Healing Flags, Tablets and Prayers

Day 32, awaiting the call for Anna's double lung transplant.

Needing to send prayers and thoughts of hope, love and healing to those that we love is such a universal human expression. When in Japan at the Meji Temple with my friends Ana and Isa we saw a display of hundreds, no, thousands of small wood tablets inscribed with prayers from people world wide who had visited there. During a ceremony the priests of the Temple take the tablets and offer them to fire and flame changing their composition to pure energy, releasing them to the world. We wanted to be a part of this too and inscribed our own tablets leaving them at the Temple.

I took a few photos of these tablets to show the variety of languages and the simplicity of heart felt feelings that were expressed on them. I am sharing some of them with you here.

This type of activity has no boundary. Anyone can partake in it. The same is true for numerous projects that I have been involved in called, Healing Flag or Prayer Flag projects. My first such project was at Lucille Packard Children's Hospital. Hundreds of flags made of cotton with a simple sleeve at the top were decorated by patients, their families and health professionals. The result was an exhibit on the top of the hospital in a roof garden. There the flags flew sending their messages out to the universe.

Other projects included small private and personal ones commemorating a special event, including one in the surgical waiting room while Isa's lung transplant was being performed. Another was for a family in my neighborhood with an extremely ill child, Sophia. That project grew with a wonderful and supportive community to being very special.

I also organized a project at Ronald McDonald House in 2006. Flags were designed and decorated for about 9 months by members of the House and other volunteers making a display of over 300 flags. And this year, there will be another one at the House for a very special guest. In October the Dalai Lama will visit Ronald McDonald House at Stanford to give a special blessing to the children. Because I am so involved with caring for Anna I have not been able to participate very much but I did help with offering the structure and knowledge I had gained in my prior projects. It is really quite exciting. It will be a lovely event I am sure with the Healing Flags of Hope decorating the House.

I made a flag to be flown at the House for that exhibit with my prayer for Anna. May all the prayers from the tablets to the flags be released and heard. And if you are so moved you too can devise a way to decorate a stick, a flag, a tablet, a paper and hang it in your garden. Watch it as it interacts with the natural state of the weather and elements. Let it be and change and release its message into the world. It will be a better place because of it and you will be too.