On Chickens and Mandalas

Post by Lara

18 February 2014

Today as I came home from school I was greeted by Dot, our first and favorite hen.  Dot’s been sitting on eggs lately—she laid 7 and now she’s brooding.  That means we only see her once or twice a day when she gets up to stretch her legs, grab a drink, relieve herself, and peck at a bit of dry rice we throw her.  Dot and I have a special relationship—she comes right up to me in the afternoons and waits patiently for half a cup of rice to hit the yard. If I dally, she might peck my leg gently.  If too many chickens come running when I throw the rice, she leaves the group and waits off to the side for me to throw a special handful to her.  I oblige, because she’s just too loyal to let down.  As I watched Dot eat today, I thought about what’s going to become of her and her 4 sister hens when we leave in half a year.  She won’t lay eggs forever—when she’s stopped, someone will decide it’s harvest time and have a chicken dinner. We tend not to kill and eat the chickens we raise (perhaps more on that in a later post), though we definitely understand the dynamic—chickens are livestock, and when Dot ceases to be the first and favorite hen at our house, she’ll be up on the menu.  I could worry about that, or try to prevent it, but soon enough I’ll be halfway around the world with a host of different problems in my mind, and the fate of Dot the Hen will be far out of my hands. 

In my world religions class in high school, I learned about the Buddhist and Hindu tradition of making mandalas—elaborate pieces of artwork made with colored sand on a flat surface.  Buddhist monks work carefully to design and complete mandalas, sometimes placing single grains of sand at a time, and then when the work is complete, they take a broom and sweep it all away, in an effort to remain cognizant of the fact that everything in this world is temporary and we can’t allow ourselves to be attached to physical things that will one day break or die or fly away.  The point of a mandala is the making of it—the effort expended to make something beautiful, geometric, complex.  That it won’t be there a few seconds after you’ve finished it doesn’t negate the work you did—whether it lasted a few moments or several millennia, it was never meant to exist forever. 

In that class in high school, we did our own mandalas with crayons on paper. I did my best to make a beautiful design, filling in all the colors I could and concentrating on getting everything right. At the end of the class period, our teacher made us rip the mandalas up and throw them away. I wasn’t finished coloring mine and it caused me almost physical pain to destroy my little piece of art, especially when I hadn’t even gotten to complete it.  I knew that was the point, but it didn’t make it any easier. 

The lesson of making a mandala was one of my most memorable in high school—you work hard, do something as well as you can, delve into the details, and then before you’re ready, push it aside and let the world reduce it back to chaos and spontaneity.  The fact that it didn’t end up in a frame or in a museum doesn’t take away from the beauty and completeness of the mandala—it only serves to illustrate the things we can and can’t control in this world. I can control my effort, my drive, my creativity—I can’t control what others will do with my work, how quickly it fades from memory, how it will be interpreted after I’m no longer around to give my own explanations.  I’ve learned from mandala-making that I shouldn’t rely on external parameters to measure my life’s work—that sometimes the act of doing, making, creating, building something is more important than the object built.

Peace Corps service strikes me as a cogent parallel to mandala-making.  Those who volunteer surely came into service with an end in mind—whether it was teaching kids to read or reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS or learning how to surf or getting seasoned at raising chickens (hey—not everyone joined Peace Corps to save the world). Still, what makes the most impact is the time spent building a life here.  The work itself—the daily activities and interactions we have with the people we’re serving, that’s the point of being here.  Time is short.  I have two years to learn how to be a Sierra Leonean woman—cooking rice, hand-washing clothes, walking over a mile to buy a cup of beans, getting my hair braided for holidays, learning the language, watching my pineapples grow, and caring for my chickens.  At the end of two years, everything about my life here ceases to be mine—I’ll go back to the states and leave all the untied ends of Peace Corps life to unravel in my absence.  The mural I painted will crack and fade and eventually be painted over.  The programs I started may continue or they may not—it won’t be up to me anymore.  And the key to going home satisfied is to carry the lesson of the mandala with me—each perfect little piece of sand you placed had its moment—and now the moment’s up.  Let the world do with it what it will. Be glad for the effort.