My Stickered Sand Mandalas

Impermanence.

I lost a notebook last week. Or was it a journal? It was so many things. Dog-eared, scuffed, pages swollen by thousands of heavy-handed pencil tracks, it was filled with ideas, worries and, lately anyway, a few short entries saying things like “Have I completely run out of things to write about?” Anything to keep the pencil moving over the page.

I buy these cheap, college-ruled composition books and plaster them with stickers so that I can tell them apart. Last year I named a song I wrote Pasta Luna Love Song after a sticker I’d stuck to the notebook in which I’d first sketched the lyrics.

The notebook I lost had a round pink sticker on the cover with the word NORMAL emblazoned in black at its center. I got that sticker at a café in Indianapolis a couple of years ago. I think NORMAL is the name of a coffee roaster. I chose that particular sticker because I wanted to get myself to think of writing as my new normal, just something that I do.

When my searches didn’t lead me to my NORMAL journal, I placed a water glass upside-down in my windowsill. My girlfriend MB learned this from her wasband’s girlfriend Amy. Amy, who learned it from a great aunt, believes in this practice for recovering lost things. You’re supposed to leave the glass in that position until your lost item turns up. You’re also supposed to believe that it will.

The water glass has only had three or four days to work on the problem, but I’m pretty sure this notebook’s gone for real. I’ve been to the library, to the café, to the other library, the other café, back to a restaurant I’d visited, all the places I carried it to on the day it went missing. I visited some of the places twice but… no luck.

I’ve turned my car inside out a couple of times, searched every logical place at my studio and in my tiny 800-square-foot apartment. No notebook.

I’d been adding to that journal for over a year. It still had a good thirty blank pages waiting for my thoughts.

This loss isn’t a tragedy, because I know I’ll write more, and I have many other dog-eared notebooks that I can mine for ideas and potential song lyrics.

I’ll never know exactly what was lost.

Though the journal’s disappearance frustrates and irritates me a bit, it hasn’t angered or upset me too much. Even knowing that a stranger could be reading (provided of course they could decipher my handwriting) first-person accounts of my anxieties, gratitude, insecurities and loves doesn’t bother me too much.

It’s annoying, it’s sad, it’s a little inconvenient, but… It also means it’s time to pick a new sticker for my next composition book, start a new cycle, stir my creativity into a shiny new vessel.

As I sat sipping a decaf Americano at one of the cafés that didn’t have my notebook in their lost-and-found this morning, a 2023 reflection on Tibetan sand mandalas by Anand Lal-Tabak turned up in my feed:

This process signifies the impermanent nature of all that we do and is still disconcerting to me to this day.⁴So much effort is placed into meticulously creating this beautiful patterned design. Why would someone destroy something so beautiful immediately after it is created? Who will get to experience it? And yet, it brings out one of the greatest inner struggles we face as artists. The separation of the process of creation from the reception of our created work. The destruction or loss of all of our creative efforts that is inevitable with the passing of time.

I’m moving on, but I think I’ll leave that water glass upside down for another week, and perhaps work a little harder on the believing part.