The Circle

“Trust in the circle.
To end is to begin.”
- Charmaine Aserappa, In a Japanese Garden

Sitting here on this crisp, fresh day, I feel infected with Spring Fever. The old wheel of the seasons has ground creaking into Spring. This is the season that I most want to take up verdant residence inside my head. Spring opens wide the windows of the cramped sour winter cabin of my brain and lets the breeze blow out the cobwebs and dry autumn leaves from my mind.

Spring renews my trust in the circle. This is the form of immortal life that comforts me now, a thick mossy covering over my original conception of everlasting life - Our Return to the Garden that Christ promised – where our souls would go upon leaving our compostable bodies. Either way: reincarnation!

I read somewhere that in his Autobiography, W. B. Yates says he sought to express his poems in “metrical forms that seemed old enough to have been sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey.” I feel old like that in winter. I go into a kind of hibernation and dream like a man half-asleep on horseback on a sacred journey.

Spring wakes me up. Spring starts a new circle in motion.

Bao Yu, is the central character in A Dream of Red Mansions, his name means Precious Jade - reportedly for the piece of jade he held in his mouth at his birth. This 3” ceramic pot has been sitting on a eucalyptus tree trunk next to the driveway for years. I stuck a piece of jade in years ago and have completely neglected it since. No water sprinklers reach it, forcing it to be stunted but tought enough to survive. Here in the afternoon light, is my very own precious jade, glowing with vitality and smug self-importance.