May Newsletter

MAY 2008

The Flower Mandala Project:
An interview with artist, David J. Bookbinder.

Please enjoy these divine images by David J. Bookbinder, and get involved in his wonderful Flower Mandala Project. Below is an interview about his work, and information about how you can contribute words, phrases or writings that these images invoke in you.

Question: What was the inspiration for your Flower Mandalas? I know an incident triggered your desire to make this work, but would love to know why you think the outcome manifested in this way aesthetically.

I began working with the mandala form by accident.

I was in a particularly dark place when I started to make these images. A very important relationship had ended, I was physically ill and had neither a clear diagnosis nor any real hope for recovery, and I had become isolated by both the illness and the end of the relationship. During this bleak period I took up photography again, after a 20-year hiatus. Initially it was a way to distract myself from chronic pain. I discovered that walking on the beach eased the pain, and I grew fascinated with the sky and the sea. As I walked, I paused to take pictures. I spent a couple of hours each day doing this. When it got too cold to walk the beach, I began to edit and manipulate these images, and I found that this process, too, took away some of the pain.

Eventually I happened upon a way to rearrange segments of my images into mandala-like creations. I began with my images of the sea and the sky, then experimented with other objects. I came across a photograph of a dying dandelion I'd taken toward the end of the season and wondered what would happen if I took something that was already mandala-like and "mandalaized" it.

The result was the first of the Flower Mandalas. It felt both more peaceful and more powerful than the other mandalas I'd created. As I applied the same technique to other flower images, I found myself feeling not only distraction from pain, but also a sometimes breathless excitement in the initial stage, followed by a deep, centering peacefulness as I brought each mandala to completion.

I joined a photographer's group and showed these images to the other members. Although they seemed to like them well enough, they didn't really have much to say, other than that they "aren't really photographs anymore." I thought maybe a painter would have a more detailed response and ran them by the wife of a friend, who painted. My friend's wife had, it turned out, been making mandalas for years. She suggested that each mandala was trying to tell me something I needed to know. "Put them up around your house. Look at them. Listen to what they're saying."

I put them around my house. I hung them in my office. I made them the wallpaper of my computer and let Microsoft Windows change them randomly whenever I rebooted. What I found was that the act of creating mandalas and then looking deeply at what I had made resulted in a spiritual feedback loop:

The original flower moved me enough to photograph it.
The mandala-making process distilled the initial feeling into something more specific and more deeply felt -- something inside that was called out and then embodied.
Looking at the mandalas I'd made brought that embodied feeling back to me.

With each iteration of the creating/embodying cycle, some new facet of my self, previously inaccessible, became more revealed, and with each re-experiencing of what I had captured, I became more whole.

I also happened upon the Star of David as the central shape of the mandalas. Earlier mandalas used different multiples of an image segment, but six iterations of a flower slice usually seemed the most pleasing. Only later did I start to see the hexagons and stars within the images, and only much later did it occur to me that the name "David" means "beloved" in Hebrew, and that by choosing the Star of David as the luminous center of my images I might be expressing self-love.

Q. As Buddhist practitioners, we can work with the symbology of mandalas; if we are Enlightened, we see a perfect world. Is this the way you approach your flower mandalas? Trying to create perfection?

I don't try to create perfection. The flowers I photograph are already, each in their own way, perfect. For me, the creation of the mandala images is a way of dialoging between myself and the much larger creative forces that made the natural objects I photograph. I try to capture what feels like the aspect of the flower that speaks most strongly to me and to meditate on it both during and following mandala image creation. It is a way of becoming intimate with these natural objects and their essence.

Q. In nature we are delighted by symmetry, yet the nature of nature itself seems to be sort of wild and unpredictable. What is the significance of symmetry in your work?

The symmetry of these images is primarily a way of centering myself. I have never done ceramics, but I imagine that what I do with the mandala images feels somewhat like what potters experience when they throw pots. Although the physical act of creating a symmetrical flower image is not at all like that of working a potter's wheel, my mind's eye does rotate around the luminous centers of these images, and the effect is calming, reminiscent of meditation.

Although I stumbled on the (symmetrical) Star of David as the central structure of these images, the symbolism of the hexagram is important to me. In many traditions, the Star of David, composed of two overlapping triangles, represents the reconciliation of opposites — male/female, fire/water, and so on. Their combination symbolizes unity and harmony, which are central not only to my artwork but to my way of life and my work as a psychotherapist.

Q. As practitioners, whatever we do, we are supposed to be having helping others in mind. What role do you think your art plays in bringing happiness to others?

The effect of these images on others is largely why I have started to bring them out into the world. Initially, they were a private art-as-healing project. When I showed some of them to others, they responded with a kind of pleasure that I had not often seen in response to my previous work. Once I started posting the images on the web, I'd get occasional comments from people telling me how calming or moving or spirituality-enhancing the images were.

Since December, 2007, I've been posting them to my "Flower Mandalas" blog on Beliefnet.com. I've received dozens of e-mails and comments from all over the world that reinforce my sense that these images are bringing happiness to others. The comments range from a simple "thank you" or "I love your mandalas!" to more detailed statements like, "It's amazing to me how peaceful and powerful your mandalas are. They're very calming and reassuring. Restoring faith in humanity one flower at a time."

Q. Artists, writers, poets and musicians have spoken about feeling the divine creating through them – do you have this sort of experience whilst you are working? And if so, how do you ‘get yourself out of the way’ to let that process happen?

I don't feel as if I can take much credit for these images or the responses to them. I feel more like a conduit than a creator when I make them. I sense something in the flower, then again in the slice I take from the flower, then again in the multiplication of that slice, which I think of as an amplifier of whatever I'm picking up. In this sense, I'm no more the creator of these images than someone who tunes the FM dial is the creator of whatever sweet music comes through the speakers.

At my best, I feel as if I'm in wordless communication with divine creation, examining it in the minute particulars necessary to create these images. This feeling is not restricted to my work with mandalas. I feel that way, now, when I am lost in the process of shooting and processing images of the natural world. There is something prayer-like about it -- that it's an act of devotion putting me in wordless communication with creative forces far greater than mine.

Q. Can you speak about your intention for this work for the wider community and how they can contribute to the discourse on the Flower Mandala project?

The flower mandalas are part of a larger effort at promoting the use of art as a means for healing and personal transformation — the primary purposes it has served for me. Right now, my primary vehicle is the "Flower Mandalas" blog on Beliefnet.com. However, in the tradition of Carl Jung I intend, as well, to publish a book pairing 52 flower mandala images with inspirational quotations such that each image‑and‑quote pair resonates with a fundamental aspect of human experience.

Recently, Lama Marut used five of my flower mandalas to represent his teachings on the Six Perfections. With no feedback from me, he used them in precisely the way I have been imagining them being used: under each mandala was a single word or phrase (for example, Wisdom), and then text associated with that word or phrase that expanded on the concept. Lama Marut even chose the same image I chose to represent Joy, a dahlia hybrid flower mandala.

It struck me that your organization is part of my ideal audience, and so I'm seeking feedback from this community, I'd like to hear responses from your readers to these images. I'm especially interested in a word or phrase that specific images might evoke, and in either inspirational quotations or brief original writings that elaborate on that word or phrase.

My hope its that I will find a sympathetic publisher, and that a broader distribution of this work will occur. So, I'm also interested in any possible avenues to such a publisher that your readers might suggest.

Contact information:
David's website: http://www.phototransformations.com
e-mail: phototransformations@verizon.net
"Flower Mandalas" blog: http://blog.beliefnet.com/flowermandalas
"Flower Mandalas Project" discussion group: http://community.beliefnet.com/flowermandalas


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