the circle

dispatch 53

Nov 15, 2023

Hiya friends! Joining you from a week where all I want to do is get to bed at a reasonable hour (read: 5pm) and watch television while wrapped in many blankets. The season shift continues to season shift, and the dark is coming in fast and quick. I am weirdly excited for Winter this year, as an excuse to stay close to home and nest.

My schedule is still in adjustment mode but having my mornings back to read, write, study, and putter is bringing me endless joy. If you’re out there, I’d love to hear what’s lighting you up lately as we head into these dark months.

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A rainbow circle in the middle of a cloudy sky. — Image from Adobe Stock.

the circle

I don’t remember the exact day that I learned that a rainbow is a full circle, but I remember how it felt. There is a particular enchantment to finding out something brand new, something that feels like a tenderly kept secret, about the world in which you’ve lived for decades. Maybe most people already knew that rainbows were circles, that we can only see a small part of them from where we sit, but I didn’t. I’m glad that I didn’t know until I needed to.

The circle as a symbol has been popping up in my life with increased frequency, a simple shape from childhood that has taken on profound meaning. It is a rainbow; it is a celestial body in orbit. It is in the ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, which seems to find me from the pages of every book that I pick up lately. My most fundamental belief about the world sits in the cyclical nature of things. Endings that form beginnings that precipitate endings. At the same time, I’d been watching shows and reading books about the idea of time loops. Loop Quantum Gravity, a theory within the study of Quantum Physics, theorizes that space and time are woven into a series of loops, that a period turns back on itself, returning to the same starting point.

Time loops are terrifying if you think about them quickly, but I’ve found that they are soothing if I let myself think about them for long enough. If my life is a loop, intersecting with so many other loops, I have chosen to get sober so many times. I have fallen in love so many times. I have pet my first dog, lost my first loved one, learned to walk, got in that car accident, and every other tiny, magical thing…so many times. If that is true, I have been through the pain and the joy of it all before, and I will move through it all again.

In Norse mythology, fate is predetermined. This core belief contributed to the reputation of the Vikings as fierce warriors, unafraid of death. If your death is predetermined, you would either die in a battle or you would live…but you might as well give it your best in the meantime. Norse people believed that fate was woven, like a tapestry, by three sisters known as the Norns. They sit at the root of the World Tree, which holds up all of the dimensions of the mythical Norse worlds, and they weave together past, present, and future. The fate of the world is also predetermined, cycling from the dawn of everything to Ragnarok, the death of everything. Each end is unavoidable but also, a beginning. Everything plays its part in the bigger story.

It is fascinating to me when modern science, so complex that I can’t begin to understand it, seems to align with ancient knowledge and ways of thinking about the world. I know that nothing is that simple but Loop Quantum Gravity, the alchemical depiction of the ouroboros, and Norse beliefs in fate and Ragnarok echo each other in ways that make deep sense within my body.

I am so afraid of the future, trying to control every little thing that I can. A snake eating my own tail over and over again, trying to avoid the inevitable. I’ve been wondering what might be different if I knew I had no control. I am not suggesting a lack of control as an excuse for inaction or apathy, but rather a lack of control as freedom to act. Freedom to be fierce when the battles do come. It is human to try to avoid pain and protect our hearts, but maybe in the process of that, I am causing myself more pain. I am holding to things so tightly so that I might comfort myself with a sense of control that can only ever be an illusion.

A rainbow is a circle, with no beginning and no end. Though I cannot see all of it, I can trust that it is there, completing itself again and again beyond my vision. It is no less beautiful because I cannot see it in its entirety. What I can see is always just enough.

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