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A few months after Erin’s accident a colleague and friend sent an account of the Tibetan Buddhist ritual of the creation of Mandalas. It was the one rare occasion when, on its receipt, I broke down and sobbed and sobbed inconsolably. It captured so perfectly our careful, unconditional nurturing and love of Erin and her senseless destruction.
Creating traditional sand Mandalas is a devotional practice. The Tibetan monks are involved in a deeply mindful and beautiful creation followed by a lesson in impermanence as the painstakingly applied sand design is ritually swept up and destroyed and then discarded - usually into a flowing river. The river itself is symbolic, as rivers and water are a commonly used symbol for life and time. Mandalas may be used as an aid to meditation. As an image of the ideal 'pure lands' of Buddhism, they guide the practitioner and aid focus (click here to see a video illustrating a Mandala being made and destroyed).
As we look to the mending and reconstitution of our family, the Buddhist ritual provides profound inspiration and healing as we look to the future - and is recounted using the words of my friend.
‘‘Monks spend months and months creating a most exquisite mosaic made from millions of microscopic, coloured grains of sand, painstakingly laid into place. It is back-breaking work, intricate in its precision and requiring the most excruciating attention to detail. The result is breathtakingly beautiful. When it is complete, the Chief Monk approaches, puts his finger in the middle and draws a line through the grains of sand, destroying the symmetry of the composition, the completeness and beauty of the whole. It is destroyed. There is horror and it seems implausible to observe what he is doing. Observers want to cry out and say, 'Stop! Don't destroy all that hard work, that beautiful creation!’ But the Chief Monk goes even further; he then takes a brush and he sweeps all of the grains of sand into an urn. In the sweep of an arm, the mosaic is gone; all those hours and hours of intricate work, the creation of something so beautiful, gone from sight forever. The ritual completes with the monks in the mountains, standing waist-deep in a river, pouring out the contents of the urn into the swift current of the water. How unfathomable is this ceremonial destruction of perfect beauty?’
In many ways it tells the story of what has happened to our family in losing Erin. She was a perfect creation and the detail of the family life that we had built around her and Cameron were the interconnected swathes of colour, winding and weaving into colourful patterns and shapes, symmetrical in harmony, a work of art achieved after many, many hours and years of working to make it just perfect. And then, in the blink of an eye, our family as we knew it was destroyed, swept away, never to be the same again.
‘Why? Why does a creator create and then destroy? Why do the Buddhists engage in this Mandala Sand Art? What does it symbolise?
In the immense magnitude and unfathomable depths and dimensions of the universe, our lives are as nothing. As humanity we arrange microscopic grains of sand; we labour away to organise and structure life in such a way as to be understandable, rational and as perfect as possible. And just when we think we have it figured, some great sorrow, ‘like a mighty river, sweeps through with peace-destroying powers’ (The Desiderata). Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, terrorist attacks, and senseless accidents – it all amounts to the same. This Buddhists ceremonial practice reminds us of our humanity, and our powerlessness in the mighty scheme of things, but also of the immense grace of Nature, a divine power - whatever you want to call it - in taking us back into itself. Erin is not gone - she is all around us. Just as the Monks poured those grains of sand into the rushing mountain stream, so Erin has been poured back into her origins, from whence she came before we ever knew her’’.
And so we look to the future. As we ache and long for the exquisite beauty and wholeness of our family as it was before, we nonetheless know that that Mandala is forever gone. Our beautiful child, our daughter Erin, is now reconstituted in a return to nature or in another paradigm. Instead we are embarked on the makings of a new Mandala. For deep within my womb I have the stirrings of new life - a different etching of exquisite beauty to be revealed May.
As we continue to journey on this now new bend in our life’s path, we consider the wider world’s questions and commentary to which we respond:
‘We will never replace Erin nor will we ever finish grieving the loss of her presence in our family or her exceptional life; we celebrate the wonder of human biology’s opportunity of starting anew; and yes, it will be daunting starting a different mandala with its painstaking, intricate placement of coloured sand all over again. We - as you would if you were in our shoes - would never have chosen our past year or our course of life. But we do approach beginning again with the same joy of the possibility of new life and beginnings as we did at the advent of Cameron and Erin. This though, is not a miracle; the miracle would have been Erin’s rescue, resurrection or preservation and the miracle was the family we had which we celebrated daily. Erin’s presence and life permeates all we are, do and will do both now and in the future.
So we call on you the audience to applaud, celebrate and be joyful with us and welcome with us a new circle of life and energy. We have embraced our journey with all the courage, resilience and dignity we are able to muster but we have not been able to do it without you alongside us. So once again we call upon you to continue to offer us your remarkable support, to walk alongside us and to offer us encouragement. Your daily emails, texts, calls, visits will continue to sustain us. We are unapologetic about proclaiming our need for you as much now as we have done through the course of this torrid year. We don’t claim the next walk will be easy…but we do know it will be full of joy and wonder because that is what our family, our daughter and son, have taught us and brought us.
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The Japanese have an art form called Kintsugi. It involves restoring broken items such as vases and other types of vessels. But when they do so, there is no attempt at disguising the breakage. In fact, the damage is highlighted through resin mixed with gold, silver or platinum. It is said the restored version is even more beautiful than the original.
It is difficult to imagine a life more beautiful than we had before…But we do live in hope that out of the thorns something glorious will emerge - something markedly different but nonetheless indescribably beautiful.
Wishing you peace and joy in the New Year.