BEING CIRCLE

 Birds inform my understanding of circle.
This is a growing collection of writing that describes my way of being circle.

SILENCE

Quaker wisdom: “only speak if your words improve upon the silence.”

It is early November. I no longer sit out on my deck. The rocking chair and side table have moved inside, along with me and my mug of coffee.

Today, as I sit at my desk, I listen. The slight hum of the furnace, the sound of my breath, and the occasional one syllable chirp from the stay-put-bird-on-our-farm, the sparrow.

The song birds left, one species at a time, en route to their southern home. In the birds’ leaving, the branches and the spaces between breathe silence to those listening.

Instead of their cacophony of song, these spaces hold their song: between the maple and the spruce, their flight patterns; the vines that climb up the cabin wall where they mated and frolicked; the stub of a branch poking out of an elm trunk that created a perch for the pileated wood pecker’s search for food. Intricate inhabited song-filled spaces now vacant, now silent.

In circle, our collective work creates space. Space where our voice can take flight, find a home, frolick in the safety and containment of a vine. That space, in part, is created and held by silence.

A number of weeks ago, I facilitated a circle of women. The invitation: “When has silence hurt you? When has silence embraced you?”

Before anyone arrived, I sat in one of the chairs around the unlit firewood. I faced west. Surrounded by a weave of leafless elm branches, I watched, through tiny stained windows, created by the crisscross of branches, the luminescent colors of the sunset: orangey pink, streaks of indigo, light infused reds. I gasped, then took in a deep deep breath — an effort to hold the colours of silence.

The rustling leaves above, the solid ground beneath, the crisp air around. I lit the fire. One by one, I welcomed the women as they arrived with tea and took a seat.

As we travelled around the circle we heard how silence, in a variety of forms, shrinks lives, minimizes hurt, keeps people small. Also, how silence holds the complexity and mystery of grief, and offers up needed comfort and presence in the forms of trees and animals.

And then a story that brought me to the bottom of it all. The following day, I emailed the teller and asked if she would retell through email. When I received it, I asked if she would allow me to publish her telling on my web page. With her yes, and with my gratitude, this is what Stephanie sent me:

I spent 12 years providing crisis support to people who have experienced violence against them because they are woman-presenting. Since gender-based violence is about power and control, the first healing balm seeks to restore power to the person whose power was taken, violated, perpetrated against.

In emergency intervention support, that includes giving a survivor the control over as much of the situation as possible. Where to sit, when to sit, if a tissue is needed, if water is needed, lights on or off, should I stay present or should I leave.

I also made a point to tell people that we could sit together in silence as much as they want. They owed me nothing in terms of telling their story or sharing information with me, which is a stark contrast to all the systems that are set up to respond to violence.

I would say, "You are in the driver seat here and I will help to make sure no one tries to grab the wheel.” The pace, direction, length, and very existence of the conversation is up to them. Filling the quiet meets my need to avoid the awkward, or incompetent, or whatever other feeling comes up. The silence gives options, and therefore power, to the survivor.

As I listened to Stephanie, I thought, “silence gives options, and therefore power” to survivors, and I wondered, is this also the way with birds? What I do know is that “silence gives options, and therefore power” to the person sitting in a circle.

And I hear a quote from W. B. Yeats echoing within: “We can make our minds so like still water that beings may gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

The intricate spaces birds inhabit, which held their song, now hold their silence. As I listen to the stillness they leave behind, I too hope to guard our collective invitation to silence so we all may live a “fiercer life because of our quiet.”

THE NEST

In the rafters of our machine shed, there is a structure, approximately 3 feet in circumference, woven together with long, medium and short twigs, held together by mud, straw and bird spit.  Perched between two beams, this bold nest, built from the fortitude and wisdom of a black sleek raven, holds her young as they grow up in a wild-log-cabin-bowl that over-looks our grain truck and combine. 

In the crook of our barn roof’s overhang, formed around one of the beams, a mud cup is lined with grass, white and grey feathers, a tiny thread of orange plastic.  The home of the barn swallow.

Perched beneath a roof line, on top of a beam, the most delicate creation made of tiny straw bits, little feathers, grasses, this puff of a bowl is the home for the sparrow.

I could go on. Every bird on this farmyard has made a nest from the elements around them to meet their particular needs of shelter in their size and placement. The particularities of a birds’ nest reflect my experience with circle.

Each circle I step into has particular habits and practices woven together from the story, knowledge and purpose that give those gatherings meaning. And from this weave, we create, again and again, a particular container for each gathering. 

