The Sand Mandala of Writing

On letting a book go

I was serving as a sensitivity reader for a company in the UK, and part of the job was to look at some Buddhist content in a children’s book. One of the activities for the kids was to make a mandala, which for Buddhists is an image for meditation and is said to be a portrait of the universe. The next few days, I was thinking about this amazing thing I got to witness long ago in Savannah, Georgia. (Apparently it was June 2009). Tibetan monks visited in order to make a sand mandala—a massive and perfect image made with grains of dyed sand. They’d rub a metal tube with a stick in order to pour just the right amount of dyed sand to the perfect place for the image.

The most beautiful and powerful moment was when they were done. They lifted the table and carried it to the river, and then released the sand into the water. In an instant, this ornate holy image was gone, and it’s said that releasing it into water carries the healing powers to the world. (You can check out a video here of a mandala being made and dismantled.)

A book, written by one person for often no clear reason, is no sand mandala, but I was also thinking in these same recent days, about the act of letting go, or making something ornate and then doing nothing with it. Often, instead of a ritual of healing and release, leaving a book “done” but not putting it into the world is heartbreaking or confusing.

I have a completed memoir about a difficult time in my life, one that I worked on voraciously for five years. And then when it was done, I thought about what it would be like to publish it, and it didn’t seem right to do so for various reasons, including loved ones who might be impacted. So I let it sit, and I used bits and pieces of it here and there, and now I’m sort of harvesting from it at will when I need some of that material. I was thinking about what might look like “pointless” effort in writing a book like that: trying to make beauty out of difficulty. Writing the book didn’t seem pointless, and it doesn’t now. It really helped me, through a kind of deep exposure therapy and the need to make narrative and find insights, to get into a different frame of mind about what I’d been through. (Okay, though, to be real, that also took a massive amount of Zoloft and sessions of EMDR and constant therapy and Al-Anon.)

What does it mean, though, to have written a book and done nothing with it? I think I’m now at the place where I’ve moved past the material in the book—I’ve encountered new challenges, have grown beyond its need and its ending. And in a way, the act of being so so careful with every word, writing and rewriting it, was a kind of devotion to the act of paying attention, trying to describe to myself what things felt like, and what they meant. And I do believe that was extremely beneficial. In effect, I put my memories in new places, made an order out of chaos. I struggled so so much with the voice in that book, and that struggle taught me a lot about voice, which I used in Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto.

When I think of “my books,” I also think of that memoir—not with sadness anymore, but with a kind of satisfaction that it really was a good book. And I think its material may be helpful in the next thing I’m writing, too. In this world of goals and outcomes, where your labor has to be accounted for, has to be “productive,” in a way it is a beautiful thing to just make a beautiful thing—I think the book was, is, beautiful—and then not sell it, not use it for gain or to get any kind of external ego gratification from it. I held onto it because my love for people who might be affected was greater than my desire for another book, and greater than the desire for testimony—for readers to see what I’ve been through. In writing the book, I got to know what I’ve been through in a deep way.

I also have another book that didn’t sell, and I do not feel at peace about that at all—I’m wrestling like a feral cat with it, dead set on making it better, in a contest with myself and the world (just wanted to be honest that I’m not all sparkles and light over here!)

Have you let a book go? How did it feel? How do you think about it?

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I’d written in a previous post about the panel I was on at the 19th Annual NIH Pain Symposium, and the link to the archived videocast of the entire conference, days 1 and 2, are now available.

Videocast Day 1| May 30, 2024 https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=54765

Videocast Day 2| May 31, 2024 https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=54785