The Power of a Circle
With our world in chaos, I found a calm center in drawing a mandala
The circle is everywhere. It’s the sun, the moon and the planet we live on. It’s the shape a child makes in the dirt with a stick; the circle our arms make when we hold someone to comfort them; the widening ripples on a pond where fish jump and a blue heron stands on the dock post. It’s the gathering of a group of friends of any age; it’s children holding hands and dancing Ring-Around-the-Rosie.
The circle has always been linked to the spiritual, to wholeness and to wellbeing. But today these things are distressingly missing from our world. I once heard that emergency room workers at Boston’s city hospital had to take leave every six months to recover from the trauma they experienced.
It’s hard to stay well when you’re working to help our world heal, as so many of us are today.
Recently I’ve had to take time out to reconnect with a calm center within. As for anyone, this means a few moments of quiet meditation, of breathing deeply and relaxation. It means focusing on things like things like art-making, journaling, a craft such as photography, pottery or sewing, gardening, a sport, or walking outdoors — doing whatever you would be enjoying if there were no crazed traitors at our nation’s helm.
But it’s time to collect my thoughts!
Practicing mindfulness at home is a way to go back out and cope with a world you can’t control. The circle is not only symbolic; it’s your working center.
American quilters used the circle like a maypole, wrapping traditional designs around it with the gay or somber spirit of the materials they saved and stitched, often gathering to talk and to share news in sewing circles.
Making sacred circles is not new …
… or even newer.
There was a period in modern art between the two World Wars when the circle seemed to stabilize design, and perhaps the artists themselves as well. The Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky said,
The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium.
Equilibrium! Equality, fairness, humanity!
Around the same time, in France, Sonia Delaunay chose circles to explore the infinite combinations of color in orderly ways.
And here in the United States, Georgia O’Keeffe was discovering circular patterns in closeups of flowers. I think she was talking about a mindful way of living when she said,
Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time … and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
Whether you succeed or not [artistically] is irrelevant … Making your unknown known is the important thing … .
In Sanskrit, the word for “circle” is “mandala”. When you design a personal mandala, you focus on what matters to you in this moment. It’s a meditative, calming way to focus on, find, and describe your center.
I decided to draw one.
To keep a loose feeling, I used storage bowl lids instead of a compass to draw three circles, and then added a smaller inner circle. I began with a heart at the center because my personal North Star is love - of family, friends, nature, kindness and creativity. You could start with a heart, too.
In the picture above, top right, I drew a spiral around the heart, and decided to keep the path open to the outside edge of the design, which you can see in the drawing, below.
I don’t want to rush this meditative exercise to a finish, so I plan to ink the pencil lines with a fine black Sharpie and then erase the pencil marks, before I choose the colors. Then I’ll print a couple of copies for trying out color combinations.
In my next Postcard, I hope to share my finished mandala with you. You might want to compare it with your own. Enjoy!
Thank you, Deda, for sharing your beauty and your kindness. So generous!
soothing words. thank you. sounds like a good idea