Bird Droppings October 21, 2025
I am sitting by my computer, thinking of a circle.

I missed the last rerun of a favorite miniseries, Into the West, and one of these days, I will find it streaming somewhere. The movie starts and ends with a circle of stones with a line going east to west and one going north to south through the circle. In the back area of our yard, we have been building a memory garden. It is basically a rock garden with numerous succulents and sedums planted among the rocks that are special to us. The garden, when finished, will be a circle. Each quadrant has a space that will eventually be filled with young trees. A Japanese cedar was given to us when my wife’s father passed away by my friends at the high school and now stands nearly forty feet tall. Another will eventually honor my father on the opposite side as we finish our project, hopefully later next summer.

“You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round…. The Sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours…. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.” Black Elk, Ogallala Sioux, Holy Man

It has been nearly forty-six years since 1970, when I wrote a short poem of shorts. At that time, perhaps it was self-analysis or a self-description, “One little circle – alone – unopened”. It has been nearly twenty-five years since I headed toward Piedmont College as a graduate student, and I thought I was the circle alone and unopened. I had grown very close to the people in my cohort. As I attended graduate school, I found that I became a much better teacher and a better student. Henry David Thoreau was a teacher until he realized he must be a learner first. He needed to be a student again, and in doing so, he became a better teacher.

As I look at the circle I have completed in my education, it is only the beginning, not the ending, and the circle of friends and fellow learners in my cohort at Piedmont, and now as I continue my education both at Piedmont and Georgia Southern. The teachers I have met along the way over the past twenty years all touch on that circle and, in effect, keep it spinning and evolving. Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux holy man, used nature to define this circle nearly a hundred years ago, and Follows the Buffalo, a holy man of the movie series “Into the West”, who was sitting in the sacred circle in the North Dakota hills throughout the movie, addressed the white man with various other characters. My son once told me of a circle’s definition in geometric terms borrowed from Wikipedia.

“In Euclidean geometry, a circle is the set of all points in a plane at a fixed distance, called the radius, from a fixed point, called the center.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As I sit here pondering, I see that my circle has grown and is furthering my education. My circle includes all I have met, emailed, and talked with in grocery stores, schools, colleges, and numerous other places around the world. The circle continues and grows with each step, each word, each sensation, and each breath I take while I am privileged to live. As you think about your own circle, please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and your hearts, and always give thanks to Namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,
Mitakuye Oyasin
(We are all related)
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