Circles of Care | Sunlight

September 22, 2024
13 pages

When we think of the many challenges facing our world, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Closer to home, our list of projects can often feel endless, while our web of relationships, whether near or far, can always use more tending—not to mention our physical and emotional health! Given all of this complexity, how can we decide what to do?

Circles of Care offers a simple principle for choosing how to direct your attention, given the many scales of reality that shape our experience of life from moment to moment.

Lovingly illustrated with colorful pen-and-ink drawings, this timeless teaching makes a great addition to your toolbox for working with life.

— Jonathan Harris

Circles of Care

A principle for scaling attention

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Circles of Care

A principle for scaling attention

Begin with your body—how does it feel?Does it need movement, a nap, or a meal?Or does it feel rested, nourished, and fit,    prepared for the actions to which you’ll commit?

Move on to your mind—what is its state?Is it filled up with worries and wishes and hates?Or does it feel empty, steady, and clear,    ready to welcome whatever appears?

And now to your home—do you love where you live?Is it asking for something it needs you to give?Or does it feel grounding, cozy, and clean,    providing a shelter for tending your dreams?

And then to the various people you love—    have you learned to accept them as more than enough?Do you meet them with honesty, joy, and respect?Do you speak from the heart every time you connect?

And then to the work that you do every day—    do you come to it gladly, as if it were play?Do you put into practice your personal gifts,    creating improvements and positive shifts?

And then to the help that you give and receive—    enlivening wishes and answering needs,    nurturing people and projects and place,    supporting the health of our planet in space.

And then to this wondrous world that we share—    with its structures and systems and circles of care    each of us playing our own little part    finding our medicine, messages, art.

For what is this world but a series of lives,    reflecting each other with myriad eyes—    each with their lenses and visions and views,    each with the feeling of needing to choose?

And what is this world, but a story we tell—    a dream with no end, an alarm with no bell?To wake from the story and see it as such,    to swim in the dream and savor the touch.

These Circles of Care—an invisible map—    to help us awaken, embody, adapt,    to the story of life that we choose to create    and the world that emerges to which we relate.

From body, to mind, to home, and to love,To work and to help—below as above.These are the scales of the story of you;    this is the world that you call into view.

For you’re in the world,    and the world is in you.You make it; it makes you;    it’s ancient; it’s new.

So what feels alive,    most fertile, and true?What are you sensing,    and what will you do?

Published September 22, 2024