"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect...and human love will be seen at its height. "
~ E. M. Forster, "Howards End"
The circle is an unbroken connection, the purest shape in nature. Mathematicians consider it a perfect symbol of infinity. Philosophers, artists, and religious leaders believe it to be a metaphor for love and the idealization of unity.
This past Saturday, my son and his best friend begged me to take them to Target and buy them the new cult accessory for Hollywood second-graders, colorful rubber bands shaped like animals, food and other objects.
They each grabbed an assortment of packs.
"Do you really need that many?" I asked. "Mom, yessss," Luca insisted. "Because then we can trade them with our friends. That's the whole point."
Only connect.
Later that day, I noticed that the climbing rose I've been endlessly cajoling to wrap itself around my guest room window has finally succeeded in embracing itself.
Only connect.
Halos of meaning popped up everywhere. In my dining room, my new terrarium became a thriving example of Emersonian self-reliance.
In my guest room curtains, the ever-widening circles on Martyn Lawrence Bullard's "Marrakech" fabric were an homage to beauty expanding outward.
(Martyn Lawrence Bullard "Marrakech" fabric)
Reading an article on artist Ann Carrington in The Guardian, a vintage sculpture in her fireplace became a powerful talisman for the connection between heart and hearth.
In the book "Bright Young Things: London" an antique convex mirror provided a glimpse of infinity echoed in circles of patterned wallpaper.
(Photograph by Jonathan Becker)
Leafing through an old House and Garden magazine yielded multiple treasures: a spread on Oberto Gili's house in Tuscany with this heavenly window frame....
(Photo by Oberto Gili)
...the simple honesty of a bowl of fruit on his kitchen table...
(Photo by Oberto Gili)...and a crown of plumage around a turkey in his garden.
(Photo by Oberto Gili)
Everywhere I looked in the sphere of domesticity, I found sacred circles of human connection.
(via "Hollywood Style" by Diane Dorrans Saeks)
(via Peter Dunham's website)
(via Ruthie Chapman Sommers website)
