Recently, I came across the work of Karen Kirkness, a yogi, anatomy scholar, and author of the book Spiral Bound. Her work is rooted in the concept that our bodies, and nature for that matter, is composed of spiraling patterns. From conception through all the stages of physical development and anatomical manifestation, the spiral is making it’s way through the structure of our being, from the cellular level all the way up through the tissues and limbs. It’s fascinating, mind blowing, and clearly is a portal of information and practice that penetrates beyond the physical body and into the structure of time and space itself… I’m getting carried away, but the other night after some studying, I voice noted just a little reflection and musing on what I’ve been learning. My hands have been in a very strange sort of constricted, dried out type of pain, where it’s uncomfortable to sit and write…. so instead, I spoke…

From our skin down to the intracellular matrix throughout our bodies, we are composed of filamentous, thread like structure. Even the collagen which makes up these threads, at its molecular level is spiral in nature. It’s funny, I looked up, collagen spirals on Google and came across these beef skin dog foods, that are in the shape of a spiral. It’s crazy how spiral at the micro level of being scale all the way up into the macro level.

Not only do the spirals exist in these connective tissues of the body, but they also manifest through way in which our body develops from the womb. As an embryo, our hands and feet popped out of our torso, spiraling upwards and downwards, respectively. To this day, those spiraling motions still exist in our limbs, and you can see it simply by lifting your arms and pressing your feet into the ground and witnessing the direction in which your hands and feet want to spin naturally. The spiral has been with us from our conception up until this point in time and it threads our body together from infinitesmal to the life-size forms.

And as we continue to develop through childhood into adolescence and adulthood, we move through spirals of time living through the seasons, circling and circling yet progressing forward through time… it’s the circling in a particular direction which creates the spiral.

And as we look back on the stories of our life with their ups and downs and peaks and valleys, they create the wave form… a two dimensional view of the spiral. By the description of the spiral, it might seem as if I’m saying everything is a spiral. And yes, I sort of am, but at the same time there’s something more to it. Just as a blanket is nothing but threads of yarn, it is actually something more. And so are we, in our lives, nothing but threads of a mysterious substance, yet also so much more.