Beginnings are so easy, compared with endings. And surely it’s true that each ending casts a new beginning, but it’s hard to see at the time. An ending seems so monumental, full, and heart-rending—the loss of an irreplaceable thing; whatever is coming is slender in comparison, barely begun, with no shape or consequence as yet, no conviction in it. In both the wheel and the Circle of Eight, endings and beginnings literally overlap as the ending of every festival gives way to the next festival and the cycle, once completed, is endlessly and seamlessly begun again. Each festival has degrees of endings and beginnings in its composition, just as it has dark and light. Imbolc, for example, is a festival that falls within the darker half of the year, though it is a festival given to the light. Beginnings are one of its strongest themes, but the ending of winter is in there too—the ending of all that depth and knowing into something simpler, plainer; new.
When we work the Circle of Eight we know that each time we dedicate ourselves to a direction—for a month or a moon or maybe only a week—we will have to leave it again. Just as we are always arriving in a new direction, greeting it with wariness, desire, or dread, so we are always leaving the direction we have by now become familiar with. Sometimes there is only relief—to escape from a hard lesson or an uncomfortable challenge, to move on from a place we felt didn’t represent us at our best—but mostly there is some level of regret, of loss; a tearing ourselves away from what has become a part of us, an unmarrying from the direction we have been bonded to while we saw the world from that perspective and spoke as its voice.
Traveling round and round the circle over time, this may lessen as we learn each direction is always there for us again, catching us in its arms as we arrive and allowing us to fall into it, each time a little deeper, more immediately. We also learn that those directions we’ve left are never really gone from us; not only do they lie ahead of us on the endless circling, but there are pieces, reflections, and commentaries on each of them within every direction. We start to become more like the circle ourselves, holding all of those refractions within ourselves while just that one—that particular one we are holding at that moment—catches the light, to be seen more brilliantly and be the filter for our experience right now, but knowing it is only an aspect of the whole or, indeed, that the whole is always present, just viewed from different angles.
Still, with all that knowing and within that body of feeling, still there is goodbye. Like leaving a lover at an airport; yes you will meet again, yes you have plans and trust and are as certain of future meetings as one can be of anything; but will you be the same people then? Even if it is only weeks or days away, will you still be the same person? You cannot be—it cannot be—not exactly the same. And in that inexactness, in that growth or change or merely time passing, there is the sadness, the loss, letting go—the surrender that happens endlessly, second to second, highlighted suddenly by a moment at an airport or this moment of leaving one direction to move to the next or this moment of moving on to a different piece of life.
Our Circle of Eight had twelve different participants over its lifetime of five years, not counting the six children in the Phoenix Circle. People came and left. One of them left, came back several years later, and then left again. Always when we turned the wheel that first night without them, it felt as if we left them behind inextricably in time, that its endless movement results in constantly leaving things and people behind.
The circle moved on without them, through the directions they had held and even replacing them; we noticed their absences, the shape they had left, for a while, and then enough other things changed and shifted so that it blurred. They became part of the background of the circle, the whispers and ghosts held just beyond the boundaries of the visible; part of our learning, our knowing, our experience of the circle, but indistinct. We might remember them more strongly in one direction than the others, even briefly see them there when we sat across from that direction or feel them momentarily when we moved into it ourselves. We might miss them when we came to sing a song and noticed their voice absent or when we created a ritual for a particular festival and remembered the way they had held the God at this festival last year or the year before or the altar they had built or the passion they brought into ritual.
Choosing how people can join is one dynamic of a group; coping with and allowing people to leave is another. Our Circle of Eight often worked on eight-month commitments, or the length of time it took to travel around the whole circle. People rarely left in the middle of these eight-month terms, but there’s leaving and leaving. There were people whose energy dropped to half-level, who skipped meetings or rituals, hanging on until the eight months would be up and they could leave within the agreed terms.
When anyone left we asked them to come to a final meeting. We sat with them in our current directions and each person spoke, sometimes at length, to the one leaving about what it had been like to be in the circle with them, what they had learned and understood from that person, what they felt their connection to be, and what it was like having them leave. Then the one leaving spoke to each person in turn about what they had seen and learned, what their connection was, and what they would take forward from that into wherever they were going. And then we turned the wheel and the person leaving stepped out of the wheel, not moving to the next direction but stepping off our rotation onto a path of their own. The wheel turned and the world looked different; we found ourselves in a new arrangement but still letting go of that person, whose echoes lay barely under the surface, their shapes and patterns interwoven with ours and still distinguishable.