A Circle of Hands by Alethea Kehas

Reblogged from Not Tomatoes:

I have been thinking about harmony and unity. About how, over the course of hundreds, if not thousands of years, we have moved away from the circle to form the line.

I have been thinking about the quest of the individual striving for purpose by trying to get at the head of the line, not realizing the line is an illusion.

I have been thinking about how we are birthed into human form to explore this illusion, but not to hold onto it. For there is nothing to hold onto. No hands to join your palms.

Last Friday, in my continued quest to learn the mysteries of the land near where I live, I visited the Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum with a friend of mine. The museum, founded by Bud and Nancy Thompson, several years after Nancy taught my third grade class at Canterbury Elementary School, is deliberately arranged in the form of a circle. When you walk the rooms of artifacts recovered across the United States, your eyes pick up patterns. Themes are shared throughout the native cultures that join the people in sacred truth. The circle is one of them.

There is, by its inherent nature, no beginning or end to the circle. The line, when drawn in this form curves back to itself, and in doing so becomes part of a greater whole that never ends. Here separation is impossible. If there is a break in the circle, it ceases to be whole.

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