Baskets beneath the BA-HA-LA Tree of Life.

baskets beneath the Bahala Tree of Life. Detail of the Babaylan Mandala – Red & Gold, by Perla Daly

There are baskets underneath the BA-HA-LA Tree of Life. These baskets are full of healthy, wholesome fruit. The fruit represents many things—talents that manifest in the world, service to Kapwa(fellow man, humanity), children, acts of love/kindness, and anything and everything positive that you can think of that our personal earthly existence generates in the world.

In the baskets underneath the BA-HA-LA Tree of Life, each piece of fruit contains seeds. Seeds represent generativity, our metaphorical potential to create acts that plant seeds in other people’s hearts and to create new growth in the fertile soul of earthly existence; the Seeds represent our descendants—children, our children, children’s children, and those we will never meet.

Rotten fruits (NOT represented in the mandala)—Glares, hate, exploitation, greed, apathy, division, selfishness, hoarding, fear, degradation, humiliation, sinfulness, cheating, unfairness, destruction, curses, war…
VS
Healthy wholesome fruit represented in the Mandala—Smiles, kind words, prayers, papers, blogs, art, song, writing, poems, cooking, petitions, activism, charity, gardening, chores, fairness, encouragement, support, Love… (YOU think of more positivity.)

The baskets represent karma, cause and affect and the saying “what you sow is what you reap.” Think on how your earthly work, your prayers, your thoughts, words and actions effect other people, create concentric circles rippling cause and effect out into the world. Are you selfish or generous? Are you kind or mean? Do you give in an unacknowledged acts of kindness?