Last month some friends & I went to the Chicago Flower & Garden Show, an annual event strategically timed to free me from the iron grip of Seasonal Affective Disorder & to offer me a welcome respite from the sight of my winter-weary backyard where last year’s coreopsis resemble tumbleweeds & my favorite flowerpot, once shiny, jaunty & orange, now sits in a puddle of its own shattered glaze, victim to the merciless hard freezes of January.
Although the tulip displays are typically my favorite part of the show, this year the bouquets of Italian ranunculus utterly captivated me. Seen in profile, these flowers have a pleasing lenticular shape but it’s their full-face view that is so fascinating: As they unfold, the knife-edges of their whisper-thin petals overlap to create a pattern of tightly packed, concentric circles that catch the light in a most beguiling way.
I’ve often marveled how one shape or form is so much more visually appealing to me than another & how a particular pattern can fill me with joy each time I see it. Favorites, though, can occasionally be replaced. For decades I was enthralled with spirals, whether in the context of a flower, a seashell or the design on a pendant but nowadays, concentric circles speak to me more, which probably accounts for my quick obsession with Italian ranunculus.
Perhaps this is because the spiral is less of a metaphor for my life now than it used to be. Maybe the idea of a fixed point generating an endless, outward-curving line or, conversely, the idea of a line winding inward until it reaches a fixed point, no longer serves me as well as that of a series of perfect circles, each with no beginning or end, echoing out from a stable center like the ripples in a pond created by a dropped pebble.
Whereas the spiral implies a journey, either from a starting point or to a destination, concentric circles imply no such thing. Instead, they suggest to me different states of being where, like an electron jumping from one orbital to another, either absorbing or emitting energy, one is free to be more expansive & encompassing or less so, but where any state of being at any given time is continuous & perfect.
I’ve experienced a sort of spiritual sigh of relief since I replaced the spiral as my metaphor for life with the image of concentric circles. There seems now to be a soothing lack of emphasis on finiteness & on toil. Whether I’m navigating an orbit close to the center or one at the farthest reaches, life seems once again to be more joyful, more beguiling, more captivating…a bit like the Italian ranunculus that inspired me last month.