The Sacred Circle

Titled Catmoonwoo ©2025 a_joy art. all rights reserved.

A story has a beginning and an end.  It has a lot of middling.  My life does too.

My journey, like all journeys, began when I was born. But my story is infinitely linked to other stories that came before mine and subsequently shaped mine without my permission, knowing, seeing, or understanding the hands, the stories, the lands, or the customs.  I only hold the outcomes - the remains if you will - of many other lives.  I hold those outcomes in my DNA, my genes, my bones, and in magic glass.  The stones remember.  But  I don’t have all of them nearby to ask, to wait, to listen.

And that’s the problem.

I also have chaos, numbness, absence, amnesia, and loss in the outcomes. I hold patterns I don’t always understand but easily replicate, of other people’s terror, trauma, grief, joy, perseverance, and melody.  I believe we all bear a melody.  We sing it every day.  It changes as we mature.  We sing it to our children if we have them.

This outcome - this space in my embodiment -  the location of my feet, is the sacred circle.  It is soul soil.  It’s my soul soil.

The Sacred Circle is an exploratory journey of recovery.  That’s why I don’t like following the more postmodern trendy notion of deconstruction.  I’m asking questions of course.   I’m exploring to find rootedness and in the last several months - since October - I’ve started to realize it’s sacred.  The journey picked up in October as Samhain approached - or Halloween - when I felt the stronger tug of ancestral ties speaking to me in harvest and hearth.  It started before then though - probably early summer.

It was in early summer when I really felt like I was living in a cultural void.  My present language would be - feelings of rootlessness.  I find American culture, as it’s often described and lived, to be empty and without meaning.  For a nation of immigrants, whatever exists here was brought here unless I’m indigenous to this place [called Turtle Island] - which I’m not.  My outcomes involve major migration to the USA.  It’s called colonization.  My outcomes and embodiment involve the displacement of beings of various kinds, and the bringing of other beings of various kinds.  Colonization is a dirty word.  For many - it was immigration or migration, often, away from trouble.  Once in the “new land,” they still found trouble.

Migration is normative human behavior in times of famine, war, and dislocation.  It can produce challenges, problems, and gross amounts of dispossession and violence.

And thus, the cultural legacy part of the journey started to make itself known.  Even then, I can argue it started right after the Christmas holiday in 2024 when the image of a deer fetched my eye on the clearance isle in Walmart.  But then, there were other moments before that - moments when I needed comfort and found myself feeling those voices who once were close by - a new experience  - whispering, holding, waiting.

The Sacred Circle is a journey into the unknown to recover, to reconnect, to root.  It is stories, questions, illuminations, confusions, suffering and loss,  Hopefully it will bring understanding, richer earth, greater connection.

It starts with the soil at my feet.