“Transmutation”
“Transmutation” - created June 8th, 2021
The Mandala Project: #12
This was the first of many times I declared on a morning walk, “I am NOT making a mandala today. Don’t want to. Not going to. Definite no.”
It was becoming clear how opening that door more often than not becomes an all encompassing, everything-else-gets-pushed-to-the-back-burner undertaking and I was thinking, “Day off.”
Not to be.
Was 20 minutes out, turning the corner for home, when a tiny piece of wood in the middle of the path caught my eye.
Tried to walk on by, but I was no match for its seductive power. It already looked like ‘a something’. It was the shape of a flame, the start of a story. Curiosity was sparked, “What could this become?”
Soon after, I came across a second flame-shaped piece of wood (the one on the right), as well as the straighter ones that make up the ‘logs’. I began imagining some kind of stone circle around the base, but that morphed into a halo element when the handful of gravel I scooped up to create it held, big surprise, a heart-shaped rock that wanted a part. The entire creation, from picking up the first element to photographing the end result took less than a half hour.
Thanks Mandala #12, for revealing that creativity doesn’t always have to be a marathon.
Creativity is Imagination in Action
As I was pre-writing this post in my head, I kept thinking of Picasso’s Bull’s Head Sculpture, made from a bicycle seat and handlebars in 1942. Its magic was in its simplicity, and how you could perceive both the original components and what they had become at the same time.
“So you’re saying—you and Picasso, same same?” you ask. Yup. And you too.
We all have an innate capacity for making unexpected connections, it just requires expanding our awareness to perceive beyond the immediately obvious. It’s a practice of tuning our receiver to the imaginal realm.
Eric Gibson writing in the Wall Street Journal said of the “Bull’s Head” sculpture, “Out of the blue, comes a moment of wit and whimsy: At once both childlike and highly sophisticated in its simplicity, it stands as an assertion of the transforming power of the human imagination [at a time when human values were under siege].”
It’s illuminating to encounter transparent examples of what creativity is: That, becoming this, while also still connected to that. These reflections reveal the truth that nothing is entirely original.
Nothing exists of its own, no expression is completely novel or independent. Everything arises from and builds on what came before.
Creativity emerges at the intersection of ‘what is’ and ‘what’s possible’, and we’re at our most creative when we’re willing to surrender our commitment to knowing anything for certain about either.
THE MANDALA PROJECT
I’m posting one new Mandala every Monday with a few words about how it came to be, and the challenges that arose or insights that emerged in its creation.
Check back here to see the new ones, or subscribe below if you’d like to receive them directly.
< Mandalas 1, 2 and 3, and the story of how the project came to life