One of the thought provoking things I brought back from Crestone, Colorado on that first trip in summer 2009 was a set of Tibetan prayer flags. I don’t remember knowing about them prior, and I do love to bring something of places where I’ve been home with me as talisman. And they’re colorful. I mean, I did come face to face with them in Colorado, after all.
From pictures I’ve seen since I acquired my set of prayer flags, looks like a body ought to have a whole string of ‘em, letting them cover lots of linear space. I suppose if they are prayer flags, multiple flags would only multiply the prayers. Can’t be a bad idea.
My string of flags consisted of eight individual flags, a set of four duplicated. Each had an Eastern-world line drawing printed with a message in a lovely script I couldn’t decipher. At the bottom of one flag, in English, was written ‘Knowledge’; on another, ‘Prosperity’; on another, ‘Long Life’; on the last, another lovely wish that somehow escapes me.
Part of the problem here is that I took down my prayer flags. You may have noticed the past tense verbs in the paragraph above. It was just that after hanging on the back porch for a couple of Ohio winters, the line broke and I figured at the time that what was left wasn’t long enough to tie another string to, so down from the canopy pipes they came.
Did I throw the things away? Maybe. I just went searching for the injured litany of wishes in all the places where I keep back porch stuff with no luck.
And now the big query: Is one allowed to throw prayer flags away?
Right now as I sit here on the back porch with my laptop glowing in the fading daylight, I wonder what I’ve done and what karma might come of it.
I’m really not that concerned about it because, after all, flags are only fabric. The beauty of the flags is the state of mind they engender in the people whose space they inhabit. Even in their absence, my set of prayer flags have me thinking, so regardless of where they are, they have made me mindful of their purpose, and therein is their being.
One of the things I learned about the flags when they came into my life was that as they weathered in their place and they began to fray, the loose threads would spread the prayer intentions to the four winds. By the time the support string holding my prayers together failed, some threads had, indeed, departed the mother flag and had drifted off into Wild Grace. It felt good to see them as they blessed my space.
I do miss them.
They were replaced, in a way, by a much smaller set received this week from an organization the Dali Lama is currently promoting. In a fundraising letter I got from His Holiness a few days ago, a small, mailable set of prayer flags was included. I did, in fact, unpackage the set and immediately set them free in the local air, hanging them on the canopy pipes at the other end of the porch.
Which got me to thinking about the flags all over again. Ergo, this blog entry.
In the winter, the old set of prayer flags were open to the elements: wind, snow, rain, whatever. As I recall, it was the winter that took them down.
But in summer, they -- as does this new set -- resided under the canopy, out of the sun and rain. They got breezes okay, but not the tough, fading stuff of Nature.
Is that how prayers should be handled: protected from the elements?
Sure got me to thinking...
In any case, when I return to Crestone this summer for a week with Cindy Lou, Noah, and our young friend Adel, you can count on my buying a handful of sets of prayer flags. Just seems like the right thing to do. They’ll be colorful reminders of a prayerful, sacred place that I like to be reminded of as often as I can.
The Rockies are a good place to be. Crestone especially.
Today’s elder idea:
The Colorado rocky mountain high
I’ve seen it raining fire in the sky
You can talk to God and listen to his casual reply
Rocky mountain high
John Denver
‘Rocky Mountain High’ (1972)
image: From goodfortune.co.nz via Yahoo image search. Pretty cool, eh?
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