Widening Circles

So it was time to give the blog a new name and a new header. And for a while I thought it would be some Tale of Two Cities type-kind-of-thing--from the title itself or the famous quote that so appropriately describes my life right now. But this metaphor works much better and has the added benefit of not being so sad, even though things are pretty sad right now having just left home and loved ones and being in a place where I don't know anyone and dealing with hard things.

The metaphor of widening circles comes from Rilke. He uses it in a few poems and the spirit of this idea is in many more. Here is where it is used most directly:

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

His poems talk about giving yourself to the earth and to things and to the present, and I would add to people. And in this way we create space in which God can enter and in which we create God. And he uses widening and unfolding as images of allowing and giving ourselves to everything:

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Here is another powerful excerpt from the end of a poem:

I want to unfold
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for where I am closed, I am false.
I want to stay clear in your sight.

And so it is in this unfolding and widening that we become clear to ourselves and God. As he wrote in yet another poem, in this way we try to make God complete "and in that way complete (ourselves)."

I think this is a metaphor for my attempted response to my life over the past year and a half and what I want to be my continued approach going forward to circumstances and people. To be more specific, one way I've thought about and tried to live in widening circles is found in this Mother Teresa quote that is in a Buddhist book Sarah and I are currently reading:

The problem with the world is that we draw our family circle too small.

And in the past year and a half I've expanded my circle to include closer relationships with people who are not in my biological family. And sometimes I've actually gotten some push-back on this from people who don't understand why I would (should) draw this circle bigger. But now I have so many more people who I love and who love me and it has made for such a happy (read: meaningful) time such as I have not known before. And so some of these people are in the pictures along the right side of the blog now. And I really hope our church rhetoric can catch up to this idea because it has a long way to go and I think it's not healthy or helpful for anyone, either people who are married with families or those who are not.

In any case, that's a brief introduction to widening circles and why it is now the name of this blog. And then there is the whole mathematics aspect. So it's kind of perfect.