Circles: My meditative language

Circle...circle...circle...

One circle at a time.

One more.

One more.

Up, around, down, around.

Sometimes down, around, up, around.

In pen or in pencil.

This is what I do when I can’t do anything else. When the alternative is pacing, crying, panicking, my brain racing against itself. One circle at a time. It’s what I do when I surrender—sometimes reluctantly. I’ve been reduced to drawing circles.

The circles are my meditation when nothing else is working. My body can now rest a little. I feel my shoulders come down from my ears.

Up, around, down, around.

The circles are beautiful to me. I feel that I’m very good at making them perfectly round. They please my eyes as they fill the page. Look, I’m getting something done. I can get something done.

Sometimes they are orderly, like my brain craves to be, in beautifully straight rows. Sometimes, they wander aimlessly around the page. They are free to roam as they please. I want to be free again, too.

Up, around, down, around.

I draw them as I sit curled up on my couch. I draw in a waiting room, at the coffee shop, on the bus. I draw as I wait for my brother to come so that we can go to Emergency. Some pages have titles scrolled in the bottom right-hand corner—Waiting. In it.

Up, around, down, around

Sometimes I colour in the circles. I use my treasured pencil crayons. The ones I’d individually selected years ago for a journey to Tunisia. I used them to capture arched doorways, patterned tiles, domed roofs. I was free then to draw what I pleased.

Sometimes the circles look like a secret language to me—some meaning, perhaps, in their slight variations. Maybe the answers, the reasoning, is right here in front of me. I don’t know.  

Right now all I have to do is get to the next moment, the next circle. In some distant way, I do know that this will pass. It has to, eventually.

Up, around, down, around.