final post of the sand mandala. we arrived as Tenzin and others readied for the dismantling. the school wanted the dismantling to occur outside where there was more room for the students to see. it's a boy's school. I thought it was co-ed as girls were around. the table was carried thru the doorway and students gathered round. some of the faculty spoke a few enriching words then Tenzin gave a glimmer of Buddhist precepts. then he chanted a prayer and while ringing a bell he used a tool to cut the lines of the mandala then invited boys to take a brush and sweep the sand into the centre of the table. now, I don't want to get all exotic about this, the temptation is there, but a sense of the life of the work was very evident. in seeing it created, in how he approached it: you could think of it as a world. after the ceremony the sand was to be taken to the Concord River, the selfsame by which I was born. we went there with a woman and her son who we know. the sky pended imminent thumper. the site where Tenzin would release the sand was where we had encountered the winter solstice celebration on our wedding anniversary last year. a place that native Americans were said to hold dear, and where colonists pastured their cattle. Tenzin sat at the river's edge and chanted then took the jar of sand and, ringing a bell and chanting, poured it here and there into the water. rain fell as he did so. when he finished, the windows of heaven opened, with thunder and lightning. a release, I should say, that seemed quite a propos. pictures at 11.