Christmas 2004: Joolz, my art therapist friend, gave me a pristine pack of sparkling gel pens and a new notebook with a quote by Picasso on the cover;
‘The inner me is necessarily in the canvas because I am the one who makes it’.
‘I’m doing circles this year,’ she said, ‘One a day, why don’t we both have a go?..They’re called Mandalas’.
So I did.
Every evening through the long winter I drew and coloured a circle.
Between December 29th and April 4th the colours were cool, mauve and blue, lots of grey, bare stick like patterns, sometimes vivid zig zags cutting across an icy background. My circle were small, constrained; images often radiating from the centre, sometimes spilling over the circumference and trailing down the page.
In my first circle I wrote
If this was a sand painting the tide would wash over it.
The wind would blow it away
On New Year’s Day we went to Cleethorpes to look at the sea and I drew my circle in the car, whilst clutching a steaming cup of cocoa. I wrote around its rim of orange and blue patterns:
The renewal of cells-the dance of the hormones
The sound of sleeping, the silence of winter
The rhythm of our heartbeat
The sound of the tide in and out
January 7th: my mauve circle had some green leaves tumbling over it, with red edging and across the top of the page:
Today the wind was blowing; the dark clouds across a pale grey sky.
Trees were swaying and bending their naked branches against the sky.
The mothers clutching their children’s’ hands were bent sideways-whisps of hair blowing wildly whilst passing old ladies holding onto their hats with narrowed eyes.
I was driving to work
‘I’m waiting for snowdrops’
Suddenly on April 7th my circles were huge on the page, and painted in bold watercolour stripes and swirls; between April and July they became increasingly vivid, sometimes a mass of green and blue pastels radiating from the middle with yellow edgings, other times flowers were dropped on to the circle, delicate cowslips, a giant pansy leaf, bright blowsy red tulips falling over the page., little notes were pushed into the page s saying,
Drip drip orange paint on a thick brush.
I’ll paint in pink and silver everyday.
Drip drip on the face of the sunflower (a huge messy painted orange sunflower filled that page)
In July I started painting the faces of huge daisy shapes everyday another rainbow colour formalised by silver gold copper tips and edgings on the petals:
I have to keep painting the flowers before they go
Later in the year the circles became smaller again, back to the gel pens, constrained, images of rain and grey skies and restriction, sometimes hurried.
The next Christmas arrived; we brought our circles and marked the celebration after work with cake and coffee in her little art room. We opened our books. I gasped at the maze of fiery geometric shapes that were Joolz’s. She watched the seasons unfurl as she turned my pages , the light pour on to the page and then slowly recede again as the next winter drew near.
Joolz had not revealed to me that traditionally mandala work was mainly around geometric patterns and my year of circles burst forth on to the page with a range of loose and random images that came from somewhere within myself.
I know they reflected the seasons, my relationship with the natural world and their affect on my mood .In my circles I saw light and dark, liberty and constraint, sadness and joy, fear and hope..
Mandala in Sanskrit means ‘essence’ and ‘having’ or ‘containing’. It also translates as ‘circle-circumference’ or ‘completion’, .both derived from the Tibetan term dkyalkil khor, a concentric diagram having spiritual and ritual significance in both.
I learned that Carl Jung (1995) had become fascinated by circular Mandala images, which are used in meditation practices in Hindu and Buddhist religions. They are found in Christianity under the form of frescos with animal images representing apostles (and the zodiac). Carl Jung saw them as an expression of the unconscious.
‘. I saw that everything, all paths I had been following, all steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point -- namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the centre. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the centre, to individuation.
I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate.’ (Jung.1995p.228).
This piece first appeared in ‘Therapeutic Journal Writing’ by Kate Thompson 2011
My Mum and I were the swimmers in the family-I think I remember her carrying me down the steps; me splashing, laughing and waving my little arms eagerly.
