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I've been thinking about spirals lately. It all started when at a weekend workshop I met a woman who wore her thick hair in long, fat ringlets, like the ones that obsessive mothers used to create for their little girls, using rags for curlers. Or the kind that an Austen or a Bronte heroine might have sported in clusters beside each ear. The woman I saw at the workshop had a score of soft, fat ringlets falling around her face and down the back of her head. It was an interesting statement, but it seemed like a pretty labor-intensive way to make that statement.
But seeing those ringlets made me think of curls, whether pincurls (which was how you created curls before the days of rollers and hand-held hair dryers) or naturally occurring curls like Shirley Temple's. Curls that soften the face. Curls that look cute or, when pulled back from the forehead in just the right way, look Hellenic and classic.
And from those thoughts it was only a short slide to similar curly, springy items: springs, for example. Slinkies, boing-y things that cushion our modern lives: shock absorbers, comfortable mattresses and sofas. Where would we be without springs?
And what is a spring but a spiral? That ancient spiral is still with us, a symbol of the goddess, of abundance, of change and motion. A spiral moves in both directions: from the inside out and from the outside in. The first leads to openness and the cornucopia image of allowing and offering, abundance and possibility. The spiral from the inside to the outside is full of movement and potential.
But what happens when you spiral inward, to those inner, hidden parts? Our culture encourages us to live on the outside and show the world only our superficial nature. If we spiral from the outside in, we discover, in the cave of our nautilus shell, a quiet world that we don't have to show to anyone. We begin to discover our true selves.
The spiral represents healing and discovering. Think of not only a physical spiraling of limbs and bones, muscle and fascia, but also a spiraling of energy through the body.
Spirals: shells, pinwheels (both the wind-blown kind and the ones made of pie crust), tornadoes and hurricanes, the stems of clematis leaves and the spiraled tendrils of grape vines, the spider's webs that spiral inward from her anchors. Everywhere we look in nature we see spirals.
So let's run right now to the playground and watch the curly-haired boys and girls on the spiraling slides.
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