THE MANDALA PROJECT: Read the story of how it came to life

If you know someone whose day would be brightened by this Mandala, please pass it along! Even more magical, with a love note from you!

This past October, in the midst of grieving the passing of Lily, my treasured friend and spiritual ally, I was on an 11 day retreat in the Sonoran desert that was designed to facilitate conversations with the natural world from the perception that it is animate—conscious and interactive and always pointing to wider, broader patterns of connection and interconnection.

With this kind of engagement, even the most unlikely beings have something to share.

I was drawn to the grasshoppers that kept crossing my path; notably a living one, a dead one, and one that was on the threshold of transition from this world to the next.

Transmission

My first encounter was with this graceful beauty who spent a full day hanging at my tent. Every time I came back she was there. Nowhere else she needed to be.

Eventually I accepted her invitation to pull up a chair. Dropping in to be with her was a meditation, or perhaps more precisely an entrancing transmission about moving mindfully through life. Thank you Grasshopper.

Lingering in the Threshold

This intrepid fellow was lying in the middle of a sandy canyon trail. I thought he was dead, but when I used a small twig to lift his body off to the side of the trail, he wrapped his two front legs around the end of it and hung on. I set him among some grasses and visited him twice over the next two days, each time expecting him to have died, but instead I would see the tiniest flex of a leg or flicker of an antenna revealing the life still in him.

I found it unsettling that he took so long to die. Then I remembered something I learned from Sarah Kerr, the amazing death doula I worked with when Lily was dying.

“There’s a difference between suffering and dying. Sometimes we mistake the second for the first when those we love are entering into their dying process.”

Up until then, I had held the two as one and the same. Opening to perceive the distinction helped me stay curious and present when supporting Lily and I was reminded again now, in witnessing this being’s journey, to surrender to what was not mine to manage.

Life Death Life

Divination is a practice of connecting with the guidance of the divine. With intention and a little work building skillfulness, you can learn to call on divination to enter into a dialogue with mystery.

In my experience animals (insects included) are powerful allies in divination. They conspire as messengers of the Universe encouraging us to trust that the sacred is always available as a source of support, and guiding us to look for wisdom in unexpected places.

“Grasshopper Divination” was inspired by a desire to honour the life of an exquisite multi-coloured grasshopper that was already dead when I crossed its path. As the mandala came together it reflected something that has become true for me about relating with death.

When you hold that which is ‘dead’ with the full presence of your aliveness it lives on, collaborating and co-creating with the Cosmos in new and surprising ways.

Magic Never Stops Calling

For one night during the retreat I slept up in the canyon under the stars, 20 feet up the wash from the Mandala. The next morning, very close to it, I discovered the exoskeleton of a grasshopper that had been dead much longer which inspired another variation of the Mandala.

And on and on it goes…

Grateful for the adventure of days strung together outdoors off the grid, and to Aravaipa Canyon for its particular flavour of mystery.

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