Mandalas

This life remains a mandala even when there seems to be only chaos, disorder, even ruin. Beauty of balance, symmetry of design, from a thumb-sized succulent to a spiral galaxy so incomprehensibly vast that a million light years voyage wouldn't cross its span, gargantuan mega structures so massive even thinking about them becomes a sort of meditation, our bipolar, tethered, and unexpanded minds must struggle to divine the unknowable against all odds or sensibility, yet we go on to Mars or beyond, build bigger telescopes, curious and restless humankind never happy to just end the great and perpetual search for...what, exactly? None can recall, but it yet remains unfound. So, search on, but know you're certain to at least find what you expect, it's all the rest that is unwarned, this life full of shocks and loss, sudden change, sometimes even horrific, when the bullet thru the bedroom wall finds the toddler's skull, or the airplane plunging two hundred doomed souls to a cold oblivion for no reason beyond a failed bolt- then where is that beautiful mandala? Or, when war scars the young face of the future with bloody wounds of thousand-year old tribal hatreds and fears- then where may we find the musical spinning wheels? When evil assumes the global thrones of power, or when an entire family of nations is held hostage by hardened tyrannies of unchallenged authority, with outnumbered freedom, for the moment, beaten and retreated?

This life remains a mandala even when there seems to be only a child's heart broken every second, or someone's best dream kicked to the gutter by rotten greed in the form of men. Then, we had better declare a truce between stupidity and so-called progress. Some peace, please, between sensibility and self-destruction. Finally, tame this gross and shameful monster of our raging culture. The mandalas of life spin in opposing directions all at once, there is no disorder in chaos, no reliable algorithms for yesterday, now, or tomorrow.