9 The Sacred Spiral

The Sacred Spiral is a way to reconcile the independent trajectories of Humanity and Nature.

Actually, by Nature here, I mean Earth — the source of Nature, thanks to the planetary metronome — day and night, summer and winter. The revolutionary spinnings and the evolutionary orbits upon orbits upon even more orbits. (Evolution took countless generations. Hundreds upon thousands upon millions if not billions of years, altogether.)

In the meantime, there is yours and my lifetime. The time we share. The love, the awesome gratitude and inter-dependence, the coming-togethers even throughout the growing-aparts. Everything we know and share takes place within Shallow Time, and yet we would not have any of it, one iota, without the utterly imaginative, creative, dynamic, powerful, indescribable really… forces of Nature. Deep Time on Planet Earth… in the Cosmos. (Occasionally a big meteor collision changes everything, on that grand of a scale. Not much else interstellar really going on. Or so this humble humanoid author believes.)

Shallow Time has Deep Time to thank. To gaze at. To imagine, and hopefully — thanks to this strange awareness — to support.

We look at our lives together, and we see a rise and fall. A rise and fall of lives, of empires, maybe even of civilizations.

The sacred spiral. When we return to where we’ve been before, we ritualize. We celebrate. We grieve. We transcend the ordinary and remember the timeless.

Deep Time is what we poetically call timeless. Like the stars and constellations, it moves around us as we spiral through the galaxies, never changing. Or as Modern Nature — contemporary Nature, like the lifetime of the humble cicadas — always changing, always the same. Living and dying just as we do. Or as we used to.

Keeping time.

Killing time. Seriously.

Life and Death is nothing to Gramma-ma Nature. Same old story.

But our lifetimes have taken on this drama. Because we are not just killing ourselves. That mere tragedy, a wasted life, is nothing compared to the massive aggressions on ours and every population.

And yet, natural disasters also exist. When we map climate change as a global event, it may already compare to the meteor that took the dinosaurs. I don’t know. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tidal waves, epidemics. The Black Plague. In deep time — or even in the last 500 years — we are not so special.

Maybe we should add Humility to the list of qualities: awe and gratitude — and humility.

The spiral is everywhere in Nature. Nautilus shells, fiddlehead ferns, the Fibonacci sequence, snail shells. It is a kind of technology — a deep implication of culture. It comes and goes so often; it yearns for a maturation, a transcendence. A movement of culture away from the previous life-and-death. When I think of God, I feel the spiral.

I think of the gift of fire, the circle of tribe around the campfire, the telling of tales — the hunting of whales. The rhythm in our bones, on our phones and tones and xylophones. Reminding us, somehow, that even as we sleep — an insect’s lifetime closer to death — we are not alone.