The material on the following pages is drawn from my journal. I began journaling sporatically in 1981. During 1988 I experienced an outpouring of pictures and words, and I had the first of a series of mandala dreams.
Beginning June 6, 1995 and ending sometime that September, I drew 40 pictures, all in circle form. Many, although not all, were mandalas. In some of these I sought to symbolize dreams I'd had that seemed mandalic to me.
This process was sparked again by a dream I had in July of 1996. I began a series of 10 pictures in which I eventually incorporated the new dream with the other mandala images.
My very first mandala, I realize now, was a circle of stones I created in the woods where I take walks. One of the round pictures I drew in 1995 recalls this stone circle, built in the fall of 1989:
I had to carry heavy stones up a steep hillside and through tangled undergrowth to construct it, but making that stone circle felt very important. (At that time, the career in church ministry I had planned for since high school had come to an end after only six years.) I buried two smooth stones from the shore of a lake in the center; and I would sit quietly inside the circle from time to time.
The buried stones seemed to me like a yin and yang of phallus and womb. This bringing together of masculine and feminine imagery occurs in this mandala, too:
On the first page of the journal in which I did many of these drawings, I wrote:
Everything living dreams of individuation, for everything strives toward its own wholeness. --Jung