Engulfing

He had arrived in time for dinner.

The guests were simply aglow. Moving about. Patterns of motion within patterns of motion.

There was conversation. Hardly discernable though. Just enough to know that the chatter was indeed invigorating.

As one guest circulated one way, another would move in opposition. 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 be discrete, invariably made a splash.

The observer was entranced by the ritual of dinner unfolding before him.

Then, a hush fell over the dinner guests.

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

Each had eaten. Taken what they needed from the smorgasbord table. The delicacies themselves having previously gleaned from their own banquet table. The transfer of the immortality of life.

The light was fading. The guests were drifting away. To fly again. To eat yet another time.

The old weathered sign was emphatic.

“Beach closes at dusk.”

He turned to retrieve his rolled up socks.

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

The sun had now fallen behind the sheltering cliff. But the old oak tree in the bottom of this little cove was stalwart in its persistence to reach for and grasp to the heavens for that last glimmer of light. The golden leaves in its crown, caught in the little eddies of wind, tethered by their stiff little petioles, swirling in little circles, shimmering, defiantly proclaiming their tenacity to the vanishing day.

His eyes dropped.

Something had moved.

And there they were.

A pair of daddy-long-legs.

Moseying along, side-by-side, together. On that still-warm November rock.

Then they stopped. Hesitated. And so carefully those elongated struts touched. Became intermingled. Sixteen legs of encirclement. And they cuddled. And nuzzled. Together. And what transpired was sacred.

In time, they slowly came apart.

Carefully. The un-circling. The un-mingling. The un-touching. Of sixteen legs.

There seemed a hesitation in their proceeding.

But then moseyed on, each in a separate way.

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, seeking the last vestiges of light at the close of the day, moving adjacent to the edge of that serving-platter, in the reassignment of their life.

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

A circle. The proposal of death perpetuating the motion of life.

The harmonic circles of shimmering in golden leaves. Grasping for the circle of light.

The sphere of spider encuddlement.

A squabble of circling gulls.

Motion.

Circles of motion.

As Emerson* once 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.”

Motion in circles.

Surrounding.

Engulfing.

*Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Circles."

The Refectory Manager