La la la

The World Is a Circle (lyrics Burt Bacharach and Hal David)

“The world is a circle without a beginning,and nobody knows where it really ends…”

Those words have lived inside me for more than fifty years.

The song was written in 1973 by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for the film Lost Horizon. I was ten years old then too young to remember the movie, too young perhaps to grasp its metaphysics but not too young to remember the song. I remember every lyric. I remember the melody as if I am hearing it again for the first time.

My mother loved Burt Bacharach. It was easy to ask her to play it. We sang it in school, too, at Resurrection, the Catholic school for African American children I attended. Resurrection was a place where we were allowed to imagine beyond the boundaries of institutional public education. It was disciplined character forming in its own way (yes, paddles included) but it also cultivated something rare: the permission to dream.

This blog is not about Resurrection, at least not today.

It is about a line that has grown truer with time: The world is a circle without a beginning.

In an age of global interdependence and global fracture, the metaphor feels almost prophetic. We live more connected than ever before yet behave as if we are separate. We speak of borders, hierarchies, and supremacy as though they can insulate us from one another. But life is not linear. It is circular relational, recursive, unfinished.

“Half of the time we are upside down.”

That, too, feels painfully accurate.

We are upside down when we forget that we are kin. Upside down when we deny our shared ancestry, sourced from one human family, birthed in the continent once called Alkebulan what Cheikh Anta Diop named the Garden of Eden, what the world now calls Africa. Upside down when we construct systems that make neighbors into strangers and siblings into enemies.

And then there is the quiet genius of another line:

And just because you think you’re small,that doesn’t mean that you’re small at all.

This may be the most radical theology in the song.

Smallness, in the world’s grammar, is often assigned by age, race, gender, geography, status. But history tells a different story. Rosa Parks refusing to move. Malala Yousafzai refusing to be silent. Louis Braille, blinded as a child, inventing a language that still teaches the world how to read.

One step. One voice. One act of refusal or compassion. One hug. One vote. One smile.

Nothing in a circle is insignificant. Every point holds the shape together.

The geometry itself teaches us something. A circle has no hierarchy. No top, no bottom, no privileged edge. It holds what is inside and protects what is within. It creates a boundary not to exclude, but to preserve to make space for safety, memory, and healing.

As a Motherist, I am drawn to this image.

The circle rotates without rest twenty-four hours a day and still we are called to hold one another so that we do not lose our orientation to the earth or to each other. In a world without gravity, disconnection becomes easy. Disorientation becomes normal. But the work of care, the work of community, the work of remembrance keeps us tethered.

Perhaps that is what Motherism ultimately asks of us: to reorder the world not from dominance, but from containment; not from conquest, but from connection; not from endings, but from beginnings we never fully locate.

The song ends playfully, almost carelessly:

“La la la…”

And maybe that is the final wisdom.

We do not control where the circle begins.We do not know where it ends.But we are responsible for how we hold one another while we are spinning.

And that, perhaps, is enough.

#dionne Warwick #Motherism #Resurrection Dayton #Bacharach #disorientation #womanist

Blue Earth