Monday, July 25, 2011

Prairie Mandala

We live on seven acres of prairie here at the Row. A couple acres of that is house, outbuildings and lawn. The rest is wild pasture, in which we’ve mowed an elaborate system of walking trails and two tent circles (one large circle, where I hope to someday put a tipi when I’ve save enough for a kit). It’s a beautiful, meditative walk that takes one past the original 1800’s homestead house – now hunched over and leaning toward earth – around the meditation tower & dog pond (dry in the summer), and then along crisscrossing trails through an open field of mixed grasses or in the shade of a shelterbelt. In the summer, when the milkweed blooms, the monarch butterflies dance along the trail, and one can see depressions where the deer have slept the night before.

My ultimate goal is to create by mowing, with hedges or with rocks, a labyrinth big enough to walk. I’m not sure what it is about labyrinths that fascinates me so; maybe it’s the idea of walking toward the center, the heart, which seems a good metaphor for a path I think we should ALL be on – a path toward self-discovery. So I’ve got the pasture labyrinth on my 10-year plan. In the meantime, here’s a labyrinth poem…

MANDALA
                                   
Mandala, yantra,
map of the hidden world,
chart of the heart’s constellation,
we are born at your center
and with our first breath scrabble out
to the edges where we navigate emptiness,
pillage and expose to the sweltering sun
the nothing out here, our skin flaking like mica.
We have nowhere to go but in.
Sometimes muscle memory or despair
pulls and we creep back to you, grope
along vine-covered walls on hands and knees,
blood and bone wired together
with coaxial cable and speaker cords,
our pulse digital, our eyes a matrix
of dimming pixels. Again, we  get it wrong,
drag with us the din of signals sent or received,
echolocation of fear, manufactured fog
against our own reflection. Somnambular,
paralytic, hollowed-out, we ride shockwaves,
drift away from ourselves away
from the heart's deep metronome away
from the center's pinpoint stillness away
from Love's dark labyrinth away
from the only divine number, One.
Mandala, tantric lens through which
we could finally glimpse ourselves,
we’ve never had anywhere to go but in.
Light the way to your radiant center,
light the way to your angular private rooms
washed in cobalt, saffron, magenta,
light the way to your bed of roses
where, if God is anywhere, It is here.

2009 Marcella Remund

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