the outside of an envelope that lets me remember a “cosmic’ experience I had one night as I looked at the stars.
I was working at a home for mentally challenged adults. These were the days when institutions were the norm. The institution was somewhat surreal. The building was on a steep hillside overlooking a large lake. Each room had large windows and some sliding glass doors to outside balconies. It was pitch dark but the moon and the stars were bright on the water. I looked out over the water, and suddenly I felt as small as an atom in the universe and as large as the universe itself. I felt totally alone and totally connected. A door to a new way of feeling about my place in this life was opened. Perhaps this was one experience that lead me to learn about and know other ways of seeing the reality of life through meditation, ancient and modern spiritual traditions and things way beyond my protestant Midwestern upbringing.
I bound these “remember” mandalas and art journalings in a small book. I will share what they ended up looking like next week, and how to do a simple binding together next week. I know I said I would do it this week, so there is a slight delay.
MANDALA MEDITATION – REMEMBERING – 1 Mandala Meditation – Remembering
INSPIRATIONS
Again here is the list of inspirations for this session. Use them to help inspire your creativity, or just create mandalas as your creative spark guides you.
REMEMBER – August 19 – September 1
PAUSE – September 2 – September 15
LISTEN – September 16 – September 29
AWAKE – September 30 – October 13
RECEIVE – October 14 – October 27
DREAM – October 28 – November 10
HOME – November 11 – November 24
SHARE YOUR CREATIVITY
Please share the mandalas and art journaling you create by sending me an email with attachments of your art. Please use a high resolution – which can be a smart phone camera – with enough surroundings in the photo. I can easily crop the image. Please send to linda (at) creativityforthesoul.com. Please use the @ sign and no spaces. I can’t spell it out here without getting lots of spam.
Thank you again Pat for sharing your mandalas.
ENJOY AND CREATE
