I’ve been making mandalas from flowers and leaves since February 23. It has become my meditation, my art project. It’s how I’m dealing with stress and anxiety. I am a huge fan of land art, ephemeral artworks made of natural, found materials and installed in natural spaces. This is my own little contribution to the art form. I love flowers and used to be a florist, so it seems to fit.

I am using primarily materials from my own garden and yard. Occasionally, when in a wild place or undeveloped lot, I will pick some wildflowers to use, but only if they are totally plentiful. I’ve made mandalas in my parents’ yard and in my in-laws’ yard, using their plants and flowers. I’m not buying cut flowers for this project, it’s just what I can glean.

It seems that every few days a new plant is blooming, making its flowers or pretty leaves available to my art. I don’t want to denude anything, of course—I grow my garden so that it’s beautiful and pleasant to be in—so I only take bits that are abundant. I carefully consider whether I can spare the flowers.

There’s a kind of sacred geometry to these, I think, as is so with all mandalas. I enjoy playing with forms. Each mandala has something wrong with it, a kind of wabi-sabi element. Somehow, this delights me. Even though I really do try to make them symmetrical and geometrical and “right.” Tiny pieces sometimes move out of place. Usually I don’t see their flaws until after I’ve taken the photo and walked away, or the wind has moved all the bits around and destroyed the pattern. Then I take a deep breath and decide to love the mandala anyway.

Some mandalas are simple and some are complicated. I’m enjoying exploring shapes and textures, as well as colors and all their myriad combinations. Sometimes I use bare ground or my lawn as the background. Other times I’ll find a place under a tree where there’s bark or needles. I think the background contributes to the overall feeling of each mandala. So far, every one of them is unique in many ways.

The wind is my enemy when designing a piece. Various sun versus shadow conditions can also be tricky, I’ve learned. Time of day matters, too. If it’s too late in the evening, I find my photo isn’t as nice because of low light. If the day has bright, bright sun, I often can’t tell by looking at my viewfinder if my photo has captured it properly. After taking shots, I play with the brightness, saturation, shadows, and other elements of the photo to try to pull out the best qualities of each mandala. I’m no whiz at postproduction, but I get in there and mess about anyway.

Even if I’m using many flowers of the same type, or many leaves from the same tree or bush, each one is different. I like that these same-element groups don’t always behave the same, or look quite the same, or have the same size, color, or texture, but when viewed as a whole, sort of cooperate and can be taken together.

I think most of all, what I like about making these is that they make me happy. They’re little earthy prayers of my own making, arising from my wild mind and creative soul though the work of my hands, arranging materials that delight me. They are quieting, when my mind is racing. My mandalas give me a moment to stop everything, take a few moments outside, and make something beautiful, even if it lasts only a little while.

I also love that they make other people happy. So, dear friends, thank you for the encouragement and kind words. I think I’ll keep making my garden mandalas for a while longer.

My eyes have been joyful lately, seeing beauty everywhere. This last month has been full of blossoms and blue skies, and I grabbed as many pretty shots as I could along the way. It’s not quite spring, technically, but there’s plenty of springtime magic to behold.

See the star?

The early spring light is sometimes warm and buttery, sometimes watery and wan.

Trees stretch their lacy blooms skyward.

Tiny lawn flowers seem to say, “Winter has no power over me!”

The almonds in particular have put on quite a show, and the quince is by far the sassiest of all.

Demure snowdrops sway quietly on the edges, like girls at a cotillion.

My favorites, perhaps, are the plumb blossoms. They arrive in a rush; one moment the tree is bare, the next it’s enveloped in a cloud of pink. They don’t stay long, just a brief spell. Then they float down to the ground, whole flowers intact, and the earth below is transformed into fairyland.

It’s done now, this spectacular display that happens in view of my front door every March. I look forward to this performance every year.

The petals have mostly succumbed to time and the rains. They’ve fallen to the ground.

But while they were here, they were admired.

Now the magnolia leaves are coming out, fresh and green, promising.

Yet lovely as they are, they do not hold a candle to these flowers

with this sky.

This last is the subject of my next painting. Wish me luck!

My Photinia Rainbow photo is featured today on Maureen Cracknell Handmade. Please pop on over to Maureen’s site and see her exquisite handwork, sewing, and quilting. I’m excited to make her acquaintance and honored that she finds my photo inspiring! I’ll be watching her creative endeavors going forward.

Maureen’s blog is Maureen Cracknell Handmade and can be found at http://maureencracknellhandmade.blogspot.com/.

That gorgeous fabric bundle is for sale by PinkCastleFabrics here: The fabric bundle is for sale here: http://www.etsy.com/listing/79584457/sale-high-traffic-red-yellow-and-green-9

This is my most popular photo on Flickr. I love it. Apparently, lots of other people do, too. It was taken on May 10, 2010. Just a little nostalgia for my morning.

I am not usually one to wax on about science. Don’t get me wrong. I love science and I think it’s perfectly marvelous. People who do science (wait, that’s everyone!) are amazing and clever and inspiring. But usually, I don’t consider myself a science geek …

Except sometimes, when science and beauty intersect. There! Right there is where my interest is captured fully and profoundly.

Enter my latest scientific fascination: W.A. (Wilson Alwyn) Bentley. Mr. Bentley was 17 years old in 1885 when he first paired his love of snowflakes with this newfangled gizmo called the photographic camera. He created on his Vermont family farm the very first photo-micrograph of a snow crystal and thus launched his career. In 1931, the year he died, he published Snow Crystals, in which he published 2,500 of his some 5,000 photographs of snow crystals.

I checked out Bentley’s book (Dover, 1962) from my local library.

And it is AWESOME.

That’s it. Page after page after page of white snow crystals on a black background. Perfect and fragile and exquisite. Fascinating and mind-blowing. Two hundred and one such pages, depicting unique crystals, including snowflakes, ice flowers, windowpane frost, rime, glaze, and graupel. There are only eight pages of text in this miracle of a book.

My dear Mr. Bentley, I think I love you.

The same day I noticed all those orange Chinese fringe flower leaves in my backyard and made the orange leaf “flower,” I also realized that the photinia leaves scattered on the ground were quite colorful. It was surprising. It’s spring, after all, and one expects leaves to be green, or maybe red like the new growth on this plant. When the photinia leaves lie haphazardly where they fall, it’s hard to notice their color variants. Gathering some together revealed almost a rainbow. My gratitude goes out to the land artists who made me realize that leaves, even from the same plant, are not all one color.

Seeing—really seeing—is something that comes naturally to some. For others it requires some discipline. We often interact with our surroundings using a kind of visual shorthand, taking in only the most general details as we move through space. Seeing is something I’m working on because really seeing sometimes leads to finding. Discovery gives one quite a marvelous feeling, don’t you think? Over time, I’ve come to understand that discovery is very often a simple matter of tilting your head to the side, brushing off the debris, and revealing what was there all along. To my way of thinking, this is proof that miracles are all around us—and within.