Tibetan Buddhists have a very beautiful way of expressing and remembering an unquestionable truth, that we are hardly a point in the cosmos: they make wonderful and complicated mandalas of colored sand. With great patience and small tubes, they blow and create with sand animals, flowers and symbolic and spiritual forms. They take days, sometimes even weeks.
AND WHAT DO THEY DO WHEN THEY HAVE COMPLETED THAT WONDERFUL JOB?
They dump everything in an urn. Half of the urn is distributed among the people present, so that they share their symbolism. The other half returns to the river, from where the sand came out, in order to reach the rest of the world.
“Celebrating the transitory is strangely comforting. Spend an afternoon drawing chalk on your patio and then watch the wind or rain blow them away. Lie on the grass with friends and invent fantastic creatures drawn in the clouds, watching how they transform from ducks to dragons. Make a sand castle. Accept the inescapable fact that nothing lasts forever and enjoy the peace that gives us this inevitable truth. "