3 January 2005: Sitting in a Circle

Happy New Year to all!

Here in the Bay Area it's been raining almost nonstop for days. A dull rain, nothing remotely stormlike or exhlilrating about it, just water interminably drizzling straight down out of a flat and featureless gray sky. It's napping weather, curling up with a book or a movie weather.

Just as well; it encourages me to stay home, resting, reflecting, and integrating the previous year, which is a good thing for me to do before the new semester starts. As is spending time with Dragon Lady; she and I have done a lot of curling up together in the past week or so with books, movies, or just ourselves.

Low energy and high spirits; winter depression without the actual depression feels sort of like a weeks-long mild cannabis high.

The New Year's Eve gathering at Bonita Hollow was delightful; the most purely pleasant New Year's Eve I can remember. Good people, good food, good drink, good music, good conversation. Good is the good is the yes.

I've been thinking lately about sitting in circles. Groups of people sitting in circles. My statement in my entry of December 31st, that any group activity worth doing should at some point involve everyone sitting together in a circle, came as a result of the observation that this is how things work, at least in my life. Over the past 23 years or so, I've spent a lot of time sitting in circles with groups of people, and I'm now embarked on a life path that will probably lead to my doing more and more of that, for the rest of my life. Which is fine with me, as long as what happens in between the circles is also good.

Which is part of what I've been thinking about: circles as life's punctuation. Paratheatrical ritual lab sessions end with everyone sitting in a circle, and sometimes begin that way as well. Aikido classes end sitting in a circle - or at least Aikido Shusekai classes do, as do the classes of the sort of dojos I choose to visit more than once. Bone Councils and other sorts of talking-stick circles and prayer circles; circles around fires; spontaneous conversation circles that form at parties or during group acid trips.

How much great work begins and/or ends with people sitting in a circle? A lot of it, for me. And I think that there's some primal ancestral energy that automatically infuses any group of people who sit down in a circle together with anything resembling a sacred intent, even if that intent is as simple as taking a few seconds to thank each other at the end of an aikido class.

See, sitting in a circle together, like singing, fighting, eating, talking, and fucking, is one of those basic primal things that everyone's ancestors did; one of those things that goes back to the first humans. Hunt an animal, build a fire, sit around the fire in a circle and eat the animal. One of the oldest rituals there is. Every human's family tree, if you go back far enough, contains a whole bunch of generations of people who participated in that ritual.

Most of the New Year’s Eve gathering at Bonita Hollow was spent with everyone sitting in a circle. We didn’t plan it that way – nobody said, “Okay, everybody get in a circle.” First it was me and Laramie and Wendibird hanging out in the kitchen, and then Sherpa and Syrinx showed up and it became a conversation in the living room. The other guests showed up in pairs (except for Dragon Lady, who’d needed rest and thus showed up much later than I did), with each pair managing to not show up until the previous pair had settled in – much like the gradual arrival of the company of dwarves in The Hobbit. Thus each successive pair arrived to find the group happily sitting in a circle, and so each successive pair integrated themselves into that circle (Laramie’s living room, fortunately, is large and contains many things to sit on).

And so it came about that this New Year’s Eve, I was sitting in a big circle, with a group of some of my favorite people in the world, at the stroke of midnight. The perfect ending for this year, and the perfect beginning for the new one, especially since they were all people whom I’m hoping to have in my life in some or other major way in this new year.

As midnight approached, I started to get a headache. It gradually got worse, and I became bleary and then nauseous. Shortly before midnight, I closed my eyes for a bit, put myself into a light trance state, and asked my unconscious mind what was going on. The answer I received was that I was releasing all of the poison that I’d been carrying around as a result of my long association with a certain toxic group of people whom I’d finally severed my ties with.

Apparently, as I’d intuited back in April, my attachment to the tradition of Aleph’s New Year’s Party was the final thing maintaining my connection to that group. Even though I’d made the decision months ago to sever those ties, and to find something better to do with my New Year’s Eve, some part of my unconscious was still waiting for a proper ritual of closure – i.e., the ritual of me actually following through with my plan by going and having a better New Year’s Eve somewhere else, with different and better people. Now that ritual was happening, and it was, among many other good things, a healing ritual for me. I was releasing poison; my body was experiencing the poison as it left. I didn’t need to literally throw up (thank God), since it wasn’t a literal poison, but I did need to feel the poison fully as it left me (did it make its way back to the people in that toxic group? I’m certainly curious as to what changes might occur in certain people’s health in the days and weeks to come, though I probably won’t find out since I’m not in touch with them anymore).

Once I knew that it was a healing, and that something needed to pass through me, and that I wouldn’t have to puke literally, I gave my unconscious the go-ahead to do the release all the way, and I relaxed and stopped fighting it. Very soon after midnight, the poisoned feeling began to go away. By 12:30 or so I felt quite good, and by 1:00 I was downright euphoric. I ended up staying until about 3:30.

I feel good. Healed, unburdened, saved.

I won.

I’ll be putting together another New Year’s Eve event a year from now, unless God tells me otherwise. I’d be delighted if things were to play out such that on every New Year’s Eve, midnight finds me sitting in a circle of good people. We shall see; God’s will be done.

Yesterday morning was the first Aikido Shusekai class of the new year. Nearly thirty students, eight of them brand new. Not bad for a lazily rainy Sunday morning right after a holiday. I expect even more on Wednesday, God willing.