“The spiral labyrinth is one of the oldest of symbols; it depicts the way to the unknown center of death and rebirth, the risk of the search, the danger of losing the way, the quest, the finding and the ability to return.”
Edmond Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest
After completing the quartz moon and the lynx paw, I had no idea what stone project would unfold next.
For some time, I had been interested in spirals. When I had drawn images after the heart attack, an image of spiral was one that kept wanting to be drawn.
A year after the heart attack, Jungian psychologist James Nourse had suggested to me that the image of the spiral was similar to a shamanic initiation ritual, of the “way in and the way out.” At the time, I had just wanted to be free of the pain, and I did not believe that there was a way out.
So it came to me that the next thing to do was build a spiral, a Fibonacci spiral, near where the entrance to where the sanctuary would be. (Fibonacci recognized one of the basic patterns in nature, the geometric doubling that happens when the sum of the previous two numbers is added together.)
It came to me as I was working on the spiral that one of the other images that came forward after the heart attack was that of seven red eggs in a sea: I was almost seven years after the heart attack, I was building the Fibonacci spiral, and I was nearing completion of a stone sanctuary.
