The next time you’re walking around your garden, taking your dog for a walk in the park, or checking out your window boxes, look around you – mandalas are omnipresent. You just have to gaze around you to see the central point’s basic shape enveloped by an organized pattern radiating outwards. Sometimes just twisting a pinecone or a flower around will unveil its mandala nature. You can pick inspiration from these natural shapes, designs, and vivid colors in creating your own mandalas.
Mandala patterns are easy to see in flowers—the beautiful petals enclosing a central core form natural designs. Picture a sunflower, with its appearance full of small sunflower seeds, surrounded by bright, large yellow petals. It’s a mandala promised to make you smile. And something equally as pleasant – a daisy. Or perhaps a begonia or a rose for a mandala with protruding petals.
How about delicious vegetables as careful geometric designs? Chop tomato in equal half crosswise, and you’ll find a stem’s centerpiece, with sections around it, each containing the juice and seeds. A bell pepper’s cross-section shows the seeds and veins, and the mushroom underside reveals the stalk and the numerous lines of gills. So, now, you may have to go to the kitchen, cut the vegetables just to watch over the two halves with creative, geometric eyes. Artichokes form one of my preferred designs. All of these are fundamental mandalas in nature.
And please don’t overlook fruit as artistic inspiration. You can observe obvious mandalas when you cut juicy citrus fruit in half. The fruit segments envelop a central stem, and the seeds form extra decoration. Randomly staring at a red strawberry from the top down reveals a radiating seeds pattern on a toothsome bright red background.
Trees, you may have rightly guessed, also contribute to the wide array of mandalas in nature. A trunk’s cross-section exhibits the tree rings. But pinecones also have beautiful symmetry when held perpendicular (Straight).
It’s not challenging to find mandalas in the flora world, but what about mammals and fishes? Are they constructed in awe-inspiring mandala structures?
Starfish cannot be overlooked. The five-pointed arms around the starfish body form a simple pattern. And jellyfish and octopi can also appear to form similar patterns when observed from above as they swim along. And the famed symbiotic relationship champions sea anemones, and so on.
Mandalas are omnipresent in nature, which may explain why they have been used as spiritual and powerful designs by humankind for thousands of years, starting from Ancient India.
Studying and trying to explore inspiring mandalas in their natural habitat serves incredible benefits.
- You’ll come to understand the totality of the mandala.
- You may be motivated to create mandalas of your own based on those you observe around you (plants, fruits, animals, etc.)
- You may be inspired in your color choices in coloring mandalas by the ones you see in nature.
- This is an exciting new way to connect with nature. This is therapeutic.
- You’ll acknowledge even the smallest natural world wonder when you’re looking for mandalas there.
By connecting with and recognizing the mandalas in the natural world around you, you may start to understand how many colorful Ancient Cultures consider the designs to symbolize universal truths.
