Take your place on The Great Mandala
As it moves through your brief moment of time.
Win or lose now you must choose now
And if you lose you’re only losing your life.
Peter Yarrow, The Great Mandala
Each May and June here on our Farm in Humptulips County the humble long-stemmed daisies growing in our fields and along our drive become anointed as God; in July, that God suffers its annual death ritual and returns to root and seed to assure Her resurrection the following year. It is July as I write and there are still daisies here, but their appearance is ragged and the Daisy God’s condition has been reduced to that of needy mendicant. Many daisies have already died and been cut back, and the few that remain are writhing in the death throes that will turn them into the wilted antithesis of the collectivized beauty that gave the God form and power in the first instance.
The Daisy God’s physical presence on our Farm has grown each year of our residence, and may soon rival Her emotional hold over it. Her expanding physical presence has been due to her foremost acolyte, Helen; while the devotion that the Daisy God demands is strong indeed, Her physical prowess is insufficient to have allowed her to demonstrate her teachings in as many great swathes of our fields as She now does in the absence of Helen’s annual refusal to cut Her down while in bloom. After all, gods, being the intellectual manifestations of humanity’s doubts and insecurities over their basic right to exist, require human hands and voices to spread their respective messages – in the case of the Daisy God, Her annual insistence that every life should be celebrated as exuberantly and vividly as possible whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself. The artist in Helen understood Her message from the instant of Her initial manifestation following our assumption of stewardship duties here.
I use the term “our Farm” to describe this small patch of ground, but the truth is that it isn’t. It is only because of the peculiarly human concept of possession that I am able to make that statement. None of the other residents of this small place would assert ownership over it; the birds, rabbits, coyotes, opossums, raccoons, field mice, plants, trees, snakes, slugs, snails, insects, and other sundry forms of life – and yes, even the great Daisy God Herself – do not feel the need to make such an outlandish claim. A simple co-existence on this place whereby each feeds and serves another is sufficient for them. They understand the essence of life better than we humans, and face it without fear; they lack the insecurities and hubris that cause humanity to assert primacy over all other forms of life that share the great mandala and to lay claim to minute portions of the wheel of life as if it possessed the attribute of physicality.
The Daisy God is finished with Her public rebuke of human insecurities for this year, and has returned to Her hibernation. As a result of my December stroke, I am better attuned now to Her message that all lives, even those of humans, should blossom as vividly as possible while remaining humble in the presence of the ineffable; that each life form, regardless of its shape or its ability to exercise power over other life forms, is but a temporary placeholder in a grander scheme that each is too puny to see, that each, by and through the use of its own devices and own means of comprehension, can only sense without any true understanding.
