Calling the Circle: Circles

My sister at Moonstone Beach in California

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle.

The sky is round, and I have heard that the

earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars.

The wind, in its greatest power, whirls.

Birds make their nests in circles,

for theirs is the same religion as ours.

The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle.

The moon does the same, and both are round.

Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing,

and always come back again to where they were

The life of a [person] is a circle from childhood to childhood

and so it is in everything where power moves.

–Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks (quoted in Calling the Circle)

One of the books I got for my birthday this year was Calling the Circle by Christina Baldwin. A lot of the concepts from this book were very familiar, not only from the group dynamics material in my clergy classes, but also from the classes that I teach in working with groups and working with communities. That said, sometimes it is hard to actually remember and use the principles of working effectively with people in real life, no matter how familiar I am with the concepts and principles in the academic sense. Rather than type a bunch of quotes up together into one post, I decided to run a series of posts over the next couples of weeks, each highlighting something I enjoyed from this book. The first was early in the book and caught my eye because after my grandmother’s death, one of my friends received a message to pass on to my mom that was, “remember the circles.” So, reading this passage felt like a continuation of that message. 🙂