Dinner Plate Mandala

I had waited until the last minute — or rather, last hour — to collect treasures for a mandala-making therapeutic horticulture exercise. The garden and meadow were draped in three inches of heavy, wet snow… the kind that announces the arrival of winter and closes the door on the vestiges of autumn. Just a week before, brave black-eyed Susans were still opening their faces to the sun in the orchard, and calendula were still sporting full, if raggedy, blooms of yellow and gold. Now, standing on the hilltop, the view was decidedly monochromatic.

But it didn’t take much digging to find so much more. In the garden, still-red rose hips, spiky echinacea seed-heads, and chartreuse pieris leaves on pink stems, with fountains of pale yellow buds ready for early spring bloom.

In the meadow, royal red sumac, onyx catalpa seed pods, and bursting cattails, beige at a distance, but pink and etherial in the palm of my hand.

Mandala-making is a meditative process—a simple creative exercise to calm the mind and restore the senses. The circular shape represents wholeness, safety, continuity. Especially when working with natural materials—rather than, say, paper and paints or markers—there is no such thing as mistakes, just opportunities to replace and rearrange, to imagine and reenvision, opening your heart and mind to the many possibilities of colors, textures and patterns.

A mandala of natural materials is impermanent. Ours was the center-piece of our dinner table that night, and by morning the cats had disbursed the seed heads and cattail fluff across the room. The joy of making that mandala has lingered, though—not just the pleasure of crafting my own little work of art, but the gift of finding all that treasure buried in the snow, and the reminder that, even in these dark winter nights, the seeds of autumn are readying for spring!