Mandalas have been on my mind this week again.  I’ve been working on my 2016 Mandala calendar and am really excited about it.

The theme for next year’s calendar is Wonder, so I went through my quote collection and gathered a large number of thoughts about what it means to utilize our capacity for wonder.  I had many more than the 13 needed (there’s one for the cover in addition to the 12 months) but I like to sense which quote goes with certain mandalas so give myself some extras to work with.  I then went through all my mandala folders to pull out ones that a.) hadn’t been used in the previous 2 calendars and b.) evoked a sense of wonder for me (honestly, they all do that to a large extent but some more than others.)

One would think it would be easy to find 13 mandalas to use for the calendar out of the hundreds, maybe even thousands, that I’ve created over that past several years.  But there needs to be a balance of colors and designs in the calendar in addition to evoking that sense of wonder.  I had 12 mandalas selected but was struggling to find the last one.  Nothing seemed to be “the one”.

And then I friend returned from a trip.  If you’ve been following for a while, you remember that I collect stones.  This friend and I bring stones to each other from our travels. They make the best souvenirs!  She had visited Straight Canyon in Utah picked up this colorful stone to bring back to me.

Straight-Canyon-Stone-©GailSHaile

As soon as I saw the stone, with it’s warm and varied colors, I knew that I needed to make mandalas from an image of it.  And just maybe, I would find that last mandala that the calendar needed.  

I was feeling the need to break out of some boundaries that day, literally and figuratively, so played a bit with expanding the edges beyond the circle on a few of them.  The first two are some of the results of that play.

As soon as I saw the first mandala (it was not the first one I created, just got numbered that way), I knew that it was what I was searching for.  It became the cover and title image for the calendar.

Wonder_Straight-Canyon-Mandala-1_GSHaile

Wonder_Straight-Canyon-Mandala-1_GSHaile

The finishing touches are going on the calendar now and it will be available for order directly from my page on Red Bubble or at the calendar pre-order page on my website.  It will be ready to go in just a few days and I will post again here when it is ready.

Meanwhile, I wanted to share these warm mandalas with you and perhaps have you think about what evokes a sense of wonder for you?