This summertime has slowed the Mandala project down. There are garden crops to tend, harvest and process; perennial borders to maintain, water and prune; searing midday sun to shelter from inside the window-shaded darkened house in attempts at staying cool.
All that and 13 of 18 stages of the Mandala are now complete with 36,706 official stitches. I note "official" because I am not keeping count of all my reworked, undone, redone stitches and rows. The project has officially become too large to photograph in the one big circle it has become. While there is floor space enough to support it, there isn't height to manage a picture. Still, the partial picture provides sufficient reference to understand the whole.
In a mad dash of get 'er done before the zucchinis take over my existence I finished this beautiful section. I love the green and brown previous stage, moving into purple and lavender of this stage; it reminds me of this stunning prairie vista with earth curving arcs of tilled earth and green fields melding into the blue purple mountains, sunrises and sunsets. This harvest season of heavy hanging orange moons and burning orange suns of rises and sets are stitched into the memories of the Mandala.
We are at the end of August and Covid-19 is still running wild among us. Idaho's confirmed cases topped 31,000 this week with more than 350 dead. Globally we are counting 25 million cases with nearly 1 million deaths; the US accounts for a quarter of both of those statistics. Summer festivals, rodeos, reunions and fairs went on as if we there were no cause for concern.
At my most pessimistic I wonder if the best way to manage this weight of death is to embrace the nihilistic approach that this pandemic is doing what all pandemics do: Successfully reducing the meaningless human population of Earth.