Circle, Part 2

The theme for today is "The Circle" (Part 2)

We live our lives in nested and overlapping circles and spheres.
A circle of friends
a sphere of concern, or influence
the sphere of the sky, the heavens,

the everchanging sphere of awareness

and within it
that which we can  reach
or grasp
or embrace.

But what's going on there?
How do those circles come about?
 
Are we intelligent about it?

Outwitted

He drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.

Edwin Markham, The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems (1913)

These circles are sometimes in our relating
and sometimes inside us
separating experience
between what we reject and turn away from
and what we can bring into a bigger embrace and what we reject.

This popular poet was pointing out
a big clue
the way heart and mind work together
to form wit, or intelligence
and create the circles in which they find their meaning.

The heart is an organ
taking in blood, life energy,
pushing it out again
from the center to the periphery.

These days we have a culture of knowledge
to the extent we take it for granted
but heart is the enabler, the one that fills things up

mind may try to draw a circle
but heart decides what can be within its embrace.

How do we DO this
or let it happen?
 

We artificially make worse the painful paths of fortune.

Human wisdom plays the sage very foolishly
in exercising herself to diminish
the number and the charm of the pleasures
which belong to us,
while she shows kindness and vigilance
in employing her skill
in smoothing and colouring our ills,
and lightening our perception of them.  

-- Michel de Montaigne (1603)

What circles are you drawing,
or feel you are being "drawn into"?

What is your "full reach"?

What does heart make "in" and "out"?
Do we feel consequences from that movement?