The Sacred Circle
Titled: Catmoonwoo ©2025 a_joy Art/ajj all rights reserved
Stories
A story has a beginning and an end. It has a lot of middling. My life does too. So does all life.
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 as both pattern and outcome. 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 hum a melody. We sing it every day. It changes as we mature. We sing it to our children if we have them. We sing it to all other beings and t ourselves.
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. But it’s also communal soul soil.
The Sacred Circle
The Sacred Circle is a sort of outcome of the wider exploratory journey of recovery found here at The Cosmic Moon Tree. It’s personal and full of bits and bobs from my own life. It sews together observations, what’s now playing in the theater of life, stories, encounters, and contemplations and turns it into a land somewhere between a little pathway out of the fuckery foo and being food for thought for someone elses [that’s plural on purpose]. 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. I need another kind of anchor than rootlessness, which doesn’t hold in any kind of weather [not even sunshine].
In my story, it was in early summer of 2025 when I really felt like I was living in a cultural void. My present language started to center on the word 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 it was native to this place [also called Turtle Island] . In a lot of ways, my kin were invasive species - not being formed here - shaped by the contours of another land [really lands], the breath of the weather, and the flow of water. My outcomes involve major migration to Turtle Island. 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.
Migration is normative human behavior in times of famine, war, and dislocation. My family’s history, where I have been able to locate it, has all of those flying through the air. It has my head in a choke hold like it held their hearts in one. It can produce challenges, problems, and gross amounts of dispossession and violence. And they didn’t reach a welcoming promised land despite the advertising.
And thus, the cultural legacy part of the journey started to make itself known in that early change of season. 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, and yes, warning.
The Sacred Circle is a journey is that little pathway to rootedness - to what I now call The Elder’s Path. Take it or leave it for yourself. Me it’s a path, for everyone else in communal soil - it’s food for thought.
And it starts with the soil at my feet.
With peace in mind,
