Thursday, I pulled a Spiral oracle card, so it seems like as good a time as any to present that word, a little way down my original list. There are so many spirals in our world, both in nature and manmade: shells, hurricanes and tornados, water going down drains, coiled snakes, galaxies, new plants unfolding, bedsprings, labyrinths, spiral staircases...Spirals suggest movement, out from a center point or back into it; growth; and the process of life-death-rebirth. There's also a potential three-dimensionality to spirals, travel down and then up, or vice versa. And, of course, they are essentially circular, and from that perspective feel more Goddess-oriented than straight lines, blocks and squares.
My life has resisted a traditional, left-brain, chronological, linear unfolding and has been an exuberant (and yet often terrifying) collection of spirals. Almost everywhere I ever lived, from Schenectady, to the Champlain Valley, to England, to New York City, to Duluth, I've lived or made extended visits more than once. I'd love to claim that I circled around, gained new wisdom, then approached the old places from a new, higher energy, but that hasn't always been the case. I think sometimes it was simply finishing lessons that needed completing. As for my many trips to England, I was "only" trying to return to the place I feel at home. My life has been my job, I realize now, and so it and my resume have defied easy categorization; I know people have found my process confounding. Heck, I have found it confounding. If you want success or stability in the current system, I don't recommend lots of circles and spirals. From the beginning, I think I may have been Goddess-inspired in ways I didn't understand, but whether I could be seen as "successful" even in that context, only time will tell.
Anyway, spirals have been the path and have shown up on the path. I told you once about my childhood dream of the tornado of fire, which I now see more positively than I used to. Then, in 2008, on a visit to San Francisco -- ostensibly to explore a new age-y degree option -- I found my way to Grace Episcopal Cathedral on a Sunday morning. The service left me in tears, grieving over decades away from my original love of English church music. After the service, I walked their outdoor labyrinth, and committed myself to finding a path back to my own center. A few years later, on a trip to Dublin, Ireland, to audition (as it turned out, unsuccessfully) for the mixed choir of Christ Church Cathedral, I visited Newgrange, the 5,000-year-old passage tomb. There are spirals and triple spirals on many of the stones there. I'd love to visit again, because I don't think the intense power of the place completely registered. It was still hard at that point to fully embrace both church music and pre-Christian expressions of spiritual wonder. Yet when I have had the opportunity to sing in a cathedral, it hasn't been a stretch to envision the sound literally spiraling upwards through the roof to the swirling musical heavens above, bypassing all specific theologies.
I like wearing spirals...my favorite earrings are silver spirals. If I were ever to get a tattoo (as of now, I am still put off by the idea!) it would be a spiral. I have used spirals in needlework, and find Marija Gimbutas's The Language of the Goddess (1989) incredibly inspiring, with hundreds of illustrations of early human spiritual symbols and designs, many of which are circular or spiral. The "language" was visual. My entirely non-scientific impression is that the Universe is an ever widening spiral of love energy, with more and more galaxies giving birth to new ones out on the periphery, always a bit ahead of what we can see or conceive of.
Are there spirals in your life?
