Interacting with Gyre

Renewing our vows

On a crisp, clear October morning, my husband and I went looking for Gyre, an earthwork of three rings by artist Thomas Sayre, located at a park on the grounds of the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.

It was shortly after our 25^th anniversary and we wanted to renew our wedding vows there.

Gyre is three rings of earth, reinforced with metal and concrete, pulled out with a crane and set on footings. The artist has said that they represent his lifelong study of the interplay between man and nature, as you can see in his other artwork.

Gyre comes from the first line of the W.B. Yeats poem, The Second Coming. It is “a symbol of history’s cycles and the spiral motion of time” where “eras expand and contract” and “one gyre of opposing energy expands as another recedes.”

I simply saw wedding rings. It was peaceful, quiet. Just a few early walkers with their dogs. We opened our copies of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer and repeated our vows, in part:

The Man, facing the woman and taking her right hand in his, says

In the Name of God, I, N., take you, N., to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death. This is my solemn vow.

We also held each other’s left hands, so that our rings touched, and said together,

N., I give you this ring as a symbol of my vow, and with all that I am, and all that I have, I honor you, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Yes, we cried, as we do every five years when we renew our vows. Last time, in 2020, we renewed them on the Labyrinth at St. Paul’s, our church in Smithfield, North Carolina, during Covid, with an interim rector.

At Gyre, a walker took our photo, and then we approached the largest ring. As we did, I was impressed by something about the artwork I had not counted on.

You know how a visiting carnival with kiddy rides can tear up a town’s fields, leaving a muddy mess to be smoothed over with public works’ equipment? After a few months of grass seed and straw, you wouldn’t even know they’d been there.

Well, when we walked up closer I could see that when the artist and his crew had pulled these rings of the earth out of the ground, they left the shadow indentations right there! They didn’t fill them in! Yes, grass had grown over, but the impression of what had been, and was now gone, was still there.

That part of the artwork spoke so powerfully to me. As someone who had been married for sixteen years and was widowed, and then remarried, I had to go into a new relationship still grieving. What I left behind was still there – would always be there. But in those 25 years since – pulled, reinforced and forged by faith – I continue to move forward.

I have since learned the artwork was installed in 1999. The rings were pulled out of the earth the year after I was widowed and installed the year before I remarried in 2000.

An artist creates something of meaning and places it in public. Each of us interacts with it and comes up with different impressions. Some see Gyre at night and see rings of fire. Some see in the summer and think of the people who crossed the prairie in Conestoga wagons. Or the ribs of dinosaurs. Some see it in winter and see the hull of a ship. Who knows what you will see when you encounter it?

I don’t know that Sayre likes people walking through his rings, but we did it, on that October Saturday, holding hands like we left the church 25 years ago, determined to journey together as long as we could.

Look for an artwork in your community. Spend some time with it. Interact with it. Write about it. Visit it again 25 years after you first encounter it.