Wanda Oslomeier visted a Tibetan
monastery once as a child and it inspired her beyond words. When she
was finally old enough to buy her own home, she built a small
reminder of that shrine and placed it on her coffee table. To her,
however, the shrine seemed empty. One replica bell and one clay monk
hardly captured the life-changing majesty of the secluded temple. So
she expanded. She got rid of her coffee table and began to build a
diorama of the room in which they housed the bell, but a room on its
lonesome was a sad thing to behold, so she cleared out her living
room and recreated the monastery's entire meditation building. Of
course, this suggested the monks lived one-dimensional lives, so she
had to tear the house down around her display to make room for the
homes, and then her yard became their farms from whence they drew
nourishment. But where were the views? Those breathtaking vistas she
had known? Those must be recreated as well, so she bought out the
neighborhood and created the mountains and forests surrounding.
Then she remembered that, as the monks
taught, nothing exists in isolation. We are all connected. So she
expanded her diorama and it engulfed her town as she recreated all of
Tibet. It spread as she created artificial continents and oceans. She
recreated the Great Wall of China, the bustling cities of Hong Kong
and Tokyo. She carved out a scale version of the Pacific Ocean,
Hawaii, and the West Coast. Then she reached her home and realized to
do her diorama justice, she must create a miniature version of her
miniature world, and from there a smaller once she reached her home
again, ever recursing downward and downward into infinity.
- Originally mailed to H. Witten in Oxford, Mississippi
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