I'm Spiraling

This week I’ve been thinking in spirals.

Spirals often have bad connotations in our language. We say, “I’m spiraling,” when we are feeling anxious or overwhelmed. Sometimes it means a feeling of vertigo. In this usage, spiraling connotes a turning inward, a darkening of the vision, a swirling winnowing of the thoughts down to the worst case scenarios.

But this week, as I re-listened to the podcast Field Notes for Belonging, from Chelsey Korus, one of my favorite movement teachers, I thought of the spiral in new terms.

Chelsey describes a process of recognizing ourselves, humans, as being part of an innate reciprocity in nature. What us animals are breathing out, plants are breathing in. What plants are breathing out, us animals are breathing in. She quotes ecologist and philosopher David Abram:

“Owning up to being an animal, a creature of earth. Tuning our animal senses to the sensible terrain: blending our skin with the rain-rippled surface of rivers, mingling our ears with the thunder and the thrumming of frogs, and our eyes with the molten gray sky. Feeling the polyrhythmic pulse of this place—this huge windswept body of water and stone. This vexed being in whose flesh we’re entangled.

Becoming earth. Becoming animal. Becoming, in this manner, fully human.”

In this understanding of humanity and nature, it is our duty to draw our circle ever wider, to include others, that are also you. Spiraling outward, we create a greater kinship, not just with other humans, but with plants and animals and the elements that make up this world that we get to be apart of. And in this way we learn to belong to ourselves, spiraling inward, by developing a greater understanding that who we are is entangled with everything else here on this Earth.

The spiral represents growth. It is both a turning inward and outward; it is a welcome, a recognition, a belonging.

If you’d like to listen to the whole episode, which I highly recommend, click the link below:

Field Notes for Belonging

Nora HarrisComment