Circles

Here I am. On the verge. Looking back at the landscape of the last weeks, months, what before seemed like a chaotic sprawling of feelings and thoughts are making shapes and strands of my life are coming together in the strangely circular, cyclical spiral that is hindsight. I move in circles. So why don’t you jump through time and unpull this trigger of mine? Do you think that we might all be making circles with each other all the time? It seems it may be possible that each interaction we have, every gesture we make, and all the exchanges we share fit unto each their circle. A circle for every friendship, every learning process, every conversation. In the moment it seems like the paths we tread criss cross before us towards the horizon, in hindsight they turn back on themselves and connect up with the past in odd ways. Blowing smoke on photographs already yellow from the years gone by. The mistakes I’ve made pile unto each other so it seems I make larger and larger cairns from them, every time I make the same mistake a feature grows on the landscape reminding me that I’ve been there before, done the same thing, doing the same thing. Until the circle turns and I realise that I am playing the same role in an old game where the point seems to be building cairns. I’ll do the same and we can end this game. Yet I was present when the rules of the game where laid out and I have it in my power to change them. Make the circle into a spiral. Give direction to the cycle. Let the cairns guide me so I don’t end up at the same place I was last time. Grow. I had enough. We can grow like trees, upwards and downwards in all directions, if we accept our weight:

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

I often feel the need to explain my relationship to that which cannot be spoken, the centre of every circle. The time we took to last. The short-hand three letter word doesn’t do anything for me, except press me into a corner where one wall is Religion and the other is Scientism. You can know the centre of the circle by giving up your idea of being on the circumference. Lost in words entangled in our thoughts. Trust only those who know. You can’t do it by pinching your nose, holding your breath, standing on one leg and closing your eyes in prayer. That’s all I ever get to say before the conversation has turned but perhaps that is all there is to say before the conversation turns. My grace, my face is lost. It’s like Nico and I remind each other from time to time, life is beautiful. Rising. Falling. Throughout the falling it is there, beauty. Tracing the curve of the fall reveals a pattern which is undeniably perfect. It is the perfection of each cycle, the necessity for the circle to have a centre, that is the beauty. Train your eye.

Many worlds before us yet no other time than this. On the verge. A single breath is all we have to live the life and death. Turning to the horizon. Now we can do it again.