In the round

Individual mille fiore glass beads.

The circle encloses.  As a design form it appeals to what sense of tidiness I possess.  Unless we consider piles to be tidy.  At those I excel.

Mille fiore glass paperweight.

They remind me of cells, studied through a high school microscope.  Undersea life, shape within shape.  On some days lines and grids beg my attention, today it is circles, the candy-like elements of Italian glass and, simply, the circle.

Fabric by designer Kaffe Fassett.

Thinking today of poets and poetry, of ways in which we return to the beginnng.  A friend shared this poem by Philip Levine yesterday, with the mention that he died on Valentine's Day.

Let me begin again as a speck
of dust caught in the night winds
sweeping out to sea. Let me begin
this time knowing the world is
salt water and dark clouds, the world
is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn
comes slowly and changes nothing. Let
me go back to land after a lifetime
of going nowhere. This time lodged
in the feathers of some scavenging gull
white above the black ship that docks
and broods upon the oily waters of
your harbor…Tonight I shall enter my life
after being at sea for ages, quietly,
in a hospital named for an automobile.
The one child of millions of children
who has flown alone by the stars
above the black wastes of moonless waters
that stretched forever, who has turned
golden in the full sun of a new day.
A tiny wise child who this time will love
his life because it is like no other.

—from "LET ME BEGIN AGAIN," by Philip Levine
"I got that phrase 'let me begin again' in my head, and the images took me to an emotional field that must have been waiting inside me for some kind of release. I realized that I wanted to enter my life exactly as I had the first time but with one huge difference: this time I wanted to love my life and myself. I was suddenly struck by the fact that in spite of the impossible and unique gift of a life, it took me so long to learn that I and my life were lovable."—former U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine, Paris Review interview

Survivors of trauma, working with pick-and-shovel, know the circle in another of its guises, the spiral.  When, after years of often exhausting effort in common and unconventional modalities, we raise our eyes to behold places we thought belonged to the past, there is momentary despair until we remember the spiral may have a familiar view but at a different level.