Chapter 49 The Second Circle

The name Elspeth did not stay on the stone for long. Within a week, the tide had shifted, and the stone had moved, and the name had been worn almost smooth, the way all names are worn smooth by the sea, by the sand, by the wind, by the water, by the patient, consuming, loving hands of the ocean, which keeps everything and loses nothing, which remembers everything and forgets nothing, which holds everything and releases everything, in its own time, in its own way, in its own rhythm, the rhythm of the tide, the rhythm of the breath, the rhythm of the heart, the rhythm of the asking, the rhythm of the continuing, the rhythm of the always-begun, the always-under-way, the always-searching, the always-mended, the always-growing, the always-becoming, the always-ongoing, the always-beginning, the always-continuing, the always-returning, the always-coming-home. Lila did not mourn the stone. She celebrated it. She celebrated the fact that the sea had taken the name back, not because it had been lost but because it had been returned to the water, to the place from which it had come, to the source, to the beginning, to the asking, to the song, to the love, to the practice, to the rhythm, to the pulse, to the breath, to the heartbeat, to the eternal, to the endless, to the open, to the full, to the continuing, to the ongoing, to the always-begun, to the always-under-way, to the always-searching, to the always-mended, to the always-growing, to the always-becoming. And she began to think about circles — not the circle of Thornhaven, which had grown, but circles elsewhere, circles that had not yet been found, circles that had not yet been invited, circles that were waiting, patient and enormous, for someone to come and ask them to join, to add their names to the ledger, to set their stones at the wall, to sing their songs to the sea, to participate in the asking, to continue the tradition, to become part of the record, part of the chain, part of the web, part of the lattice, part of the network, part of the community, part of the practice, part of the love, part of the life, part of the forever, part of the always, part of the ongoing, part of the beginning, part of the returning, part of the coming-home. She wrote to the northern coast. She wrote to the western coast. She wrote to the eastern coast. She wrote to the islands, and the inlets, and the harbors, and the coves, and the bays, and the estuaries, and the deltas, and the mouths of rivers, and the edges of cliffs, and the bottoms of clefts, and the tops of stones, and the spaces between the waves, and the silence between the names, and the darkness beneath the water, and the light above the surface, and the wind that carried the salt and the song and the memory and the love and the asking and the continuing and the returning and the coming-home. *I have found a circle,* she wrote. *It is growing. The names are multiplying. The stones are being set. The songs are being sung. The sea is listening. The record is expanding. And I am asking you: will you carry your name too? Will you add it to the ledger? Will you set it in stone? Will you sing it to the water? Will you join the circle? Will you continue the asking? Will you remember? Will you carry the name home?* And somewhere, on a coast that had never written before, a woman who had kept a name for forty years read the letter, and she understood that she was not alone, that there were others who asked, others who remembered, others who carried the names home, and she wrote back, and her name was added to the ledger, and her stone was set at the wall, and her song was sung to the sea, and the circle widened, and the asking continued, and the record grew, and the sea kept its records, and waited, and watched, and remembered — as it always had, and always would, as long as there were people who would come to the shore and ask who their person had been, and listen, and remember, and carry the names home. The circle did not stop growing. It could not have stopped if it tried, because growth is the nature of a living practice: what welcomes will keep, what keeps will remember, what remembers will ask, and what asks will continue, and what continues returns, and what returns comes home. Replies were crossing between the villages now the way gulls cross between boats — north and west and east along the coast — each carrying the same question and each answered the same way: come to the water, say the name, listen. The record grew. The stones multiplied. The asking went on. Not all of it was easy. Some letters brought grief instead of comfort: a man in a western port who had waited too long to learn his father's name and now had no one left to ask; an island woman whose whole circle had been three old sisters, two of them already gone. Lila answered every one herself, at the reading-room table after dark, with the bark ledger open beside the paper one and Wren's kettle breathing on the stove, and she told them what Eleanor's letter had told her — carry it as far as you can carry it, and someone will carry it the rest of the way. On Sundays the children learned the new names alongside the old ones and could not always have said which were which, which Lila privately considered the whole point. Some nights she read the oldest bark pages over again, not for the names but for the hand that had written them, and felt less alone in the work. By the time the swallows left, there were circles keeping names at four walls besides her own, and the envelopes were still arriving.