Anatomy of a Spiral
Depth of a story, and the practice writing
The first story I tell myself today is: I am not getting out of this bed. I am warm, tucked in, the day is dark in a blackened room, no light outside, under the weighted blanket.
It was a story of refusal, of comfort — a highlight of my own stubborn streak — wherein I was determined to dig in and stay. The yin of the season is the holding place, the dark night, those times for revival. Sorry, day, I wanted to say: too cold, this cusp of winter, I have to stay.
Then, a breeze arrives. It exhales into the room like breathing, energizing. The street arrives, the radiator hisses and shakes in its awakening. The train starts to run and hum its morning song along the tracks, lull of traffic begins, as the neighbor yells. What a warm story, I think, staying in bed.
What urges me up and out into the momentum of morning, into the flow of the day, out past the points of comfort, is the power of story:imagination, humanity. If I have this many hours of motivation and sunlight, this many projects to finish, and ways I am determined to feel by the end (rested, steady, flowing, in the case of today) I think back through, “what steps can I take now to support my arrival there? I tune into my humanity — humans, as we know so far, are the only species equipped with the power of imagination — and envision the day’s end like a finish line, feel the energy of determination and aspiration, and work backwards on how to get there.
This spirals down into the present moment. A day is a doorway, a portal, a potential. I imagine the story I want to tell at the end of the day: I did what I could, gracefully, effort and ease the star ingredients, and I work backward. First step, though, is presence: unfold the blankets, feel feet sturdy on the hardwood, day like a portal, rising like the breath to greet the morning.
*
I am thinking about the power of stories: what we tell ourselves, how deep down they go, how rooted they are, how thick and gnarled they are at the roots, and how we unfold and untangle to arrive to new views, insights, and understandings. I have chastised myself for the stories I have told inside my brain until recently, frequently returning to the fact that storytelling is what honors our humanity. I am learning to embrace the stories, to cherish them for their care and meaning. I want to tell you about the moonrise over the buildings at sunrise this morning; the memory of the same moon rising over the desert and the dust pink skyline driving east along the highway one day years ago, another autumn. Stories of arrival, presence, transcendence, departure.
I have arrived, and continue arriving, to these moments of meaning through memory and imagining, through lines of thought, trails of story, and fragments of shape and textures on the page. Part of journaling and talking is unpacking and processing, organizing and orienting around what the story is that we’re telling ourselves, who it’s for and what its purpose is, naming at noting the origins, like, is this a fear story? A joy story? A curious path to follow? Something delicious or intriguing to try? Something trying to keep us safe? Personal or collective, both? The deeper I go with writing, the less tangled I find myself, and/or the more prepared I feel to meet those places and moments in time when the stories spiral, overlap, or intertwine.
Over the last month, I’ve written here about depth in our bodies, minds, and practice, going to the core, writing through the stories of trees, roots, and our muscles. Part of the depth of our humanity is through our stories. Writing — and specifically, journaling — can take us to our cores, to our roots, to our centers. It is a practice of intuiting and intimating with our inner beings, animating our memories and ideas, befriending our neurosis, being fully human, and generating points for connecting. Stories and their depths and meanings are not just for the personal; they are guideposts and channels through which we can each enter, understand, and connect with each other. Writing can bring us to the root of something, if we allow the journey to take us there. Imagine: pulling on a rope, following it along until you find where it begins — that starting place, the root, the origin, the seed.
Writing can also be the doorway through which tend to our bodies, our stories, ourselves and each other, and those places in minds. To write or draw is to witness the expressions of life as it’s unfolding. To be with the moment and reflect on it. You can watch a moment of your life — a story, sensation, or a feeling — as if it’s a landscape seen from the window portal of the car or train, and in this witnessing remind yourself that you’re a human with ten thousand thoughts a day. You can compassionately examine the story, invite it in like a friend, welcoming it in from the cold, hand it compassion like a plate of hot food, a mug of something, an embrace, and hold it there. You could treat a story like a room in a house, tending to it with the intention of tidying it out or doing a deep clean of debris — crumbling it up, cleaning it out, throwing it out again. Sometimes, our stories arrive as persistent visitors. Our practice is to greet them, be with them, learn with them, and collaborate again, again, and again.
This potential and possibility is what I love about the depths of writing: learning to be with it, build together, and sustain the practice over time. I have been writing since I was a child. I have written on car rides in motion, drawn sketches in forts under blankets, through college dorm rooms and office spaces, on rocks and in the hot sun, against the background of rivers, shorelines, and oceans.
