About my blog title*

stitchery from the Karmel Dachau, a convent of Carmelite nuns at the Dachau concentration camp
based on Teresa of Avila's Seven Apartments of the Soul

A circle divided into quadrants reflects a basic human need for order, beauty and meaning. The squared circle anchors us in our own center even as we travel within and around the edges of self and world. As far as I can tell it's a pretty universal symbol--one that has spoken to me since I was a girl growing up in the rural Midwest. There, daily walks down to the place where our ribbon black highway crossed paths with a red gravel road helped me find my spiritual and geographical center.

I delight in identifying little correspondences and affinities all around my world, including these explanations of and variations on the theme of the squared circle:

• The Native American medicine wheel is a familiar symbol. In her wonderful book on coloring mandalas, Suzanne F. Fincher lays it out for us.
• The axis mundi is another. (I know Wikipedia says this article may blur the lines between fact and fiction, but I think it does an okay job of getting the basic idea across). Raylene Hinz Penner, beloved professor of many, uses the idea of axis mundi in her book Searching for Sacred Ground, and I promise that I will read it cover to cover someday.
• The beautiful cover of Gertrud Mueller Nelson's To Dance with God was my introduction to the circle squared/squared circle (the former sounds more poetic, don't you think?) and the idea of envisioning time as a circular, flowing whole--like the worn face of the 1930s Seth Thomas on my fireplace mantel.
• I'm sure you can enlarge and complete this list with your own examples of squared circles. If you like, let me know what comes to your mind.

*One of these days I want to post a picture of my latest squared circle, but words will have to suffice for now.