Mandala Day

Last week was Mandala Painting Day in Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast. Each year, the community repaints the mandala which, because it is right out in the open and immediately in your path if you are walking to the beach or the pier, needs to be repainted. But more than re-painted, each year it is re-designed in its shape format and then entirely re-designed in the contents of those shapes. Everyone in the community--kids, adults, artists, novices--is invited to come and participate, to claim a space, to pick up a paintbrush and to make their marks for everyone else to see and appreciate for the next 365 days. And then it is time to repaint the mandala yet again.

It’s a great sight to see, not only because of its size but because of its variety. And because of its size, its variety is essentially a mystery because unless you spent a lot more time at the beach/pier than I do, you could never really get a handle on all the things that are there within the mandala. Well, you can see them all, but you can’t really internalize much of what you’ve seen. For that, it would take living with the mandala. But that’s okay, because it’s not meant to be absorbed in its particularity entirely so much as to be absorbed in its wholeness and informed by the suggestion of its particularity.

It’s a terrific community exercise and Roberts Creek does it proud each year. It stands out from the host of festivals that clutter the calendar in the summer months in the sense that it is entirely participatory. Even watching the completed project feels participatory, whereas going to the jazz festival or the fibre arts festival, say, feels like being a member of the audience, like being an observer.

Point Roberts has a little of this in the so-far yearly Art Walk, which happens next Monday from 10-4. Unlike the Mandala Project, though, it doesn’t focus on a single event that stays with the community. Instead, a half dozen or more different individuals/groups offer people who come by the opportunity not only to see some completed art, but also to take a run at doing some of it themselves, in at least a limited way.

The quilters have participated in this for the past three years. We make up small fabric books with blank fabric pages, and people fill up the pages with cut up pieces of fabric (collage images or abstracvtions) which they glue on to the pages, with stamps and ink, with ribbons and glitter. And they take their book away with them. But how could we manage to do something that would involve a final product that, like the Mandala, would last for a year and then would be replaced the following year?

Obviously no time to think sufficiently about this before Monday, but there is next year to think about. Certainly everyone who comes could make a painted quilt square and the quilters could subsequently put the squares together for some temporary (i.e., year-long) purpose. Or, perhaps something else that incorporates the other artists. Ideas would be appreciated.

Day Out of Time

Last Friday was Day Out of Time Day in Roberts Creek. Located between Gibsons and Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia—both of which are regular towns with regular governments—Roberts Creek is an unincorporated and much more self-invented locale. A history from the 60’s of American draft avoiders and a later and continuing influx of hippies and free spirits still provides a focus for the community. But more impressive is its strong sense of itself as someplace different from the rest of the places around. And part of this difference is in its holidays.

While Sechelt and Gibsons organize for regular holidays and for tourist kinds of spectaculars (Festival of the Arts, Festival of the Written Arts, Fibre Arts Festival, Sea Cavalcade), Roberts Creek specializes in a special kind of home grown celebration. They have, of course, their own Earth Day celebration, but they also have, in August, the Higgledy Piggledy Parade--a wonderfully home-spun phenomenon--as a major feature of Creek Daze, which also includes music, food, and craft fair. Any Creek celebration will include a weekend with special live music at the Gumboot Restaurant and with a dance or concert at the Roberts Creek Hall.

Day Out of Time is the occasion for all those things, but it is especially the occasion for the re-introduction of the Roberts Creek Pier Community Mandala. Each year, someone in the community provides a new design--this year a tree--for the mandala, and everyone in the community who wants to, comes out to paint a section of that design as suits their mood and talents. The mandala, which is about 35 feet across, is located at the end of the street that leads to the Roberts Creek Pier, itself a fairly simple arrangement of rocks, benches, and water.

A few days before Day Out of Time, the design outline is painted on the street and then the folks, young and old, come in to paint their own special segment of it. The picture above is an aerial photo of this year’s finished mandala. Here are photos that Duane Burnett took of the painting and of the festivities. And here are photos I took of the day after the festivities, primarily close-ups of segments of the mandala in order to illustrate the painting style, and the way in which one walks through it.

This mandala creation tradition began maybe ten+ years ago, and it is remarkable to see it bloom again, each year, with a different form and features. Kids and adults come year after year to add their visions to a solid piece of Roberts Creek. Great memories, as well as real participation in actions that build the tradition, as opposed to just observing it. Lucky kids! Lucky adults.