How to make a Miniature Zen Garden.

Yesterday we thought about the wisdom of ancient Tibet when we painted a lovely rainbow with our colorful sand.

Today, we talked about Buddhism as we made a miniature Zen Garden.

We learnt that a Zen Garden is a place of meditation and we experienced how calming it is to work with sand... to rake it, let it run through our fingers, watch it change shape as we move it with our hands.

This is what we needed to make our Miniature Zen Garden...

A glass, wooden our metal container

A spoon

Sand (we used some of the beach sand that we colored the other day)

And Zen treasures, we decided upon pretty rocks and earth-colored marbles.

We put the sand in the dish. The green and purple sand mixed together to make a lovely pink. We used the spoon to make the sand level.

We took our little rake and made a spiral marking in the sand. We positioned our Zen treasures in our Miniature Zen Garden, making use of the spiral markings to maximize our gardens aesthetic appeal. We placed and removed our treasures many times until we thought it looked just right.
Mr T was very impressed!
And then we played in it... for a very long time... raking, placing treasures... covering treasures, making markings in the sand... arranging treasures again. We 'meditated a lot!'
Can you believe that we made the Zen Garden Tools too? You won't believe how easy they are! Have a look at the link above to see how we made them.

Blessings and magic.