Paris Mosque Mandalas

Life has been so busy lately it's hard to find time to select something from the present. So I turn to the past, to something I wrote after visiting a mosque in Paris.

 

I stand on something, it's not big but so unexpected I stop in my tracks. I look down on a small green object, a hard unripe fruit perhaps. It's camouflaged by the turquoise tiles spread like a shiny sea all over the sunken garden, shells of light around the areas where plants grow. Bright pink roses 

against a green sea. Slightly shocking that a green nut has fallen outside its earthen plot.

To walk on these green tiles feels almost impossible at first, later, turns into a secret and private joy. As if the water tiles conspire to hold you up. Light flashes, among the footfalls. The plants breed silence and are fed by it. Nourished by silence and prayer, they spill colour. And one hard green fruit. Slipped under my foot like a reminder – remember me, don't forget this, it seems to say. I have not forgotten. The living seed and the painted rose-shaped pattern on the wall. I'd been moving towards the pattern when I trod on the seed.

What is it about roundness, its defining and enclosing nature and the way it opens out and points to what is beyond itself? Surely it must be the hallmark of the invisible for nothing else so perfectly describes the contraction in space that implies, points to, what is beyond it? Both target and source. Something to seize hold of the vision, focus it, and in that action, allowing all the rest of us, not trained on the rippling pattern, to be supported by the invisible, to rest in it.

This vibrating wheel of colour radiates green and blue and affirmation.

The mandala pattern is the shape of rose, the shape, it seems, of who we really are.