Home
Growing and Shrinking the Circle
A short prose piece on growing and shrinking the circle — on home as something that expands and contracts rather than sitting fixed at an address. It treats belonging as elastic: the circle of what we call home widens to take others in and narrows in retreat, and the piece attends to that motion. It sits among the writing on the Artwork page, brief and lyrical, closer to meditation than argument. For its length it carries a good deal of the framework's feeling — the sense that coherence is a matter of who and what we draw inside the circle, and how far we are willing to let it reach.
For its brevity it carries a surprising amount of the framework's feeling, and it reads more as meditation than argument. Its image — a circle that widens to take others in and narrows in retreat — is the whole project's concern with coherence rendered at human scale: home as a matter of who and what we are willing to draw inside the line.
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Home
home · n. the place where one lives; one's family or household; a person's native land; the place where something flourishes; a refuge, a place of belonging.
For the ones I carry, and who carry me.
Ask a bird where home is, and it answers three things at once: the nest, the tree, the green sprawl of the park. None is wrong. Each is the true center of a different circle.
Ask a person, and the rings only widen
a face, a kitchen, a street, a city, a country, a pale blue dot turning in the dark. We spend our lives pointing toward where we belong and never quite landing on it.
To dwell, the old thinkers said, is not simply to occupy a space but to be woven into it
for the walls to learn your shape, the air to hold your name. Home is less a place than a belonging, and belonging keeps no fixed address.
Which returns me to the question from On Rising: if we are rising, what are we rising toward? I had assumed up
toward the galaxy in the far corner of the sky, the widest ring of all, the last and largest home.
But there is an old homesickness in us that no journey answers, no distance cures
a longing for a country we have never seen and somehow cannot stop missing. We climb and climb, and the ache only deepens. Perhaps that is the clue. Perhaps we have been reaching outward for what we were only ever carrying inward
the Kingdom, it was said, is within you, not without.
So ask the bird again. It does not fly off to find its home. It holds the center of every circle.
It carries it.
Light parallels
voices the piece leans toward, not citations it rests on.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1994)
his image of Earth seen from the solar system's edge: the widest ring we can yet photograph.
Gospel of Luke 17:21
"the Kingdom of God is within you," the saying the piece turns inward, against the outward climb.
Letter to the Hebrews 11:13–16
strangers who confess they are pilgrims, desiring a country they have not seen: the unseen homeland.
Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking (1951)
to dwell is not to occupy but to belong; being woven in, the walls learning your shape.
Liber XXIV Philosophorum → Nicholas of Cusa → Pascal
the infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere; the bird holding every center.
Augustine, Confessions I.1
the restless heart that finds no rest until it rests: the homesickness no distance cures.
Novalis, Fragments
philosophy as homesickness, the urge to be at home everywhere; the Romantic Sehnsucht.
Zhuangzi · Laozi, Taoist tradition
the center already carried, never sought and never left: the bird that does not fly off to find its home.
CC BY 4.0 · ORCID 0009-0009-8618-398X · DOIs MINTED ON DEPOSIT
© 2026 JAMISON TODD JOHNSON · LEGIBLE TRACES LLC
Banner artwork Hilma af Klint, The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood (1907), Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm. Public domain or CC0 — full list in the image credits.