52 Turns Around the Circle
What Joni Mitchell understood about growing up, growing older, and beginning again.
Today I turn 52. Which, if we're being honest, is old enough that I've started saying things like "back in my day" and young enough that I still get personally offended when someone calls me ma'am. It's a weird little corner of the circle to be standing in.
Birthdays make us a little more aware of time, and lately I keep circling back to one song in particular: Joni Mitchell's The Circle Game. She wrote it when she was very young herself, answering Neil Young's Sugar Mountain and his sadness about leaving his teenage years behind. Somehow, though, she wrote something that doesn't belong only to the young. I think it belongs to every decade, every season, every version of us that's had to let go of one thing while becoming something else — kind of like how I let go of my ability to read fine print sometime around 45 and became someone who owns four pairs of reading glasses and can never find one.
The song follows a child growing, season by season, always looking forward, always wishing to be older, until eventually the looking turns backward too. Time doesn't feel like a straight line in this song. It feels like a circle — round and round, season after season, always leaving something and arriving somewhere at the very same time.
At 52, I think I understand that better than I ever have.
The Season Nobody Warns You About
We talk a lot about the seasons of childhood — the terrible twos, the awkward tweens, the anxious wondering of adolescence. We even talk about the seasons of early motherhood, early career, early marriage. Nobody hands you a book for this one. The one where the kids are grown or nearly grown. The one where the job you built isn't quite who you are anymore. The one where you look in the mirror and don't recognize the woman looking back — not because she's lesser, but because she's been quiet for so long you forgot the sound of her voice.
Joni's song captures something I don't think gets said enough: growing older isn't a loss followed by nothing. It's a loss and an arrival, happening at the same time, in the same breath. The child in the song doesn't stop existing when they become a dreamer, and the dreamer doesn't disappear when they become someone older still. Every season carries the ones before it. That's the circle.
For midlife women especially, I think we're taught to treat this season like an ending — of usefulness, of relevance, of being someone. But what if it's actually just another turn in the circle? What if the woman you were at twenty-five, and the woman you were at thirty-five raising babies, and the woman you are now standing in a quiet house wondering what's next — what if none of them left? What if they're all still turning here, together, and this season is simply the one where you finally get to look at all of them at once?
Listening for the Next Season
Today I don't feel particularly sad about turning 52. I feel curious — and mildly amused, honestly, at how confidently 25-year-old me thought she had it all figured out. There are versions of me I miss. There are parts of my life I'm glad are behind me (looking at you, my entire haircut history). And there are parts of this next season I can't quite see yet.
Maybe that's why this is exactly the kind of song I'd want playing while I make pages. Not because it hands you answers, but because it holds the ache honestly, without rushing past it to get to some tidy, hopeful conclusion. It just watches the seasons turn and lets that be enough.
If you're working through your own pages right now — pieces of yourself you're gathering back up, prayers you're only beginning to say out loud again — try sitting with this song before you open your journal. Don't write the lyrics down. Instead, ask yourself: What season do I feel like I'm in right now? What version of myself am I grieving, even quietly? What version of myself is arriving, even if she hasn't fully introduced herself yet? And if I could see all my seasons on one page, side by side, what would that page look like?
You don't need to have language for all of it yet. You just need to notice the circle you're standing in, and trust that noticing is its own kind of creativity.
You Are Not Behind
That's the thing about a circle. There's no behind. There's no ahead. There's just where you are, turning with everyone else who's ever stood in this exact kind of season — watching a life move, watching yourself move with it, and beginning again, exactly where you are.
Maybe that's part of why I created Soul Pages, too. Not to teach us how to make perfect art, but to give us somewhere to notice. To gather pieces of ourselves. To make marks without knowing where they're going. To sit with the season we're actually in instead of rushing toward the next one.
And somehow it feels right that I'm opening the doors to it today, on my 52nd trip around the circle.
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She's not gone. Neither are the girls who couldn't wait to grow up, the young mother who was always needed, or the woman who wondered if she'd lost herself somewhere along the way. They're all still here. They're simply taking another turn around the circle.
And so are you.
What season are you standing in today? I'd love to hear in the comments.