What Remains

My Photo: The Path Ahead

 

There is a moment, after the circle closes,
when the space feels different.

The chairs are still there.
The air is the same.
The forest just beyond the walls continues on as it always has.

And yet, something has shifted.

Something has been witnessed.

Not in a dramatic way.
Not in a way that asks to be explained.

But in the quiet way that meaningful things often do.

 

The Listening Circle is not something that easily translates once it ends.

It is not a performance.
It is not something to analyze or summarize.

It is something that is experienced,
and then slowly understood afterward.

Sometimes hours later.
Sometimes days.

 

What stays is not always the words.

It might be a feeling that lingers.
A moment of recognition.
A sense of being less alone in something you hadn’t spoken before.

Or simply the experience of sitting in a space
where nothing needed to be fixed.

 

There is a kind of steadiness that comes from being listened to
without interruption, without interpretation.

And there is something equally meaningful
in listening to others
with that same kind of attention.

 

The circle opens, and then it closes.

But it does not end in the way things usually end.

It carries forward quietly.

Into conversations.
Into walks in the forest.
Into the way something is held, or understood,
just a little differently than before.

 

What remains is often subtle.

But it is not small.

 

Thank you to those who stepped into the circle.

And for those who are quietly wondering about it,
there will be another.

- Sherri