Thanks to everyone who has participated in the Mandalas for Marinke remembrance project. The deadline to contribute has passed (contact me if you needed an extension), but that doesn’t mean our daily posts are coming to an end. Far from it. I still have well over 100 contributions to share with you including today’s contribution from Lani.
See all Mandalas for Marinke here
This is a small eight-round crochet mandala made using neon versions of the colors of the rainbow. I love the neon twist. And I also love how all of the colors of the rainbow are in order except for purple, which has been pulled from the end and put into the center. It has an extra ring of light blue around, which hints at the sky a rainbow would be seen in, and also gives a subtle sophistication to the rainbow palette. The extra ring of red neon around the end feels like the sun to me and again changes the impact of the rainbow coloring. I love these choices.
This crochet mandala comes from Lani in California. It’s the first mandala that she has crocheted. Many of us who participated in this project, myself included, had never made a crochet mandala before but had admired them, especially Wink’s designs, and appreciate that the project gave us the impetus to try out mandalas. I know that for me it started what just might be a lifelong love affair with making them! Lani says that she hopes to become as skilled as Wink was in making hers. A lovely contribution and a lovely sentiment, to which she adds, “Thinking of you Wink”.
For the depression awareness portion of the project today I wanted to share this TED talk by Andrew Solomon who shares his story about experiencing depression. It begins with an Emily Dickinson poem and he says, “we know depression through metaphors” (through art), then he goes on to describe what it was like when he first experienced depression.
He says eloquently, “The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.” He goes on after that to describe the every day hassle of life in depression, something I’m all too familiar with, saying, “I would decide I should have lunch, but then I would think that I’d have to get the food out, and put it on the plate, and cut it, and chew it, and swallow it, and it felt to me like The Stations of The Cross” and that while it seems overwhelming, you’re also painfully, acutely aware of how ridiculous it is, because most people manage to eat lunch every day without it being such an arduous task. Oh it’s so familiar. This is just the beginning of his half hour talk that you can see here:
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