This month, The Container is moving spaces! Our events will now be at the new Ashtanga Yoga on East Market Street. (More details on that below. Or, if you’d rather not wait, check out the MeetUp here.)

As we leave one space and enter another, let’s take time to consider the way spaces hold us, and maybe we’ll find that Circling as a practice draws us into ceremony with ghosts.

When we enter a room we’ve been in before, we cannot help but return to all those moments we’ve lived there. The arguments, jokes, and long afternoon naps murmur at the edges of the present. And sometimes, they surge forward and take shape before our eyes.

By returning over and over again to a room, it keeps a memory of us, just as we keep our memories of it.

The experiences accumulate, and their residual charge hums in the walls. That charge has meaning and can be tangibly experienced, perhaps even by those who weren’t there before.

And strangely, this is oh-so reminiscent of how the Circle itself works.

The form of the Circle, with its ritual opening and closing, brings us into a kind of no-time/all-time space, as any ceremony does. In this way, it calls in a present moment state of being that, rather than deleting the past and future, brings all time together at once.

In this way, we can be with all that was and may come—as long as we are truly present to its impact on us in the moment.

The great mansion of philosophy has an entire room devoted to this very thing. Hauntology, as described by Jacques Derrida, refers to the persistence and unique existence of ideas, thoughts, and mind structures from the past. Such forms can return, in spectral form, and live right alongside us in the present, even when they are no longer acknowledged to be alive.

We know this in the Circle, because we have all felt how the past lingers, stalking the room. It can feel as much here as anything else, and maybe that’s because it is.

It’s presence, though somehow different than the current moment, is real. Its nature is changed, but it is here all the same.

The Container is now moving into a new space, and we’ll begin charging this room with you soon. Please join us in the homecoming this Saturday! See details below or join us on the MeetUp.

Stephen Jenkinson is a culture activist and author who brings together ceremony, music, and story. His much-loved book Die Wise taught us how to face that hardest of topics: death. In 2024, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Now, in his new book Trembling Still, he captures in intimate detail his path with the illness.