Always Here, Never Alone: On Center and Circumference
I am in a book discussion group reading Cynthia Bourgeault's Eye of the Heart. Her work tends to open my heart and reorient me back to my center. There are people who have done real work purifying their own consciousness, and their whole system radiates something you can feel, not just something you can argue with. I catch myself hanging onto every word they transmit, as if I'm tasting honey. Their teaching is original to their own particular quirks, and there's no mistaking that their focus is laser-aimed at what G. I. Gurdjieff called the Real I.
Shortly after our last book gathering, I had a group coaching session where my coach reminded us of our center. My feelings went deep, and afterward my body reacted as if I were coming through the last stages of a cold: shivers, cold sweats. Something had moved through me strongly enough to register in my body before I understood it in my mind. Teilhard de Chardin has a phrase for this, quoted in the very book my group is reading: a felt paroxysm, the moment a truth stops being merely understood and is instead lived at its full intensity. My body seemed to know that before I did.
That night, I wrote this:
The center is my source, and the center is my Lord. Everything else is circumference.
My skin, his skin. My lips, his lips. The Eros running through our veins like the pomegranate split open.
I can give and receive from that center, and my heart expands in proportion to trusting his presence.
Always here. Never alone. Held. Loved. Embraced. Now.
Today, in a meditation with sixty other people, I understood its true meaning.
For the last few years, my life has been focused on wholeness, awakening, surrender, and return to Love, to God. It has become, somewhat jokingly, my full-time job, though I'm never quite taken seriously when I say that out loud.
For all my dedication, I do steer away from my center. In the beginning of this journey, I almost wanted to leave the circumference behind entirely, the human aspects of life, not life itself, but something closer to how a monk or a nun lives, separated from the daily grind. With time, I've realized the point of walking toward God was never to escape being human. It was to infuse love into our humanness, to be fully human while also being fully divine.
That means the circumference matters, but nothing else gets to become my Source. The circumference, people, relationships, work, frameworks, being seen, certainty, is always offering itself as a substitute center, and because it's tangible, it's tempting. The invisible, felt truth of the center can't compete on those terms unless I already know, in my body, that it's real.
For a long time, it felt mostly like either/or. I either had my center, or I had the periphery. I struggled to hold both at once. I'm starting to see that I can have my work, my writing, beauty, money, friendship, romance, and still not ask any of them to give me what only the center can give me. I don't have to kill desire to return to my center. I can feel the fire and remain rooted. I can move outward without relocating, without abandoning what's underneath me.
In that sense, what I'm actually longing for is freedom within the world, not freedom from it.
When I feel myself departing, this is the practice: Where is my attention right now? What has quietly become my center? Can I return?
And whenever the circumference starts to seduce my attention, I come back to this:
Always here. Never alone. Held. Loved. Embraced. Now.
We might forget the center. It does not forget us.
