What Kind Of Concentric Circle Have You Begun?
No matter how hard you might try to not start one, you can’t stop it.
The great artist Van Gogh told his brother, “I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”
I wonder if he would mind if I took away the word “people” so that it would simply end with the word “love.”
Wouldn’t this expand the picture? Instead of thinking we can only love those people, places, and things that look exactly like us, we could expand the idea of love to include everyone and everything.
One year, while waiting for spring, I put some narcissus bulbs in a bowl of rocks and water so they would bloom in my house. Every time I looked at them, I marveled at their beauty and promise that spring wasn’t that far away.
It was a concentric circle of love.
The dish by itself would have been empty and fairly boring. Filled with rocks and water, it still wouldn’t have been much to look at.
Add the bulbs to the dish, rocks, and water, and the dish, rocks, and water all had a purpose. At the same time, without the rocks, water, and dish, the bulbs would not be blooming.
And that concentric circle of love expanded.
Every time I looked at the flowers, their beauty filled me with joy. Then I passed on those lovely spring feelings to someone else, and then they passed those feelings on to another, and then to another, and another, and another, and another.
We are all like a stone thrown into the water, concentric circles expanding to include and touch everything.
Once, I saw a video of a crow who loved and cared for a kitten who could have died without him. And the kitten reciprocated by loving him back.
This love continued even after the kitten became a cat and found a home. Each morning, the crow waited for him by the door until he came out to play.
What if the crow had looked at the kitten and thought, “He doesn’t look like me, and besides, I could use him for food if he dies.”
Instead, Mr. Crow showed love and got love back, and that shared love has been a continuing, expanding circle for everyone who sees and hears about it.
One Christmas, Del gave me an entire pack of DVDs that he called “happy movies” because each ended with love.
One of those movies is called “Stardust.” In this movie, the heroine shows the hero that true love does not need proof of its love. It doesn’t require sacrifice and sorrow. We don’t love to have power.
As they live this truth, the world they find themselves in transforms.
In another movie, "Enchanted,” the heroine is so infused with love that her point of view expands into and through everyone and everything she meets.
She shifts the world that she has been unlovingly thrown into. Without blame and by being only love, she, too, transforms the world around her.
Concentric circles of love. We are all at the center and the cause of concentric circles.
We get to choose whether that circle will be one of love or of the multitude of other names for what is not love.
The opposite of love hides behind words like sorrow, blame, despair, upset, anger, or revenge, but it is always the opposite of love and only has power because we choose it instead of love.
That concentric circle does not end well for anyone.
In order to be a concentric circle of love, we have to start with a love for ourselves. Starting there, it is easy to be a stone of love that begins the circle of love that expands to transform the world.
Like the crow that loved the kitten, we have to begin by being happy with ourselves and content with who we are.
We love not worrying about what we don’t have (how does a crow feed or hug a kitten) but what we do have.
We have the capacity to love because that is the essence of our being.
None of us can do anything alone. Like the flowers in the dish, we must have each other’s support and encouragement. Without each other, we will feel empty and unfulfilled.
Try as we might, we cannot stop the concentric circle that extends from what we do and say.
It is our choice whether we expand love or do the opposite of love.
As we choose to love, that concentric circle will bring into each of our lives the fullness of what it means to love and be loved, and together, we can enjoy the sweet fragrance of the unique blooms called us.
It doesn’t matter if we are the cat or the crow. The crow had to give love to something he wasn’t supposed to love, and in return, the cat had to accept love from something he wasn’t supposed to trust.
If they can do it, we can too!
Like the women in “Enchanted” and "Stardust,” we can shift the world we were “sent to” into the world we know it really is—love.