Glass Pebble Pictures

There is a beautiful story on the Spirit Play training CD called "The Buddha Bowl." It's in the Holidays-->Earth Day section of the CD. The thrust of the story is that every being in the Universe is made of the same stuff--sand and bone and stardust--though something especially nice about this story is that it introduces the concept of a koan, opens the possibility for discussing gender equality and inequality in communities, delves into the teacher-student relationship, and so many other things. (It's a story aimed at older elementary kids.)

At the end of the story, our main character, Fu, casts handfuls of sand onto the floor and the sand glitters in the moonlight. For a special work sample available after this story is told, I borrowed an idea from my friend and colleague Kathy Smith, making circular mandalas using shiny glass pebbles.

Here's how the cost breaks down:

Small bags of pebbles in six colors, plus clear--$2 each (after JoAnn's coupon and teacher discount) for a total of $14.

Thrift store silverware tray, $1.50 (You can have each color grouping in its own clear plastic box from the dollar store, or of course in baskets, too.)

Circles cut out of scrap leather, $0. (You can use felt or craft foam. What I like about the leather is that it's a natural material and it grips the surface a little bit so your circle doesn't slip as you work on it.)

So, this work sample in total cost $15.50, and took about 30 minutes to assemble, which was mostly cutting out the circles and sorting and re-sorting the colored glass pebbles after my toddler "helped" me with my work.

Two things I want to add about this project:

One, when I first saw this, it was at a conference for adults, and it was offered as an in-between time activity, or an activity to do quietly while also attending to a lecture or discussion. Kathy had sea shells, little pine cones, acorn caps, and other such things to add to the mandalas, too, in addition to the colorful glass pebbles. It was, by far, the favorite activity of those of us in attendance. I plan on using these glass pebble mosaics as an art response for a retreat that I'm helping the women's group here to organize; the theme of the retreat is "Embracing the Impermanent." While it's possible these glass pebble pictures could be glued down, the idea really is to not glue them down so that the ephemeral nature of the activity becomes part of the experience.

Two, as I've formalized this activity for use in the Spirit Play classroom, it has been sitting on my dining room table. My homeschoolers come up and make pictures with them, just for fun, to pass the time, as their own kind of response to one thing or another, while we're chatting. That last one is the best. I first learned about that idea from Sandra Dodd's essay "Doing Two Things at Once, or Leaning on a Truck and Other Parallel Play." There's good science that shows that some of us benefit from doing something open-ended and rote, such as knitting or doodling, while also listening or discussing.

Skull.

Eyeball.

 (Thanks to the homeschoolers for those last two, plus the Earth in the picture above.)