Circle spirals

Three weeks of early mornings, full days, palapa-roofed afternoons and lake-mirrored moons.

My first class leaves me limp with relaxation at the sound of my voice transformed. My students sit silently, unwilling to break the peace.

I feel as if I've done this forever. Knowledge speaks from somewhere deep. Intuition ferments it into gradually strengthening wisdom.

Before I have a chance to let my ego panic, I am a teacher.

They hand me my final certificate in a circle of candles, the same circle we've been sitting in for weeks. I look around at my new family of sisters, faces made even more compelling in the flickering light.

We drum with our eyes closed, pulsing with the music. Ten new teachers beat out an undulating tale of discovery. I don't even know how to drum, but the noises coming from this instrument are rhythmic and transporting.

I have been writing this blog for eighteen months. Eighteen months, constantly turning corners, uncovering new vistas.

Except that these are the corners of a circle, the only geometric shape that has no corners.

I perpetually slip and perpetually discover, but am never halted by the punctuation of a real edge.

A circle is the strongest protection and the purest link. It unites and forges.

It takes you away and away and then loops you back round to where you began.

You send something out and you receive it back. It surprises and convolutes but guarantees you resolve.

It has neither a beginning nor an end.

For eighteen months my writing has been stamped with circular references. Looping, curling, hooping, round, curvatures and revolvatures, swirling and whirling. Ringing a point, creating a centre. In every spinning tale I've included at least one reference to this symbol of wholeness, however tenuous.

All that time devoted to the centrifugal forces within my life. All that time writing about each infinite corner of my perpetual circle. All that time spent within the glittering scoop of my hula hoop, spinning like a dervish, swirling in my moving meditation.

In all that time, my story has been like the geometric flower of life, a series of perfectly connected circles in one ever-flowing net.

But for three weeks I've stopped slipping, and have been instead still, a vital bond in this perfect shape. For the first time, I feel like I have found my hole.

And it is only on the last day of this, my yoga teacher training, a culmination of at least a few circles of life, that I notice the formation we've been sitting in.

And I realise that, morning, noon, night; before and after and during every lesson, every meal, every evening drum session, I've been literally sitting in a circle. This new family, my surrogate sisters, arc around me on either side, every hour of every day, embracing me in the strongest circle of all.

Destiny giggles...from a smoothly rounded corner.