Circles appear wherever we call them. I called a circle as part of my twenty-fifth college reunion. Circling was still such a new concept, I wanted to see if the readiness I felt in other groups was also present among women who had mostly grown up in the middle of the Middle West. One early evening in June of 1993, we closed the doors to the girls' dorm, and twenty women from Macalester College, Class of '68, looked at each other anew. On a coffee table, I laid out a Balinese cloth, candles, and a basket that travels with me. To this centerpiece, each woman contributed an object that symbolically represented her life now: photos of family, a favorite book, an identification badge from work, a running shoe, a rock from Lake Superior. We lit the candles and looked at each other in the flickering light, seeing remembered twenty-year-old faces in our forty-seven year-old eyes. We opened the discussion and began sharing all the things we don't always take time to speak about in the busyness of our days, It had been a quarter of a century since we came of age: now what? As we went around the group, each woman held her object, said what she had come to say. It took three hours of close attention.

Christina Baldwin, Calling the Circle