Spiral Shores
What will wash up on the shore today at the threshold between land and sea?
I walk the tideline, the fine line between one world and another.
Tracing the edge of this body of water,
perhaps I’ll find riches dredged up from the deep,
while the water laps at my feet,
leaving a fleeting imprint of my form on the landscape,
until my marks dissolve into the ocean’s breath.
These words came to me in the depths of a healing crisis. Having survived a life-threatening health condition and recovered my ability to walk, it seemed that everything could get back to “normal”. But my system had crashed. I was house-bound, largely bed-bound, utterly debilitated by exhaustion and panic attacks, and wracked with physical pain. And conventional medicine couldn’t provide me with any answers.
By sifting through the debris that washed up from my subconscious, I occasionally discovered pearls, nudges that helped me find not only a name for what I was experiencing – Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS / ME) – but also methods and communities that could help me heal.
Spiral Shores became a path of surrender. Surrender to not knowing, to the moment, surrender to the spiralling path of healing as I circled back to revisit all the trauma that had already demanded years of healing work from me. Often it felt as though I was back where I had started, but in moments of presence, I sensed that the waves were bringing me to a new shore of learning, and a new layer to be uncovered.
I began to draw and paint my inner landscape, searching for meaning. As I explored personal and collective stories and began to envision new narratives, elements of myth and folktale appeared in my images. Painting became an anchor, helping me encounter the medicine of Nature through the tip of my brush, reconnecting me with a sense of wonder, beauty, wholeness and possibility. And slowly I began to recover, not only my health but also my sense of purpose. The experience led me back into the heart of creativity and has birthed the artwork that I am now beginning to share.
Have you ever come across a word or phrase, story or image that feels like a key as you turn it over in your hand? Perhaps you’d been searching for it for a long time. And perhaps it came out of nowhere. But now it’s here, you know that somewhere there’s a doorway, a threshold waiting to be unlocked. For me Spiral Shores is one of those keys, unlocking new chambers of my being. As small as a shell that can fit in your palm and, at the same time, as vast as the ocean.
What do the words spiral shores evoke within you? I would love to hear.
Amongst other things, spiral shores has come to encapsulate the shape of healing, the nature of creativity, the cyclical journey through the seasons, the phases of the moon, the menstrual cycle and the arc of life itself. For me it is also a journey of awareness, a vessel for the unknown, the dance of activity and rest, chaos and harmony, regulation and dysregulation and the wild wisdom encoded in our DNA. It provides a map for the territory of the unknown. A path of discovery.