Life's Longing for Itself

I’m still thinking about shapes this week and how they influence our ideas of time and growth.

Everything surrounding us and inside of us moves in a circle. Circles imply flow and rhythm in their continuous movement with no clear stopping point. The planet we stand on orbits around the sun. Water cycles through the environment in a circular pattern. The growth of plants occurs in a cycle, without beginning or end, as does our own process of converting food to energy. Even our breath, our life sustaining respiration, is an ever constant revolution of air in and air out.

Humans, though, in our finite wisdom, complicate this. We try to make things linear, straight forward. The way we have structured our concept of time is proof of this. We try to control, to grasp, to make sense by corralling what is circular into a straight line.

We can find more ease, more peace, more acceptance of life as it is by letting go of linearity. We can allow the continuous circuit to flow. From the moment we are born, the one who birthed us is in a constant cycle of letting go, letting us go from their bodies, from their nourishment, and from their arms as we grow up. To be a parent is the ultimate lesson in the circular nature of care, love, and letting go.

In The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece, he writes:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

May we learn from our parents. Let go, let flow, let it move through you. You are part of the circuit of continuous energy in this world.