Setting Out
“Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me, the long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.”
Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road
The Inward Journey
The spiral is one of humanity’s most ancient and enduring symbols; it represents the winding journeys we must take inward if we are to truly know ourselves and understand the world around us. If we embark on this journey with honesty and courage, we may return home with a heightened sense of fulfillment, having become the hero of our own adventure.
The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung wrote that “[t]he spiral in psychology means that when you make a spiral you always come over the same point where you have been before, but never really the same, it is above or below, inside, outside, so it means growth.” (Dream Analysis, Parts II & III. 1929)
Jung thought that the form of a spiral represented the idea of “eternal return” in the pattern of human thought and insisted that the archetypal symbol represented the cosmic force. Various ancient cultures viewed the spiral as a symbol for journey, growth, and evolution.
“The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.”