A Month for Mandalas – TRUTH – part 3
January 23rd, 2017
Truth in Kinship – Family, Friends, Community, Creation, Creator.
Sharing Truth Tea. How I can go forward.
This is part 3 of a Month for Mandalas with the main theme “truth.” The first blog asks, “What is a Month for Mandalas” and explains what it is, why truth is the theme and how to begin.
TRUTH IN KINSHIP. We find truth from and in others – people, creation and Creator. Truth comes from a deep place of love. It is true truth if it is formed in love. There is love and there is fear. Truth is not truth if it comes from a place of fear.
Truth seeps into our cells, our hearts, our souls. We feel it, we know it. Truth guides and shapes us. Truth guides us with the highest force. We know deep within, the truths of love, peace, justice, honesty, trustworthiness, diligence, discipline, fairness, caring for all of creation.
The highest of truths is love. But how can we know this truth, when so much feels broken? When there are not shared truths among us, how can we find the highest truth, love, between us?
Can our wounds and dreams show us the way?
“Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love… To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand, we need to listen.”
Thich Nhat Hahn
TRUTH TEA
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.” Muriel Rukeyser
We are all human, we all have wounds and dreams. Tell me the truth of your sorrows and dreams and I will share mine.
I have a wish that I could sit down with a woman whose life is so different from mine, whose truths are not mine. We sit at her table each sharing a cup of tea. I want to listen to, really listen to, her true sorrows and dreams. She tells me her sorrows as her tears slide into my cup. I tell her my sorrows, and my tears fall into her cup. We drink each others tears in our tea leaving a few drops in the cups. We keep talking and share our dreams of our futures. And the tears of our dreams fall into each others cups. We drink our dreams, but leave a few drops in the cups. We walk outside to pour our tears of sorrow and dreams onto the waiting earth, to join with the sorrows and dreams of mother earth. We are community, the world is splitting open.
These mandalas were created to address the tears, the pulling apart, of the hearts of people who felt connected through shared truths, but no longer. There are broken hearts and many tears of sorrow. What can heal those tears in our hearts and tears from our eyes? Perhaps the sharing of truths based in love, truths of our sorrows and truths of our dreams. Truth tea can be shared. This is how I want to go forward.
CREATIVITY PROMPT
Gather your art materials. Let the words from Thich Nhat Hah (Buddhist Monk) and Muriel Rukeyser (poet and activist) inspire you.
“Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love… To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand, we need to listen.”
Thich Nhat Hahn
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.” Muriel Rukeyser
Listen to the meditation and then create a mandala or mandalas that calls upon the truths of kinship into your sacred circle. Listen deeply to the truths of elders and those present. Listen deeply to the truths of others of creation. Listen deeply to the truths of Creator.
Use words to reveal truth in ways that go deep. These words don’t have to be legible. Author Terry Tempest Williams explains her process.
“When I want to see furthest into my soul, I will write a sentence by hand and then write another sentence over it, followed by another. An entire paragraph will live in one line, and no one else can read it. That is the point.”
Write words over and over in a line, or create a weaving of words written in one direction across the page and then turned 90 degrees and written on top in another direction.
MANDALA MEDITATION – TRUTH. There is a place to pause the meditation for a quiet time of listening before finishing.
Let this blog inspire your creativity and help you find your truths.
PLEASE SHARE YOUR MANDALA CREATIVITY
Please share the mandalas and art journaling you create by sending 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.
ENJOY & CREATE
P.S. I am going to create some ceramic cups for Truth Tea and instructions about how to use them. I’ll share when done.
And I am in the planning stages of a three day workshop called “A Sacred Circle of Creativity – Mother Earth, Mandalas, Meditation & Words.” It will be held in St. Louis and nearby during late summer or early fall. Details will be coming soon.
