The marvelous potential of spirals
Transcend bullying binaries with earth's secret geometry
Greetings from Maryland, where the sun has just peeked out after days of intense rain and wind. Which of course reminds me of these sublime words by the poet Rumi from ’s recent newsletter:
Sun in the heart, sun in the soul, fill the house with light again.1
In this time of unravelling and disintegration, many of us—men and women—long to renew our lost groundedness. I’ve been preparing to co-lead a retreat this weekend—where I’m excited to read that Rumi poem, and also my touchstone, Marie Howe’s “Annunciation,” which I wrote about here. I will be sharing the following thoughts at the retreat—about the marvelous geometry of spirals and the differences between the hero’s journey and the heroine’s.2
In her 1980 book, Maureen Murdock envisioned the Heroine’s Journey as a cycle. She understood it wasn’t the hero's journey cast with a woman protagonist. This is an entirely different story. Circular, womblike, and spiraling downward into the territory of soul: dark and earthy. The power of Heroine’s Journey is in the depths and the roots.
Spirals are everywhere in nature. Think of ferns, algae, pinecones, sunflowers, snail shells, the DNA double helix, hurricanes, and galaxies. Even a hawk dives for prey in a spiral. Water drains in a spiral. The 18th-century mathematician Bernoulli called the precision that underlies all spirals marvelous. He was right. Spirals are a marvel.
Obeying a secret efficiency, the nautilus continues adding segments in a spiral as it grows its shell. Hurricanes and galaxies spin faster at the center than the periphery. The mathematics of change, open-endedness and rotation describes a point of origin that echoes ever outward. Stability and motion in one grand structure.
In opposition to Nature’s logarithm, we are expected to live in the binary of the algorithm. A world reduced to zeros and ones, with time as a straight line leaving the past behind as it barrels into the future. This is the geometry of the patriarchy.
The binary is, quite literally, dis-spiriting. The binary bullies us into choices between extremes that are equally unappealing. The binary divides “us” from “them.” It labels, insists on two genders, sees the world in black and white. The binary dehumanizes, and, worse, it enforces our separation from the living world by insisting that humans are superior to “all that stuff out there.”
Hildegard of Bingen wrote that such dualism is “the sin behind sin, for competition makes dualists of us all and robs us of any interest we have in enjoying the goodness of one another.”3 Dualism, she wrote, expresses “the desire to separate, to make into either/or our relationship with God and the cosmos.”4
This accounts for the frustrating feeling of insanity that accompanies the news. Us/Them and Either/Or are at odds with the nuanced and subtle realities we perceive. The language of the soul offers a potent alternative for us to consider this weekend. Soul wisdom is expressed through symbolic imagery—as Hildegard did with her paintings. The spiral is a particularly potent symbol. After all, it’s the hidden geometry of our Mother Earth, and of the Cosmos.
For too long, humans have been alone at the center of everything. What happens when spiral out from this trap to explore the frontier edges, the thin places? What will we hear, see, feel, and smell when we cross hidden thresholds in the forest?
Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey was sparked by a conversation with her mentor Joseph Campbell. She asked him, doesn’t the heroine have a journey as well? He replied, No, women don’t have a journey of their own. Women are the home to which the hero is questing to return.
This didn’t sit well with Maureen. She went on to explore the heroine’s journey in her own life and in the lives of many other women. In the book’s introduction, she says: “Women do have a quest at this time in our culture. It is the quest to fully embrace their feminine nature, learning how to value themselves as women.” Her words still ring true, 45 years later. This journey emphasizes community, resilience, and transformation, rather than the individual conquest of the hero’s journey. Our journey is cyclical and requires descent—deep down into the unknown dark.
As Francis Weller writes in "In the Absence of the Ordinary," the Underworld is a “landscape familiar to soul—loss, grief, death, vulnerability, and fear. . . From the perspective of soul, down is holy ground.”
Suffering, chaos, and destruction seem to be everywhere today. The path forward is unclear, uncertain, unknown. Still, we wonder, What can we do? What can we do, now? How do we step away from contributing to the problem by perpetuating the binary world, and instead embrace the potency of spirals to guide purposeful repair and restoration?
In this time of unravelling and disintegration, many of us—men and women—long to renew our lost groundedness, to reconnect with the sacred feminine. This weekend, we’ll reconnect with the earth and with each other, and nourish our mythic imaginations through stories. Together in community, we’ll share and listen, chant and drum and dance.
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Some of my favorite people have written eloquently on the heroine’s journey, including
, , and , among others.Matthew J. Fox, Illuminations of Hildargard of Bingen, p.89
Ibid., p. 84
Beautiful thoughts, Julie. I think you might like some of these ideas for creating art with natural materials found on-site: https://www.morningaltars.com/altars
Yes the Fibonacci sequence everywhere in nature is magical! Thanks for sharing, this gives me an idea to add a spiral of stones to my garden 🌺