Some think that heaven too is a circle

I arrived in time for dinner.

The circles were a whirl of motion.

The guests were simply aglow. Moving about. Patterns of motion within patterns of motion. Conversation. Not discernable. Just enough to know that conversation was invigorating. As one guest circulated one way, another guest the opposite way. The coherent balance of the banquet hall remained static in the swirling pattern of circles.

One by one, a guest would quickly sneak a delicacy from the bounty of the smorgasbord. And in the attempted haste to not be detected, they invariably made a splash for themselves.

I had come to nourish my soul.

To read again from Emerson. This time his essay “Circles.”

But I was entranced by the ritual of dinner unfolding before me.

I didn’t think they would mind. So I did it anyway. Unlaced my laces. Slipped out of my shoes. Pulled off my socks. Let my toes taste of the smorgasbord the dinner guests and I now shared.

So warm. Surprisingly warm. The remnant heat from summer in this mid-November day.

The warmth of the light in the setting sun was behind me. The dinner guests were bathed in it. The limestone cliffs across the bay shimmered.

I would read from Emerson. Underline sentences. Be struck with the homology of Emerson’s words with an on-going conversation with a fellow saunterer seeking what it means to be a Deist.

So many little points of departure in this essay. So many conversations for the days ahead. The Wandering Saunterer simply must read this essay.

A hush fell over the dinner guests.

With some signal from the maître d', the choreography and conversation came to a silent reprieve. Each guest took their respective place at the smorgasbord.

The seagulls had been nourished. Smorgasbord creatures gave their lives in the nourishment of others. And past on what they in turn had taken from still others.

And now, it was the bobbing of seagulls on the tranquility of that smorgasbord lake.

Emerson. “Circles.”

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.
Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the act and holds it fluid. . . . Nature looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the rest; and when once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable? Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. Moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than batballs.

The light is fading. I look up from Emerson. The seagulls have drifted away. I can’t see them now. Transparent. Not a mass of facts. My perception of them dissolves. The smorgasbord is fluid. It is tranquil. Provokingly stable. Secular.

My toes still dwell within the seagull’s smorgasbord.

We shared. In one way of many ways, the seagulls and I shared.

The way a teacher shares with a student. Seagull, teaching me.

The old weathered sign was emphatic.

“Beach closes at dusk.”

I turned to retrieve my rolled up socks.

There is something about trying to put socks back onto feet that are still wet from the banquet table.

And there is that awesome feeling when feet are again encapsulated in the accoutrements of civilization but regaining their tingling warmth. It makes the heart beat softer.

The sun had now set behind the cliff behind me. The old oak tree in the bottom of this little beach cove was stalwart in its persistence to reach for and grasp to the heavens for that last glimmer of light. The golden leaves in the crown of that old tree, caught in the little eddies of wind, defiantly proclaimed their clinging to the day.

My eyes dropped.

Something had moved.

And there they were.

A pair of daddy-long-legs spiders.

Moseying along together. Then they stopped. Hesitated. So carefully those long limbs became intermingled. And they came together. Sixteen legs of cuddling. And they cuddled. Together. And cuddled. And cuddled. And what transpired between them was sacred.

In time, they slowly came apart. Slowly, carefully, the un-mingling of sixteen legs.

There seemed a moment of hesitation.

However they communicated. They communicated.

And they experienced the awesome experience of cuddling.

And moseyed on their separate ways.

St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere and its circumference nowhere.

The Deist would ascribe my perceptions to One Awesome Power that is the author of a sacred scripture that was just revealed to me.

Dinner guests. Flying in the circles of the beauty of randomness. Cohesiveness. Each taking their turn in selecting the comestibles from the smorgasbord of a lake. Aquatic creatures, for whatever reason, moving close to the edge of the serving platter.

The beak and claw of one. The life of another.

Death of one as the perpetuation of another.

A circle.

The cuddling circles of dandy-long-legs. The encircling of and within each other’s arms of embrace.

A circle.

As Emerson said: “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.”

Some think that heaven too is a circle.

This silent guest to a banquet just experienced it.

The Refectory Manager