The image of the mandala has been with me for quite a while now. When I am walking along the river trail I can see a mandala in so many things. The dark centre in the picture reminds me of the mystery of wholeness where a descent into our own inner depths is required to remember the parts of ourselves we have never known or forgotten. There is a curious spiraling in towards the centre and out again as we live our lives in this conscious way. The rings on the tree remind me of this spiraling and of the time it takes to grow towards being more whole. So when I walk on the trail and I see these mandalas I am left with an impression, a resonance in myself of something in nature trying to speak to me. I can sense very faintly within this resonance an immenseness, a deep, intense, organic and spiritual feeling of my connectedness to nature and to this planet. It is faint because my ego's senses have been dulled by the kind of culture I live in. I could go on a rant here about the effects of growth oriented economics on the environment and the impact of technology causing us to be more and more controlled by what we think we control. To what end? All this does is get us polarized, angry and we stop seeing and hearing what we really need to. Just imagine, you could go out and simply see nature with different eyes, with different senses in general. In my heart that immenseness, that lost connection to our organic primordial spiritual selves is out there we just have to slow down to find it.
