Narrated Essay: What the Circle Asks

In Bailick Park in Midleton, County Cork, nine immense stainless-steel feathers rise from the earth and curve toward the sky, forming an empty bowl. From a distance, they look almost weightless, like the remains of an immense bird. Up close, they are ribbed steel with riveted joints, casting a dark industrial sheen against their soft green surroundings. Their shape carries the invisible weight of famine, but also something more receptive and circular, like palms in open prayer. The sculpture is called *Kindred Spirits*. It honors the Choctaw Nation’s gift to Ireland during the Great Famine of 1847. Only fifteen years after the Trail of Tears—when starvation, disease, and death plagued the Choctaw as they marched from their ancestral homelands in the southeastern United States—the tribal nation learned of the treatment of the Irish people under British colonial rule. They were themselves still impoverished, still living in the aftermath of trauma and devastation. Yet they gathered $170, roughly $5,000 today, and sent it across the Atlantic to feed families they would never meet. *Kindred* carries the old root of *kin* and *kind*. I’m reminded of the distinction between being *kind*, which is an expression of our feeling of belonging, and being *nice*—which derives from the root word *nescius*, meaning “ignorant” or “not knowing.” To be nice is to be polite no matter how we feel. But to be kind is to extend our relational and ethical imagination beyond those familiar to us: to recognize ourselves in lives we cannot see, in people whose language, history, and stories are not our own, yet whose tender aliveness is no less real than our own. In *The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows*, John Koenig coined the word *sonder*: “the profound realization that every random stranger you pass is living a life as vivid, complex, and real as your own.” I think of sonder as I move through airports and hotel lobbies, glimpsing faces illuminated by phones, people pulling suitcases through corridors. Everyone is carrying a world unseen: a diagnosis, a divorce, a child asleep at home, a hope they have yet to speak. I arrived in Ireland a few days before I was set to teach at Ballymaloe House. It was late September, and I had given myself the unusual permission of having nowhere I needed to be. I stayed in small inns and drove along stone-walled lanes, past fields bright with rain, lakes shagged with green moss, farmhouses with whitewashed walls. I sat in framed windows, holding porcelain cups of tea, and watched clouds and sunlight move gradually across the morning. With no schedule pressing against presence, I spent long stretches in strange conversation with myself about my desires and regrets, and my ancestry, and the land, and how I want to embody this life. One afternoon I drove to Lough Gur, where the Grange Stone Circle—the largest of its kind in Ireland—stands. The stones are enormous, weathered, low to the earth, arranged in a ring that has lasted for thousands of years. Archaeologists have surmised some things about the people who gathered here from remnants of beaker pots and animal bones, but they cannot say exactly how they prayed, what they feared, what they remembered, or how they ritualized the cross-quarter days, when sunlight angled through the dark. The stones don’t explain themselves. But the circle's near-perfect shape and the discovery of a posthole in its center suggest it was measured from a central stake with a rope, the entranceway aligned with the sunset on the festival of Samhain in early November. I sat down in the grass and leaned my back against one of the circle’s largest stones. The afternoon was calm, with no other visitors nearby. The lake rippled beyond the field. A bird called once. And I had the rare perception that whatever needed to happen could happen, that nothing in me had to be managed or made useful. To my surprise, I began to weep. Long ago, I learned how not to cry, and why. I am more inclined to be the person listening, comforting, finding the next practical step. But this grief—this ancient tenderness—asked nothing of me but to reverberate. It did not arrive with a question, a name, or even a reason. It was elemental, like weather; a movement whose only condition was presence and whose only message belonged to the humble ground on which I sat. Grief is one of devotion’s most honest forms. It breaks the hardened surface, asking us to place ourselves on the soft earth, where we cannot manage its outcome or coax its meaning. I cried beside that stone for a time, my heart held by its weight. And when I finally stood, my body felt emptied and rearranged. After my previous visit to Ireland, I dreamed of spirals for weeks—of the spirals I had seen in the Neolithic carvings at Newgrange and in the springtime fiddle ferns, but also of a colossal, sweeping spiral of time. A spiral is what happens when a circle begins to climb, to move, to leave and return. We come back to old questions carrying new losses and gains, new resources, new capacities for understanding. We revisit familiar landscapes and find that they have changed, and so, too, have we. Our culture loves the spiral. We celebrate motion, growth, progress, expansion, becoming. We ask where we are going and what we have become. But the headlines have gone mad, and half the human world seems to be shaking itself loose from its axis. In our individualistic pursuits, we have too often let go of the rope that connects us to the people, places, creatures, rituals, sensibilities—and yes, griefs—that have given us all the conditions we have needed to survive. Carl Jung often quoted the Hermetic maxim: “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” This season, I am less in the spiral’s aspiration than in the circle’s belonging. At the closing circle of our retreat at Ballymaloe, after a week of practice and connection, I named a simple fact: we do not know what the future holds. But instinct shows us that gathering is medicine. We must make room in our lives to be together—to nurture recognition and reconciliation, to make strangers into friends. Our hard edges give way, and our values restore themselves inside these wider fields of relationship: family, community, land, history, and the more-than-human world. We come full circle and remember our innate belonging. And when we do, new questions emerge. Not: *What do I want from life? What can I extract from this brief and bewildering existence?* But instead: *What does life ask of me? How can I live within this belonging?* Nothing in the garden is self-made. Each thing belongs to the same field of attention. The spiral carries us outward; it asks for the courage to become. But to live well is not to become more accomplished in our self-sufficiency. It is to become more conscious of—and more responsible for—the reciprocity of our lives. In the presence of all we cannot fix, the circle gathers us back, asking that in all our becoming, we do not leave one another behind. **Upcoming Gatherings** **+ November 20-22, 2026:** A Doorway Into Thanks: A Mary Oliver Retreat co-taught with Mary Oliver’s official biographer, Lindsay Whalen, at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, MA. Free offerings for your practice \+ Full-Length Yoga Practices \+ 10-15 min Guided Meditations \+ Music Alchemy This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shawnparell.substack.com