impermanence

I took a marvelous class yesterday entitled, “Midsummer Memory Mandala” offered by Lakewood Cemetery (Sidenote: Lakewood has really interesting classes and events, open to all! I’ve especially loved the Lantern Lighting Ceremony, the next one is in September.) I started paying attention to Lakewood after Mom died. She isn’t buried there, but she does have a dedication plaque in one of the mausoleums. Now, I don’t know the first thing about mandalas. Seriously. I had to look up what a mandala was. It’s a circle. And it’s some other stuff, too, but…it’s a circle. The reason why I registered for the class is the photo that was adjacent to the registration link (above). The photo took my breath away. I love how the bright pink POPS, and the rock outline, and the symmetry, OHMYGOODNESS I love it so. And I was pretty sure that if I signed up for the four-hour class I would be able to make something EXACTLY like this. I’m being sarcastic, of course, but I was so interested in this art form, I really couldn’t wait to learn from our “Mandala Master.”

Our Mandala master’s name is Day Schildkret, and he is the brains behind Morning Altars. Day makes a mandala every single morning (check out his stunning Instagram feed here.) I loved learning from Day. He is kind, thoughtful, empowering, and a wonderful guide. He taught us too many things to name here, but you know I bought his book immediately and can’t wait to revisit all he said. However, the thing that has stuck with me into today is the idea of impermanent art.

I deeply reflected on impermanence when Mom died 4.5 years ago. She was here, and then BOOM, she wasn’t. A force of good in my life had physically vanished. I thought about my own legacy, and what I wanted to leave behind, both physically and spiritually. At times of incredible anger and despair, I wondered what the point was of living if you were just going to die anyway. Does your life make a difference even after you are gone? After having time and space to think, I can enthusiastically say YES! Your/my/our lives matter, even though there will be a time when no one on Earth will have ever heard of us.

However, I had never thought about impermanent art before.Yes, all art I’ve ever created, be it theatre, dance, music, words, or painting, has always come to an end at some point. The show closes, the painting is shipped off, and the book is published. But I’ve never created anything knowing that it could be either transformed or destroyed while you are literally creating it.

The altars we created in the class were all made out of nature and potentially at the mercy of the weather. I foraged for my items, never even stepping out of my own yard. I used weeds (People! Weeds are beautiful!), sticks, bark that had fallen off the tree in a recent storm, the blooming flowers from the hostas, anything I could find that I thought could be used for my art. I cleared off my sidewalk, used it as my canvas, and I began to assemble.

The wind started up immediately. It blew my art around. And I was ticked-off about it if you want to know the truth. I had been patting myself on the back for taking an online class on a Sunday afternoon and I was making myself uncomfortable by talking to strangers and I was skipping around our property with a basket slung on my arm like I was Little Red Riding Hood gathering leaves and sticks and berries and why wasn’t the Universe rewarding me for being so brave by giving me zero MPH winds? And then I laughed at my ridiculousness and kept going. I talked to my Mom. I arranged and rearranged until I got it to a place where I liked it, and then I took a pic as quickly as I good. Ten minutes later, a quarter of it blew away. An hour later, it was gone.

One day no one will have any recollection of my Mom. One day, there will be no one on the planet who will remember me, or remember you, either. (This is both heartbreaking and freeing.) But this doesn’t mean that our lives don’t have meaning. No one would have seen the art that I created yesterday if it wasn’t for the fact that I”m going to show you the picture. Even if no one sees it, art has meaning. It matters to me. The joy for me was in the creation, in the ritual, in the sacredness of the time I set aside to learn something new, in meeting Day and the other students, and in spending time with my Mom.

Nothing is meaningless, even though it can’t last forever.

(The process was so much more delicate and involved than I’ve explained in this post. I urge you to read about Day’s Seven Steps and try it for yourself or sign up for one of his classes. Want to create with a friend? I volunteer!)