Zen Rock Garden

This week was the one year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the US. As an American I find myself seeking a kind of inner peace. A solace that all can be well in the world. And especially that WW3 is not about to begin. With ashes and twisted metal and rubble being brought back up in the media, I find myself taking those mediums and like so many other artists, wanting to do something with it.

I am however going back through history to another time, and another place to call upon the idea of using rock and sand to make an artistic arrangement that brings comfort and calmness to mind. I am turning towards the Zen rock gardens for my inspiration and purpose.

Most commonly today, we find Zen rock gardens as small novelty gifts that set on a desktop or window shelf. We can take them down, shove a few pebbles around and re-rake the sand around those stones. While Feng Shui specialists and corporate executives might think this is a small bit of comfort I challenge it holds nothing to the real rock gardens that can be made.

The rock gardens that are much harder to find through simple internet searches are much larger and can have small boulders as the stones. These kinds of gardens don't often get shifted around. They do get raked however and the comfort I would imagine would go the greatest towards the one doing the raking. As it is, many of us, myself included, don't have the money or space for a real Zen rock garden and so must either suffice with the miniature desk set or something else (like rearranging the pencils in our pencil cup).

I however have found the next step down in the rock garden evolutionary trail. I have devised a way to have a digital rock garden using POV-Ray. It's not 100% but for now it serves it's purposes. For the digital rock garden the placement of the stones are random so the rules of Feng Shui are ignored, and fate is given that function.

There are some rules that I created however in creating the stones and the raking of the sand. In raking the sand I did as the Zen did and raked solidly from one end of the field to the other in straight lines. Then around my stones I places some rings. In my case I decided to set that at 5 rings around each stone. For the stones, I let the computer pick three different kinds and melt them together. This creates a variety of stones that add a little color to the rock garden.

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