The "wood busters", the crew that plans, builds, and maintains the daily bonfires in the roundhouse during Brushwood's festival season started early.  They drove in the tractor, and cleared out the old fire pit, and dumped loads of sand and smoothed out the circle,  12 meters across.  (about 35 feet).  Jason spiked in the center.

By 10 am, I had copies of this pattern, 40 pounds of rice flour, a stick and string ready, and people started showing up for class.
I told them about the history of rangoli, the traditions, and that the reason old women got up in rural India every morning to create these beautiful, fragile patterns for the puja room, where the household deities are kept. I told them how and why women daily create a sacred space that is the physical dwelling spot of the deity, a transitory cathedral.  I told them that this practice may have originated the sacred circles created to recreate and regenerate order when the world  was perceived to be in disorder.   Then, we got to work.

We started by tying a string to a spike driven at the center of the dance area, and marking out 7 concentric circles in the sand. We pulled the string straight across the center point, and made a diameter.  Then, using the tight string and sticks marking the sand just like a geometry class compass, pencil and straight edge, we constructed a right angle, then bisected angles until we had the circles laid out into 16ths.

We started in the center and marked the lines in the innermost ring  in the sand with our fingers.  When the looked right, we made lines of rice flour.
When the innermost lotus petals were finished, we took a water break and did the next concentric ring.  It was blazing hot, and we were in full sun working in the sand.  It was HARD WORK, bending or crouching down and laying out these lines.  A dozen of us worked from 10 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon to complete the rangoli. We interlocked all the lines of the lotus knot, to make a single beautiful line.  It was lovely and amazing.  People got quiet when they saw it, and nobody dared disturb it.

We dragged in every drummer we could find, and met at "dusk o'clock", or quarter-to dark. People gathered and watched us put in the tea lights on all the khamsas. When all the women who helped make the rangoli turned up, I explained a bit to the crowd the significance of this rangoli rice flour lotus knot thing in the dirt, and we started to light the fire and dance it into the dirt.  It was a lovely summer evening.

We did Rangoli 2 more times. The got better, a quantum leap better, each time!
See:
Bees and Starbursts  http://www.sphosting.com/reverndbunny/messages.html
The Ephemeral Cathedral      http://www.sphosting.com/reverndbunny/1day.html
Dancing it Down   http://www.sphosting.com/reverndbunny/night1.html

Catherine Cartwright Jones summer 2002
info@mehandi.com