Darumarama!

SO! Last week Tuesday was our 2nd General Meeting, which was called....Darumarama!
If you didn't already know, the daruma is the little guy we use on all of our fliers and things. The daruma was designed after a Zen Buddhist monk named Bodhidharma who meditated for so long that his arms and legs and eyelids fell off. Hence the almost egg-like daruma was born! Typically, they include the colors red, yellow, green, and white.
The daruma is a Japanese wish doll; when you make a wish, you fill in the daruma's right eye with black ink, and when that wish is fulfilled, you fill in the left eye. At the end of the year, the darumas are burned. The daruma is also closely tied with the proverb "nana korobi ya oki" which means "fall down 7 times, get up 8." This proverb also contributes to the daruma's shape and is why it has a low center of gravity. No matter which way it falls over, it can come back to it's original upright position.
This is one of the reasons why we have the daruma as our symbol. No matter what happens to us as an org, we'll always get back up. Also, if you notice, our daruma has no eyes colored in. This is because we do not have just one goal for our organization, we are just trying to reach our best potential. And! It looks really awesome.

After those present learned all of that, we had a little trivia game with Pocky prizes and then we were on to making darumas!
Chantelle made up some nice darumas that you could color in and decorate, cut out and put together for your own personalized 3-D daruma.




We all had a lot of fun making our darumas unique and colorful. Then once they were assembled, since the darumas were hollow, we had candy to fill them with! There were definitely some interesting and awesome ones there..like a Taiko drum daruma, or a daruma globe with wings and glasses...




Here are a few of them for you to see!





Looks like fun, right!?

Hopefully I will see you all at our next general meeting for musubis!