I watch her wobble in her arc across the roofs of my neighborhood. I assume it’s the same bird, though they look identical to me most of the time. She circles lower as she scans what is below her, where I am turning right back onto my street, to change cars, to leave again. I wonder what she thinks of me. I wonder what I look like to her, a large gray animal sliding along the ground, not food, not friend or foe, simply stranger.
I’m struck by the way a vulture rides the current of the air. They glide, more than fly, letting the wind move them, drifting like v-shaped balloons. Her arc wobbled; it felt somehow as though she had not perfected the shape of a circle, the way we struggle to over years and years and perhaps only when we are gifted a protractor or a pencil compass will we make that best imitation. Hers is not a full circle, not a perfect balance of curves meeting each other. It wobbles. She flies on.
Ancient Pythagoreans loved numbers, believed the universe built on their perfection, their wholeness. The numbers had harmony, that was the foundation. In music, in math, there is a sense of completion. The equation that balances to zero. The circle that ends where it began, or continues where it left off, infinitely, beautifully. I love this, too. I know this love of a harmony, a balanced equation, the crisp satisfaction where everything on a list is crossed off, and each requirement of a self-help book is accomplished for that day, and each and every thought and word is catalogued and balanced.
I live in unsteady and unfinished circles. I am the vulture scanning the ground on an air current that changes. I make lists only to lose them in my purse or on the floor of my van next to Cheez-its and Cheerios. I begin projects and find that they will take weeks and not hours. The thunderstorm cancels riding, I trudge with my kids to a celebration of reading at their school and step deep into puddles and soak the socks I borrowed from someone on the day that I forgot my own.
When I ride, my teacher tells me to make loops, 20 meter circles, at one end and then the other. She asks me to change directions halfway down the arena in a serpentine shape. The horse and I, we make these circles unsteady. We wobble. “Fix your line!” she calls after me as I pick up the trot, my hands sweaty on the reins.
But the unsteady circles of my life resist being fixed, forced into precision. My pressing them tighter makes the world more fraught, keeps my own self wired with anxiety and a humming in my veins I can’t shake even when I lay down to sleep. I cannot make my life’s circles perfect. I want to build a day of finished dreams and harmonized goals: a philosophy paper; a book full of metaphors about riding, and bird watching, and God; the perfect afternoon playing outside with my kids and yoga completed and prayers prayed.
All this, an unsteady circle. The vulture in her flight.
Yet she is still flying, isn’t she. I saw her again a few minutes after I had the thought, and she was still airborne. She had, in fact, gone somewhere new.
A circle will repeat; perhaps another way to see the unsteadiness is that it moves me forward. I learn on the lines of the arena how to love the horse; I learn in the crumbs of the van and the half-planned afternoons that love does not need a schedule.
If we live in unsteady circles, we still fly.