I have been thinking about harmony and unity. About how, over the course of hundreds, if not thousands of years, we have moved away from the circle to form the line.

I have been thinking about the quest of the individual striving for purpose by trying to get to the head of the line, not realizing the line is an illusion.

I have been thinking about how we are birthed into human form to explore this illusion, but not to hold onto it. For there is nothing to hold onto. No hands to join your palms.

Last Friday, in my continued quest to learn the mysteries of the land near where I live, I visited the Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum with a friend of mine. The museum, founded by Bud and Nancy Thompson, several years after Nancy taught my third grade class at Canterbury Elementary School, is deliberately arranged in the form of a circle. When you walk the rooms of artifacts recovered across the United States, your eyes pick up patterns. Themes are shared throughout the native cultures that join the people in sacred truth. The circle is one of them.

There is, by its inherent nature, no beginning or end to the circle. The line, when drawn in this form curves back to itself, and in doing so becomes part of a greater whole that never ends. Here separation is impossible. If there is a break in the circle, it ceases to be whole.

In my quest to find sacred sites in New England, I have been searching for circles of stone, but on Friday I found circles in other forms. Bodies, male and female, joined into circles of hands on baskets, pottery and clothing. The symbol of unity stretches across our globe.

In our more modern quest for dominance over each other, we have forgotten what it feels like to hold each others’ hands. We have forgotten that we are birthed into individuality only to discover we cannot truly make it alone. When you gaze at a circle of hands like the one show in the image above, it becomes almost an absurd hope to strive for separation.

Imagine the energy of holding an endless circle of hands. Fear has no hope here. Loneliness does not exist. The pain of the individual dissolves into the embrace of the whole. Imagine the love.

A long ago time, this was simply Life. The Circle of Live. There is a reason thousands of years ago humankind formed circles with stones to worship Life. There is a reason why bodies of hands continuously joined, and voices sang in a circle of harmony around fires.

If you doubt the power of the circle, close your eyes with me and imagine a hug of one thousand hands.

The land still remembers its hold. Can we?