It comes from my book Organic Prayer, a kind of "gardening companion" to a spirituality connected with the earth. The chapter is part of a section devoted to "Pests"--those things which keep our planet from flourishing. From among the many possible candidates, I chose emptiness and greed, self-righteousness and guilt, and despair and burnout. I dealt with the last two in the following paragraphs, slightly altered here in the interests of inclusivity. These words are but one part of the truth, of course, but I hope that they are helpful to the reader.
___________________________
During the dramatic early days of the Persian Gulf crisis in 1991, I went to bed every night with mental pictures of warfare that I could not seem to exorcise no matter how I tried to drive them away. Violent images became interior monsters who cast a constant shadow. News of the destruction of human life and devastation of the natural environment gnawed at my joy, at my hope, and at my energy.
One evening during this period, I attended a ballet by a Japanese dance company. The performance was a dazzling blend of color, sound, and movement entitled, appropriately, Mandala. The principal characters in this story, set in the early Edo period in Japan, during a period of religious persecution, are Hokuba, a young painter who is working on a great mandala, a circular religious painting representing the cosmic order, and Moe, who poses for the central figure of the design. In a climactic scene, the figures in the mandala come to life, and dancers in brilliant costumes move against the golden backdrop of Hokuba's great project.
As I lay my head on the pillow that evening, I noticed a difference in myself. My head swam with images of golden kimonos, colorful sets, the exhilaration of sound and movement. Shining pictures of beauty had, for a time, banished the ugly vision of war. The artist Hokuba's mandala had fulfilled its destiny as symbol of universal harmony for this member of the audience, at least.
It is no mere chance that the word "imagination" is derived from imago, "picture," because our thoughts often appear in the form of mental pictures. When we imagine the future, we picture it. When we remember the past, we see mental home movies of past events.
My experience with Mandala showed me that images play an important role in dealing with present reality as well. They have tremendous power because they are the language of the unconscious mind; our dreams are more likely to resemble an evening at the cinema than an afternoon in the lecture room. Moreover, images often slip unbidden, and sometimes unwanted, into our unconscious mind, a fact much appreciated by the world of advertising.
If this is so, it is no more self-indulgent to provide our imaginations with a balanced diet of images than it is to feed our bodies with healthy food. The media show us the most dramatic events in the world and these are often fearful. But these images do not represent the real world in all its fullness, so if we receive these alone, we fill ourselves with a distorted reality. The counterbalance can be discovered in those less newsworthy situations around the world: the compassionate work of the nursing staff in a hospice; the millions of second-graders on swingsets and see-saws at recess time at any given moment; the acres of wilderness where the only sounds are those of birdsong, brook, and the wind in the birches; the beauty of a ballet; a mental picture--of Buddha, Jesus, candle, sacred tree, or mandala--that evokes the life of the spirit.
When we forget the need to balance negative images with positive ones, we are inviting spiritual indigestion. We are disregarding nutrition just as much as if we believed ourselves compelled to gobble down whatever food happened to catch our attention as we walked along a city sidewalk--candy bars, frozen yogurt, bagels, shishkebab, hot dogs, hot pretzels, roasted chestnuts--and never chose our own meals.
The pictures we carry in our imaginations have the power to form the future, for, in a mysterious way, collective thought is a channel of energy for good or for ill. Ideas and images have great power either to destroy or to heal, and the process begins with ourselves. It is a matter of courage--keeping our coeur, our heart, beating despite the seductiveness of depression, burnout, and despair. It is a matter of guarding our joy.
It is common knowledge that a person who is ill can become better by picturing "wellness," whether it be through imagining the shrinking of a tumor or the lowering of blood pressure. Similarly, when we furnish our minds with images of beauty and of wholeness in the world around us, we surely contribute to the health of the earth, as well as our own ability to work, with all our energy, all our intelligence, and all our imagination on its behalf.
Surely the Mystery who brought this earth into being means us to take delight in the dance of life--the sparrows chattering at the birdfeeder, the forsythia branches bursting into sunshine, the fugues of Bach, the cry of the loon, the warmth of human affection--even as we rage at injustice. Rather than letting our rage paralyze us, we can channel its energy into efforts to bring healing to the world. But to do that, we need to care for our physical and spiritual vitality, and to keep things in perspective.
The negative images we see are all too real, but despair is not the only option. The monk and writer Thomas Merton reminds us of the other reality, which is the mandala, the vision of the divine: "The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there." [1]
___________________________
Written ten years ago, these reflections may seem inadequate to the new reality in which we live. But the power of ideas and images was demonstrated only six days after September 11 by a visit to this college town by--of all people--Philippe Petit, the highwire artist who walked (illegally, he reminded us!) between the twin towers of the World Trade Center over twenty-five years ago.
Philippe Petit served as my "mandala" that week. His passion for life and courage as an artist made his audience's hearts soar once again. While his art seems dangerous to outsiders, he insists that it is not, because of his careful mental and physical preparation and discipline. He can step out fearlessly over the abyss, whether it is between the twin towers of the World Trade Center or Notre Dame de Paris, because his mind, spirit, and body are in tune. Philippe Petit made traffic in lower Manhattan stop and pedestrians look up towards the sky, not in horror but in awe. A small figure, suspended in space between two towers, both a metaphor and a healing image, part of the cosmic dance that is always there.
[1] Thomas Merton, The Monastic Journey. Kansas City: Sheed Andrews & McMeel, 1977, p. 17.
Nancy Roth is a writer and Episcopal priest, who worked for many years at Trinity Church, Wall Street, a block and a half from Ground Zero. She now lives in Oberlin, Ohio. Organic Prayer is published by Cowley Publications, Boston, MA.
©2001 Talking Leaves
Winter 2002
Volume 11, Number 3
Diversity, Wholeness, and Healing