One Circle

One Circle
Alone I am a dot, together we are Earth By Jawad Yousofi. For the Earth, and everyone on it. Alone I am a dot, together we are Earth. One. Alone, I am a dot. One small point of light, here for a little while. I breathe, I wonder, I reach — and sometimes I feel like the only one. Two. But look closer. I was never alone. Another dot beside me. And another behind them. The hands that grew my food. The voice that taught me words. Strangers I’ll never meet, who shaped the world I woke into. More of us than I could ever count. Three. And no two of us the same. Different colors, different names, different light. We are born in different lands, under different skies. We speak in a thousand tongues, and pray in a thousand ways. We love differently. We grieve differently. We dream in our own languages. Some of us are loud, some quiet. Some near, some so far we will never meet. We disagree. We misunderstand. We see the same world and name it differently. And still — look. Every one of us wakes to the same sun. Every one of us breathes the same air, one person letting go of a breath another takes in. Every one of us knows what it is to hope, to hurt, to hold someone we love. This is not what divides us. This is what fills the circle. Our differences are not the cracks in the whole — they are the many points of light that make the Earth glow. Four. Now step back with me. All these scattered points, all this difference, all these separate lives — they begin to curve, to gather, to form something whole. What looked like distance was always a shape. Five. We are the Earth. Every dot a person. Every person a place on the circle. Your light and mine, held in the same turning world. Alone, I am a dot. Together, we are Earth. Find your dot. One small gold dot appears in every picture in this book. Go back and find it, page by page. That dot is you. Pause. Think of one person whose hands touched your life today without your ever knowing. Thank them, quietly. The hands that held you. Write the names of the people, near or far, who helped carry you here. Draw your dot. Draw yourself here, one dot of light, and the people around you. Thank you for being part of the circle.