All around us, life is circling.

Some circles are big, some very small.

Insects that live a whole life in one of our days. Breakfast sees the end of childhood, lunch the weight of middle age responsibility, tea time the creaking of age, and with night, the sleep of the dead. Until the next generation comes into being.

Or consider the life of these tall trees.

Each slow forming ring of growth, evidence of their elevation over our own anxieties.

Each falling leaf layering the soil, laying down the food for the coming spring.

Each spreading branch offering the arm of shelter to a thousand lesser creatures. And me.

Seeding slowly and deliberately.

But even the tallest trees

Will one day

Fall.

And what of us?

What of our life time? We tend to see our journeys as linear. Even then, perhaps we are comfortable with the now, less so with the tomorrow, and the future is a foreign country, were be dragons.

Away we go, off into middle distance – always forward, but often acting as if we are standing still.

But we are born not to die,

But to live.

To trace our own arc through this space of ours –

To windmill wide and open,

To love this life

And let it love us back

Perhaps unlike any of these other circles, we humans have this gift (this curse) of knowing

Knowing and seeking to know more

Seeking to connect and to overlap these circles-

Seeing where they depend one on the other

Seeing where they smash into one another

Vulnerable to the sharp jagged things

But capable

Of such joy