Arty Farty Friday ~ Squaring the......

Glancing through husband's Flickr pages I decided I could maybe wax a bit arty farty with a few of his photographs, taken on our trips over the years. Among the thousands of images circles began to jump out and demand my attention.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Everything the Power of the World does is in a circle. The Sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball and so are all the stars. The Wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles. ... The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were.
(John Neihardt)

"The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul."
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look behind from where we came
And go round and round and round in the circle game
(Joni Mitchell).

Circles and Extremes

There are no straight lines in astrology, only circles and cycles. Some are so huge that we never again get to see the point from which we started out. Others, such as the cycles of the Moon, come around many times, even in a comparatively short lifetime.

In the circle of the zodiac, around which our planets and lights travel, the first and last signs are opposites, they are also neighbours. Aries, the initiator, full of energy, impatient to get things started; nextdoor is Pisces the loose, visionary dreamer in no hurry to, as they say in the USA, "haul ass".

Circles don't have extremities, only departure and return points, which means that opposites - extremes, are liable to bump into one another, even co-mingle, not in individual viewpoints but in effect.

In the case of political opinions, the further left or right one moves in entrenched viewpoints, the more liable one is, without even realising it, to be assisting the very causes one started out to oppose, thereby damaging one's own best interests.

Take the so-called "progressive" liberals in the USA. Please! I'd wager there are few more lefty than yours truly in this fair land, yet those "progressives" get up my nose.

Some of them are undermining the current Democratic administration. They whine incessantly that the politicians in power are not doing enough and not doing it fast enough.
They criticise every word and every move made by prominent congress people and the President. I do seriously wonder whether these people are really conservatives in disguise.....Trojan horses. It's a tempting idea! Or is it just that they don't realise that they have slipped through the almost non-existent divide into a murky, putrid extremist soup, good for practically nothing. The extreme right and extreme left are neighbours in the circle of opinion, just as Aries and Pisces are neighbours in the astrological zodiac. I'd better make it clear that I am not comparing the signs to political viewpoints, only in the way that extremes are liable to co-mingle and produce an effect compatible with their opposite.

Just as extreme left-wingers can do more harm than good to their more moderate colleagues, and inadvertently assist the aims of the right, extreme right-wingers can end up helping their perceived enemies on the left by being so extreme that their words and actions leave nothing but ridicule in their wake and, in the end, serve only to assist the left.

“Extremes, though contrary, have the like effects. Extreme heat kills, and so extreme cold: extreme love breeds satiety, and so extreme hatred; and too violent rigor tempts chastity, as does too much license.”
George Chapman, English poet and dramatist c.1559-1634.