In defence of the downwards spiral

Can you believe it’s October? This time, I’ve got a newsletter about spirals and grief for you. As a heads up, there are short mentions of abuse, genocide, police brutality, and other forms of violence. 

If you’re in the Northern hemisphere, I hope that you’re wrapped up warm in this colder weather, and to everyone, everywhere, as always, take care and eat well xxx

This newsletter is about spirals or, at least, it was meant to be. I wanted to write about spirals but what I really wanted to write about was grief. I’ve got a few reasons for this: My Appendix Teacher (removed at the start of last month in a sudden, delirious hospital visit); Saturn retrograde in Pisces doing a number on my Pisces rising; allllllll of the mixed emotions that arrive with September. These days, I’m just too tired to hide and way too tired to care. So, here I am - another person writing about grief in autumn. 

Spirals speak to grief because they break down concepts too big for the human brain to understand. Like the upwards coil of deep time diagrams, spirals turn the unintelligible into something we can grasp, connecting us to something bigger than ourselves. Vortexes, coils, whorls, and gyres loop through time and space, joining the dots across aeons and oceans and species boundaries. From the swirling of the galaxies in the night sky, to the charged spinning of the atoms and molecules in our breath, spirals are everywhere. We see spirals in the bands of rain around the eye of a storm, in the 7 counterclockwise circles of tawaf at the end of a muslim’s pilgrimage, and in the rotation of insects, fishes, and plant-animal worms around a common centre. Spirals show us the cosmic and the magical in the most ordinary of things. 

Spirals also symbolise the potential for growth and transformation, specifically through the process of return. Look at the outward spiralling shell of a snail, which must expand to accommodate a growing body. When a snail needs to make their body-home larger, they secrete minerals like calcium carbonate and a thin, protective layer of protein, known as periostracum. To form their shells, snails return to where they first left off when they were smaller and younger, and then they grow. 

There’s something comforting about this, right? Grief can feel so isolating, so beyond us, and it can take us back to some very small places. The symbol of a spiral might then feel like a way to defang the past and expand beyond the stuff that feels too big to handle. On this, Jill Purce, quoted above, writes:

Time here is an upwards, outwards spiral - like the snail who expands their reality through return, or the whirling of the Sufi dervishes whose movements imitate the planets of our Solar System. The spiralling of these examples doesn’t mean feeling out of control, but a kind of mastery. A transcendence. 

Similarly captivating is the natural phenomenon known as phyllotaxis, where the leaves and buds of plants grow in intricate, regular arrangements. Sunflowers are the most famous example of this, their seedheads formed from interlocking Fibonacci spirals. Ferns, who the Māori base the koru symbol of their artworks off of, grow in fractals too. When I think about spirals, I think of beauty, wonder, and perpetuity, but I also think of the continued repetition of interlocking systems of harm. 

Those who grew up in unsafe homes will recognise that stubborn, pervasive feeling of inescapability. On a broader scale, and not unconnected, spirals make me think of the seemingly endless patterns of colonial and sexual violence that link centuries of exploitation to the present. Genocide, displacement, police brutality, modern slavery, environmental degradation, human trafficking, child labour, uneven access to resources, and more. None of these are new problems. All are the long legacies of harm and trauma.

So, how do you grieve in a world where violence never seems to die, but to loop over and over?

For many, grief is not an option. With it having been just over a year since the latest intensification of the genocide in Palestine, continuous traumatic stress (CTS) has emerged as a “new” condition. The term was first coined in 1986 by writer Frank Chikane, who studied the psychological effects of apartheid in South Africa. It refers to toxic stress and trauma developed through conditions where threat is not in the past (which could lead to PTSD or C-PTSD), but which persists into the present and future. In the UK, the recent acquittal of the police officer who shot Chris Kaba is another instance of slow violence manifesting in the present as direct harm with no justice or relief. In each of these cases, there really is no escape from oppression, no silver lining that will come with time, unless it is made. 

Let’s return then to spirals not as symbols of growth, or of descent, but of agency. Back in the summer, after warm bowls of wild black rice porridge and coconut milk sweetened with pandan and palm sugar, a friend showed me a dreamwoven kain they’d received in Borneo. The kain was an unusual shade of pale blue and was stitched with the repeated motif of a woman standing strong, surrounded and crowned by spirals. My friend and I spoke about what the kain might mean, and there are a few interpretations but, for me, it felt like a loud, visceral statement of ancestral strength - like an auntie telling me to check myself.

Amidst constant expressions of harm and the separations that obfuscate our true histories, it can be easy to forget that many of our ancestors have resisted colonial imaginaries for centuries and / or - if our ancestors were complicit or perpetrators - that we can be the ones to change. Looking at the kain, I remembered that the potential for both the shortcomings and the wisdoms of our ancestors continues within each and every of us. It’s up to us to choose which cycles to repeat. 

We fear repetition, stuckness, stagnancy, but we forget that, as Octavia E. Butler put it, ‘the only lasting truth is Change.’ Another author, Vladimir Nabokov, wrote that: “The spiral is a spiritualised circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.” Spirals can move up or down, out or in, but they are always in motion. To be constantly moving is to be constantly changing yourself, or your surroundings, or both. Change, motion, is at once a constant letting go and a constant becoming, and in this we find choice: what do we want to let go? Who do we want to become? What realities do we want to build?

On a personal note, I’ve spent many years trying to instrumentalise my grief. I wanted grief to be the seed for strength or beauty because I fundamentally misunderstood it. I took grief’s rawness as ugliness, its softness as weakness. I looked at grief, shapeless and unwieldy, and saw it as something to be contained, rather than tended to and, eventually, set free. It took me many, many years to recognise that grief is freed not through pushing it in or away, but through tenderness and acceptance.

That’s because grief, at its heart, is care. When we remember this, the insurmountability of grief becomes the infinite expanse of love. In her book on molluscs, titled ‘Spirals Through Time,’ Helen Scales suggests that the patterns of seashells could be memory made material: “Molluscs have the ability to read the patterns on their shells, like the pages of a diary.” Which memories, whose pain, whose love, might be found within each of our bodies? How will we read these stories to shape our worlds so that all of us can be free?

In the end, some things fall or go or leave and that’s that. These spirals aren’t about growth or transcendence, but an invitation to do the hardest work: to feel the lightest presence in the heaviest absence, to see fragments of what leaves in the echoes of what stays, to learn to be OK with descent and unproductiveness. Grief is very much reverence. In honouring those who have gone before us, we make the space within ourselves for them to return to us in new forms. We learn to see them in all those who stay and all those yet to come.

It might take years but, in time, we’ll realise that life hasn’t grown through grief, but around it, because life always grows - because change is inevitable. Then, whenever we’re ready, we can remember that every repetition carries with it a choice. 

To finish, a ghazal from Urdu poet Ishrat Afreen on intention: