Love and wisdom are real only as ‘round-trip’ events. They move on legs to turning points. They intensify and reverse. The leg of approach leads to separation. Inward withdrawal provokes outward return.                                                                                                                                                                 The phrases “perennial wisdom” and “eternal love” suggest that we climb the virtues like ladders to states of high constancy. But we don’t. Love advances through reversals. Wisdom travels through stages marked by turning points. No single stage can stand for the whole. The worthiness resides in the completely unfolding pattern.                                               

     The approaches, separations, withdrawals, and returns get their meaning because they join into dramas of engagement and discovery. The dramas, though they disclose themselves as events in time, can be illustrated graphically. I have sketched out the main patterns in still pictures. You can put them into motion in your mind.

     Both love and wisdom are vulnerable to perturbation at the links between their mini-cycles, as illustrated to the left, and even more so, at the major turning in the pattern, the turning of turnings, where the temporal shape of the whole emerges from the congeries of its parts.