I remember in 7th or 8th grade, my art teacher, whose name I can’t remember anymore, had us draw and color ‘mandalas’… I realized just yesterday that I probably draw and see the way I do today partially because of her! I see things in lines and curves and shapes because of the assignments she gave us to draw inside of a circle…

And in thinking about mandalas, as I drew for my own amusement, I remembered my mother (Cynthia Blomquist Gustavson)’s poem (which was printed in Sojourners a couple of years ago) about the Cross-Timbers in Oklahoma… I’ll print it here:

Hundreds of years growing on a steep hill, desolate, aging
despite scarce nourishment, they wait for history to recognize them.

Crooked cedars, centuries old, twist in the shifting light of seasons,
and cling to a long forgotten hill shared by three-hundred-

year-old post oaks, every head cut off by lightning, every stump holding out
side limbs like wires on ragged and weathered clothes-line poles.

Recorded history reveals itself in the cross timbers’ rings, some narrow
as a spider’s thread, examined not by eye, but magnified to count

each period of drought, season of rain, each scarring fire, tornado, flood,
times of settlement and grazing. Washington Irving slept here

among the timbers, now a century older, and proclaimed them
beautiful. They have waited these years to hear it once again.

I wait. Transition is permanent. I understand these trees which grow
around rock and moss, trees which stretch limbs in crooked lines

seeking elusive light, trying to catch the run-away water, clinging to life
long enough to leave a legacy on the land before becoming

firewood. Their endurance, spirituality of patience, their
mandala of encyclopedic rings. What they have is what I want.

I made the connection between my life and my mother’s in that second, as I was up late drawing in my sketchbook! She is right — the patience of the cross-timbers is what I want, what we all want — the peace of stability, and the knowledge that your roots are safe. That we can grow, but we are firmly rooted in place.

I have moved around all my life, and I can’t claim one location as my home. I have many feelings, and of course, my family, that bring me to the place of feeling at home, but I am a wanderer. And that mandala is what I want.

By the way, this drawing is not a mandala — I drew outside the circle — that is also my personality — I do things that I know I shouldn’t have done. Just imagine that I didn’t draw outside the circle’s boundary:)