Episode Details

Spirals began appearing in the Boyne Valley. First, in a dream when I was rounding cobblestoned streets searching for a place I vaguely remembered. Then, indelibly, among the neolithic moons carved into the mother stones at Newgrange in County Meath, where an invisible hand was believed to gesture to the dead on the briefest day of the year.

The fiddle ferns seemed eager to converse at Ballymaloe, their shoulders smiling atop their green, springtime spines; and a cream-colored nautilus curled perfectly in my palm on a windswept beach in Ardmore. An acupuncturist friend explained how Chi travels through the body's meridians in spiral patterns. Spirals began opening in the intervals between musical harmonies and along the wooden banister in my father’s home. And then, in meditation — massive, breathing spirals emanated like forest vines behind my eyes.

“The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free,” said the Russian American author and poet Vladimir Nabokov.

Vedic people sensed this spiritualized circle moving through all creation — and reflected in the physical shape of the galaxies — as the interweaving power of creation itself. The universe does not manifest randomly but is expressed through an intricate matrix they gave the nomenclature Ṛta, a Sanskrit word that means “that which is joined together, order, truth, or architecture.”

Ṛta is closely allied to the injunctions and ordinances thought to uphold it, collectively referred to as dharma, and the action of the individual in relation to those ordinances, referred to as karma (two terms that eventually eclipsed Ṛta in framing a sense of moral and religious order). Josh Schrei and I recently spoke about Ṛta with respect to its etymological connection to the words harmony, rite, art, order, rhythm, and ritual.

But some facts do not square tidily with our notions of sacred geometry. Words and actions can unfurl in conscious or unconscious directions. We get caught in tired eddies of protection, maelstroms of othering, devastating tornadoes of forgetting.

The beauty, the horror. We find ourselves asking — what vastness can contain all this?

Scholar William Mahony explains Ṛta, this concept that encapsulates the centripetal and centrifugal movement of time and evolution, of energy and light, as follows: “Vedic thought holds that a true vision of a divine universe must necessarily include the brokenness of the world and that, in fact, it is precisely the imagination that is able to see the way the whole fits together despite the often disjointed nature of the parts.”

So an uncoiling, integrative comprehension of reality must stretch to encompass the world's brokenness, Mahony counsels.

Joanna Macy, an elder in environmental activism and deep ecology, is the visionary teacher of the Work that Reconnects, a roadmap for staying present to painful truths — the brokenness — while opening to the joy that comes with a renewed commitment to acting on behalf of a more just and humane world.

The Spiral of the Work that Reconnects progresses through four stages as follows:

(1) Gratitude. First, we must touch the ground. Gratitude resources our nervous systems. It links us to a flow of empathy and the inspiration to engage in the present moment and the world around us.

(2) Grief. Here, we stop trying to bypass suffering with protection and privilege. “This world, in which we are born and take our being, is alive. It is … our larger body” (Coming Back to Life, Macy & Brown). We feel our interconnectedness. With support,