Once winter creeps onto this farmyard, our birds migrate south to find their warmth and make home again. As seasons influence the migrating habits of birds, seasons influence the habits of circle.  Created by the weave of tradition that works for a time, a circle’s season inevitably comes to a close, inviting the regenerative invitation of the new. 

Bird nests are brilliantly created, but for a season. The same commitment and humility generates the life-blood for our human gatherings. 

THE BIRD SONG OF THE SONG BIRD

As I write this, I am sitting on my balcony that comes off of my office. It is early June, and the song birds who migrate to our farm are busily establishing their nests, making home for their young. They sing while they work. An orchestra of song. Robins, Mourning Doves, Downy Woodpeckers, Goldfinches, Barn and Song Sparrows, the Nuthatches, and more tweet, sing, cackle, stutter, chirp, hoot in different rhythms and tones to create this cacophony.

Every circle I am a part of invites those present, name by name, person by person,  to speak their own truth. Like the Song Bird, we tweet, sing, cackle our particular song.  A circle doesn’t welcome the opinions of others who might amplify our song (this has become quite the discipline for me since I love quoting those I read); we let go of our desire to tune up or influence another’s song; we don’t listen for someone else to tell us how to sing. When we step into circle, we commit to listening for and singing out our song while asking the circle to hold us in that work. And if no particular song is found, the circle welcomes the company of silence. 

 When we hold song and silence well, authenticity, integrity and respect is born of that exchange and the healing spirit of that circle holds us. There is a mystery in this exchange that, for me, language can only try to describe. John O’Donohue writes about the space between things. When we are able to notice and be in that sacred space -- the space between my truth and anothers’, the space that silence inhabits, the space of my wonder and curiosity that invites me to shed what keeps my world small -- we begin to understand what it means to belong, not only to many layers within ourselves or in others, but to the Mystery that holds all of us in and beyond what we know.

CLENCH AND RELAX

During storms, song birds find the lee side of a tree. When they clench their talons around that protected branch, their bodies relax. Clench and Relax. On the lee side of a tree, inside the stretch of these two different acts, the song bird finds its way through storms. 

When sitting in circle, I am invited to practice being with difference. I am asked to resist the temptation to fix, analyze or change the other. I am invited to sit with my heart and hands open. I am challenged to create space for wonder and curiosity, not only about the other’s truth, but about what I might have polished and revered into certainty. 

When I resist the combative tendencies with my own insecurities, or with others’ difference, with silence, with my breath, with the decision to honour another’s truth and my own, I invite space within. 

Only then do I create the room to wonder and ask questions about my own protected version of truth and open myself up to the possibility in others.  Only then do I draw out the generative within myself and with others.

I will clench and relax: I, alongside others, will “clench” to the importance of a healthy structure and vibrant organization to ensure everyone can relax into the freedom to have a voice.

I will clench and relax:  I will sit with a non-indigenous person speaking their economic and educational privilege alongside an indigenous person who claims their redemptive healing ceremonial privilege.

I will clench and relax:  I will sit with my love for some biblical stories and the pulse of mystery within this universe alongside a person who has deeper love for the claims inside of science and the humanities.

I will clench and relax:  I will sit with the strengths of the three dimensional views of my dyslexic partner as he sits with the strengths of my love for reading that comes from my linear brain.

I will clench and relax:  I will sit with being Ajah’s mother through the birth of adoption alongside a Cree and Dené woman, who, through the birth of her body, is Ajah’s mother. 

Through the practice of being in circle, clenching and relaxing at the same time, I have cultivated, slowly, bit by bit, an ability to live and quest for the truth that sits inside of the stretch rather than on either size of polarization. I let go of right and wrong, left and right, up and down, us and them, “isms”. I embrace the workings of circle. Through its very structure, as it is built out of the stretch around and around and around, I, with all of my complexity and simplicity, belong. 

In that circle, I clutch this: With vigilance, I will not sacrifice the lifegiving generative experience of truth for the fixed iconic triumphilistic nature of certainty. 

I relax into this: With my heart open, I will face storms within, with my friendships, with my community because I trust the spacious shelter that comes from the practice and mystery of being circle.

I am grateful to Parker Palmer, a Quaker, who has written extensively about the ways of circle, particularly in his book, A Hidden Wholeness; The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, 2004. I have gleaned much from his use of the bird and the nest for understanding the elements of circle. In my gleaning, I keep discovering the depth of this metaphor. As I learn and observe more about the way of birds, the metaphor of the life of birds deepens my understanding of being circle.