Image: Green tree leaves, with a few beginning to blush for fall
After a lovely moment quivering on the equinox threshold, we’ve tipped over into autumn. Here in the Pacific Northwest, that’s meant rain rain rain, and rejoicing for those of us who’ve had enough of that pesky old sun. It would be a perfect day to wrap myself in a blanket on the couch and read Mansfield Park — if the Department of Transit hadn’t, in its wisdom, decided that this would be a good week to jackhammer up the pavement on our street.
I was paying a lot of attention to the arrival of the equinox last week, not just because of the pesky old sun, but also because I’m hovering on my own balance point: orienting myself to a new place, new communities, new routines, while trying to deepen my commitment and engagement to practices and projects that mean a lot to me and that I’ve been husbanding for a long while. My brain does not like all these goings-on one single solitary bit, and is constantly trying to drag me off to more surface pursuits. “Don’t you need to read about the Dyatlov Pass incident again?” “There’s Elvis movies on the Criterion Channel!”
One of the things I’m exploring to keep me present and focused is a form of Celtic prayer called “caim.” Traditionally, the caim has been an encircling prayer, undertaken at the beginning of a day or a task or adventure — the gentler cousin of the “lorica,” or breastplate, prayer so beautifully yet grimly girded on by St. Patrick. At its simplest, the caim is a protecting prayer, surrounding the petitioner with beneficent energies:
Circle us, Lord,
Keep love within, keep hatred out.
Keep joy within, keep fear out.
Keep peace within, keep worry out.
Keep light within, keep darkness out.
May you stand in the circle with us,
Today and always.
I’m noodling around with the notion of… what do I want to gather to myself, now, in this season of the year and this season of my life? What do I long to have near, right next to the skin, and what would I prefer to keep afar, or even actively reject? This circle, this circle of my life that I’m always in the center of, always surrounded by the Spirit that knows no limit or boundary… what am I called to fill it with, and how wide can it be? What’s distracting me? Where am I fearful, or reluctant, or anxious? Where do I need comfort, and where do I need challenge?
Each of needs to leave the hobbit hole of perceived safety and familiarity at various points, to grow into our full stature as human beings, uniquely equipped to appreciate and to nourish the world and each other. Going out into the borderlands is creepy and uncomfortable and potentially dangerous, a place of floundering and unease. It’s where we’re faced with our vulnerability and our limits and our need for help, and without encountering these challenges to complacency, we’ll struggle to grow.
Yet our center is always our center — worth celebrating and savoring — the place we’ll always gyre back to, however widely far we’ve swirled. Knowing and acting from that center of home, that place from which our gifts and our strengths come, lends us insight, and embodies the power to do, to bring ideas and values into being, to share our unique dreams and perspective with the world… especially a world that seems with every day to fling us farther apart from each other, with such deadly consequences.
So that’s the caim I’m trying to write, and trying to pray, seeking that equinox balance of dark and light, wise and weak, foreigner and friend. I want to name and honor what strengthens, deepens, and gives life to me, and what I struggle to understand, am afraid of, and want to avoid. And what the world needs from me.
I hope to put into words my trust that the center will hold, and from it, my circle can be as wide as the world. And I need to return to the center, again and again, the heart of who I am.