A rusty paper clip held them together. Typed letters, faded from the dark-inked punch of typewriter keys filled lines on discolored pages rimmed in muted brown.

Stories told here were pulled from a brown envelope written over forty years ago by my then college self. The pages took me back in time to settings and places where words were heavy with observations, and innocence of a college freshman. Fingering the crinkly pages was like holding steppingstones into what is now my published writing life. They weren’t just youthful reflections caught in the lines of each rough surface, but the beginnings of where I would later return.

How I came full circle.

“Coming full circle” refers to things that now are the same as they were in the beginning, suggesting that after a series of events or changes, you have returned to the same situation as in the beginning.

Shakespeare may have started the idiom from his King Lear when he remarked, “The wheel is come full circle,” but there is another connotation to the expression. Coming full circle can also have a spiritual meaning of the interconnection of all things. The idea has roots in the natural world where everything in nature revolves around a center, such as the cycle of seasons and the orbits of planets. In many spiritual traditions, circular designs are a symbol of the divine, perfection, completion. Mandalas are an example, as translated to “circle” or “center” and are widely used in Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, reflecting our spiritual journey from the outside in. The circularness of existence is always changing and renewing.

First, I had a plan.

With a Smith-Corona case in my grip, and an oversized suitcase in the other, I entered the College of Journalism to study advertising. Sure, I had been a journaler since I was fifteen, but reporting, newswriting, persuasive writing, were among required classes and rites of passage, hurdles of a means to an end to get to my place in advertising. What I had planned after graduation was a working life of creating mini stories to sell products. I would work for an ad agency as an account exec selling the agency’s creative pitches to clients. Well, I got the first job, working for Leo Burnett in Chicago, starting at entry level. I figured I had my youth and nothing but time to earn my way to where I wanted to be. I would learn a thing or two about how an agency works and just where and how I would find my place. Until I didn’t.

And the circle continued

After years in the agency business, I took a turn in life, out of advertising and into the world of international corporate banking until I was done with it and it was done with me. I reasoned I still had time and youth to find my place. And I did. Until . . .

Life doesn’t always go according to the plan.

But, in the meantime, I’ll keep writing.

Over the writing years, I had accrued a timeline, a growth chart, of my life’s turning points, and a lot of reflection in between that lead me to the heart of their meaning. I thought of the mandala. Perhaps I was on a spiritual journey, starting from the outside and circling into the inner core.

Now I see that sometimes after the journey of bends and twists and turns of our lives, we do, indeed come full circle, where it all started back then and where now find ourselves.

Circling shows us how much we’ve grown.

. . . speaking of circles . . .

Trees start growing in the spring, most trees that is, cell-by-cell. In the fall, the wall of each cell thickens, darkens, and eventually the tree stops growing for a time. When that happens, a tree ring forms.

Nicole Davi

Tree-time reading

ONE MORE THING . . .

My novel, The Wisdom of the Willow, debuts May 7. The story touches on the idea of coming full circle as part of the navigation of the lives of four sisters in finding their places when they return to the wisdom taught to them under a willow tree by their mother.

It’s a metaphorically rich and reflective tale of sisterhood and strength, and you can PREORDER now.