Jumping the Circle

» (Un)Learning Eco-Mythic Trails

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Jumping the Circle

Years ago, at the beginning of this journey of unlearning, in the slow unraveling of modernity’s ontological centrality, the image that accompanied me was that of a cliff. Shrouded in a thick, vertical, and silent fog. I stood before it with the strange certainty that I would have to take a step forward, though I did not know if I would step on solid ground or fall into the void. The image promised neither redemption nor destiny, just the sensation of an inevitable threshold. Over time, the fog dissipated, revealing other forms of uncertainty. What had seemed like an abyss turned out to be the foot of a towering mountain. The impulse driving me was no longer to jump, but to climb… slowly, over sloping, unstable terrain, where every foothold had to be (re)invented. The vertigo remained, not because of the possibility of falling, but in the awareness that the path did not lead to a safe center, only to successive shifts of the body and perception.

More recently, the landscape has shifted once again. I am no longer on the edge nor on a steep ascent. I am in a forest clearing, at twilight, in that intermediate time when the world suspends its certainties of day and night. On the ground, there is a circle of mushrooms. And I leap in and out of it, in and out, in and out. In ancient Iberian and European imaginaries, circles were zones of enchantment, places where the invisible could be invoked, or where a protective light rendered the world’s poison powerless. But circles can also exclude, spells also imprison, and protection can blind. We can become trapped.

In this image and the movement of jumping in and out of the circle, it seems like a gesture of decentering.

For centuries, modernity has functioned as a circle of enchantment that organizes what can be seen, thought, and lived. We have long inhabited circles of enchantment where the world organizes itself around an invisible core. I do not intend to break or dominate it, simply to pass through it. Knowing that there is no “outside” of modernity for those of us shaped within it. I leap, but I carry the spell in my body. In the jump, I carry violence and friction, volatility and flaws. I repeat, over and over, knowing that the spell also pierces those who try to leave it. I discover that the circle remains partially within me, and I resist the enchantment and illusion that, within the circle, everything is safer, more organized, and controlled. Leaping out of the circle is not liberation. It is accepting that certain certainties may never return… I have lost fixed formulas of comfort, identity, innocence, and belonging.

Leaping out of this spell is not triumphant liberation, but discovering that there is a forest. Centerless, multiple, and pluriversal. Which also brings ambiguity, disorientation, risk, and loss of reference; here, orientation is never guaranteed. For the forest is not always a shelter or even hospitable; it is also a place of conflict, predation, parasitism, death, and competition. It does not guarantee innocence or harmony.

I bring these body-images—cliff, mountain, and circle—as perception shapeshifters as life unfolds and the center shifts.

They promise neither arrival nor overcoming, but as certain spells lose their power, other forms of attention become possible. More porous, perhaps less self-assured, but better able to remain in the twilight where the world ceases to be a map of destinations and becomes once again a shifting clearing.

For now, I just keep jumping, in and out, in and out.