Dust to Dust

Recently, a friend and I were touring the campus of a small New England college accompanied by the college’s president, who seemed very happy to be able to skip out of her office for a brief excursion into the fall air. We spent a few moments looking at a design challenge having to do with a central open space among various buildings before entering the cultural arts building, which my friend designed several years back. Inside the building, two Tibetan monks were putting the finishing touches to an intricate mandala sand painting they had been working on most of the week.  

The president of the college, without preamble, said to the two monks, “I’m so sorry for what happened.”  

They looked a bit embarrassed, shuffled their feet uneasily, shrugged in a kind of way that said they weren’t exactly pleased with what had transpired.  

“I want to apologize on behalf of the entire school,” the president elaborated.   

The monks, more than anything, seemed to wish they were anywhere but where they were standing.   Another awkward moment or two. And then one of the monks proceeded to give a detailed explanation of the symbolic representations of various intricate parts of the mandala. It was lovely, the design itself as well as the explanation. Later that afternoon, the two monks would carry their work down to a nearby stream and empty the mandala into it. Such is the impermanence of all things, especially things of such beauty and soulfulness. We thanked the monks and bowed a farewell. 

When we left, the college president turned to us and explained the situation. Several nights ago, someone had gone into the cultural arts building and destroyed the mandala. No one knew who it was. Most of the buildings are left open 24/7. The monks had had to start again from scratch.  

The priest and ecothelogian Thomas Berry once noted that while the wildness of nature holds perils for humankind, “we are also imperiled in the disturbed conditions of what we generally designate as civilized society.” 

Something to think about. Most often I tend to frame those “disturbed conditions” in terms of our macro situation on this planet: the fact that we need to reduce our carbon emissions by as much as 80% in fairly short order, or the notion that we need to get proactive about scarce water resources so that we forestall the projection that by 2025, 40% of the world’s population will be living with chronic water shortages. But this act of destroying a mandala painting on a small New England college campus caught me up short.  

Granted, my colleagues and I see these small indices of “disturbed conditions” every once in a while during the course of the work week. Someone rips down one of our LEED plaques and throws it in the bushes. We get occasional “hate” email because we’ve designated certain spaces in a retail shopping center to be set aside for hybrid vehicles. We tend to shrug it off. We must be doing something right to hit such a raw nerve. After all, paradigm changes don’t come easy.  

But this destruction of a mandala sand painting leaves me more disquieted, less sanguine. What do you do in the face of such “disturbed conditions,” except dust yourself off, start from scratch, and carry the finished product to the river as originally planned. And then begin again on the next mandala, hoping maybe this time something will have changed.