eaten-away tree rings — photo by author

Circling back to ourselves

Mick Gibson
2 min readOct 21, 2022

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We circle each other
for lifetimes.

Meeting and leaving
over the years.

We spiral out
from birth
and then
back to ourselves
in dust.

The cycles erode
and then
return.

They are etched
in us,
in nature
in all that holds
us together.

It’s been a reflective week for me — following a lot of good work and hard truths over the weekend — in the company of others.

And the circle is the image that keeps showing to me.

It was a circle of men that created the safe space that allowed me to fully grieve the passing of my mother.

It was two interlocking spirals I cut from a piece of paper over the weekend, when asked to cut the shape of how I was feeling in that moment. The one spiral is my life in years emanating out from a birth that nearly killed me. The other spiral is my life in truth centring back to truly hug myself before passing. The edges of the spirals touch and connect in moments of magic and realisation.

It was that beautifully eroding tree stump slowly being turned back to dust by the busy termites of life.

It is our path together,
back to ourselves,
until it is not.

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Mick Gibson

3 countries, 3 children, 2 dogs and 1 life-partner. I speak and write to make sense of what’s inside.