Writing has reached me across continents, and into the rhythms of crashing waves. In these times, and throughout those spaces, I have unpacked, unfolded, dissolved and reformed, and strengthened the context and the depth of my understanding of myself and life, in a way where this knowledge of self contains a depth where I know her (me) vastly and deeply, and yet never fully at all — in the ways that one can imagine the width and the depth of the ocean, or see a canyon stretch deep and wide across the horizon and never fully be known, traversed, or understood. Just when I think I have arrived at some end point of understanding, the pathway continues, and I am in the portal, in the channel of creativity, in the process of unfurling and arriving to life again. I am grateful for this process, and I am dedicated to its continuing.
Whether through paper and pen — the tactile writing — or the glow of a digital screen, a page is a portal and place to unwind, a way to plant a story. It is a path to travel down, a trail to revisit and trace the outline of, a way to revisit again. It is a way to celebrate what makes us human, to explore for ourselves and for each other, for our memories and our existence, to gather together the threads of our shared experiences, the things that make us human. “The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious,” Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in Women Who Run With the Wolves. “If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” What doors are you opening? What pathways are you traveling down? How does that unfold for you in your life and in your writing?
*
Recently, I felt that familiar pull of a story. It was persistent; it arrived as a spiral. I did my usual things: felt it some, tried avoiding it, recognized it, turned towards the feeling, sat with it and listened to it, let it be, paying attention to what that had to say. I can cognitively talk my way through the experience of a spiral, thankfully, but I wanted to externalize it in a way that neither fueled the narrative nor pushed it away. So I pulled from the shelf of my typical ingredients, that toolkit of existence: a handful of movement (talking it out), a cup of grounding (making dinner), a gallon of hydration (lemon balm tea), and I put the spiral to rest, on low, to simmer. I went to sleep.
I slept, woke up, and I noticed that the feeling shook loose, as the combination of a head on a pillow and hours of breathing deeply in the dark can do. What arose from the rest state of sleep was the outline and the understanding of what started the story — a practice I have been turning to and refer to as the anatomy of a spiral1. For me, this works once the feelings have subsided, once the grip of the story is less acute.
Start by taking a blank page, and slowly draw a spiral. You are collaborating with your experience of the feeling, the story, the page, going for depth and the intention is to learn in collaboration together.
Start from the point of the pencil, tracing a line outward to expand the circle like the rings on a tree, expanding out. Notice how the spiral is like the story or the thought you were experiencing. Then, once you draw your way to the center, retrace your spiraling line back to the center, to the root of the story or the thought, making notes along the outside of the spiral, identifying the ingredients that went in. What started the story and where did it start and stop? What’s at the root? Who or what supported you in that moment? What brought you back? Once that’s done, turn the page.
Like any landscape we’re traversing, anything we’re making, like anything we are collaborating with or relating to in life, writing can be a way of befriending ourselves, becoming our own companions, and noticing the depth and the horizons of our stories and celebrating what makes us human. So as you peel back the layers of story, peel back the bedsheets from the bed, take the ingredient of your life and do with it what you can. Step through the doorways, the portals, the pathways, the passageways, flow with it, and creatively move forward: let’s continue.
upcoming experiences:
November 29 | We Create Pop Up manhattan
November 30 | Paper Marbling baltimore
December 3 | Fort Greene Park Holiday Artisans Bazaar brooklyn
December 6 | Marbled Stationery brooklyn
December 11 | Bookbinding: Pamphlet Stitch brooklyn
December 13 | Taste & Write: Meditating on the Senses brooklyn
December 13 | Bookbinding: French Link Stitch brooklyn
December 17 | Build Your Journaling Practice brooklyn
December 18 | Grounded in Gratitude: Meditation + Journaling brooklyn
December 21 | Casing In Lined Journals brooklyn
[here’s the full calendar. more to come]
nourished by, nourishing:
Watching: videos of dabke, maori haka, soaking in images and instances of tenderness, practices of community care, and collective effervescence — which I’ll be writing about more in the weeks to come. Thinking about: early morning trains and books that get at the root, or bring us underground, like My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem, and Underland by Robert MacFarlane, The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts, The Places That Scare You by Pema Chodron. Nourished by: hazelnut, orange, fig spread on citrus flecked bread. Sleep, early.
a note:
I decided against a sale in the shop this year, but for a sale on paid subscriptions — 40% off until December 3. This comes just in time for our last seasonal session of the year in celebration of the solstice, arriving December 21. Paid subscribers, I’m filming a longer version of today’s Spiral practice for you, with visuals, arriving soon. Thank you, as always, for being part of this creative community.