Buddhist Sand Paintings

And Cyclotrons and Synchrotrons, and ....

I recently had the opportunity to see two great plays at Community Theatres.

• In November, in Ajijic, Jalisco MX, I saw The Twelfth Night, a comedy by William Shakespeare where my brother was the star! They spent months writing the script, from 5 to 2 Acts, building the set, making costumes, doing the marketing and ticketing, printing the programs, practicing and changing the script with direction, make-up artists, cleaning up, etc. It ran for two weeks … and then GONE.

• In December I saw the final performance of A Christmas Story put on by a Community Theatre in Elkader, Iowa (population 1100) which again played for about 2 weeks. As the audience was leaving the theatre, they were already tearing down the set.

This reminded me of Buddhist sand paintings. I saw one live many years ago at the I.U. Art Museum. These monks spend a bunch of time creating some artwork using grains of sand. And when they finally finish, they just empty all that sand creating an enormous amount of entropy.

And I remember, when in my late 20’s, saying to Fred Mills, a physicist at Fermilab who had been my boss and mentor, when I was up there with a crew from the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility dismantling a synchrotron: Hey, Fred, how does it feel to see that something we spent our whole lives working on (hey, I was still in my late 20’s) getting dismantled?

And he said, “Every particle accelerator I have ever designed is sitting in a trash dump somewhere”.

And you know what? I now can say that. Every particle accelerator and PV manufacturing machine I’ve designed is sitting in a trash heap someplace.

So, another Buddhist saying I heard from my brother DavE:

Nothing you do is important. But it is important that you do it.