Waving the White (Prayer) Flag

When I first began reading about Buddhism and Tibetan culture, I was inspired by the romance of Tibetan Prayer flags. 

Prayer flags come in sets of five different colors. The colors are arranged from left to right in a specific order: blue, white, red, green, and yellow with each color representing the five elements. Blue symbolizes the sky and space, white symbolizes the air and wind, red symbolizes fire, green symbolizes water, and yellow symbolizes earth. According to traditional Tibetan medicine, health and harmony are produced through the balance of the five elements.

Each flag is printed with prayers. As the sun shines through them and the wind passes over them and they slowly unravel, the prayers are slowly dispersed into the world. There is just something about this that makes me feel good. My flags hang on my balcony and they remind me throughout the day to be compassionate, to be grateful for all I have, and to be generous to those in need. They are the last thing I see when I begin my morning meditation and the first thing I see upon its completion.

Traditionally, prayer flags are flown until they completely disintegrate. Hence the reason you see grayish flags slowly moldering on the homes of many Buddhists. My flags, however, are not disintegrating uniformly. Rather, my white flags, are coming to pieces before my eyes while the others are largely intact.

The white flags represent wind, which is the element responsible for our thoughts and our movements. I wonder if the flags are consumed as needed by the surroundings. Or do the tattered white flags symbolize something specifically about my thoughts and movements - too much, too little, too deep, too frivolous, too self-centered, too much in the past, too focused on future tasks. Who knows? And, since the rope finally rotted through this past weekend, I guess I will never know if the other flags would have endured or soon followed the white flag's dispersal.