Walking the Spiral Way
How creative growth returns us to what we already carry.
Creative growth doesn’t follow a straight line. It moves in spirals. And if we don’t know that, we’ll keep thinking something’s wrong every time we revisit the same pattern, or when a lesson we thought we’d already “healed” shows up again in a deeper way. We’ll mistake the spiral for a loop. We’ll mistake return for regression. But when we honor the spiral, we begin to see each return as an invitation. Each cycle as a deepening. Each threshold as a chance to become more whole.
The Spiral Way is not a concept. It’s a lived rhythm. It is the pattern that underlies all creative transformation. Seasons. Moons. Menstrual cycles. Migrations. Mythic journeys. Grief. Growth. It is the intelligence of the Earth and the body. And it’s the rhythm we come back into when we choose to create from a place of truth, rather than urgency.
In a spiral, you don’t graduate. You deepen. You circle back to the same themes again and again, but with new awareness, new questions, new capacity. Maybe this time you meet your visibility wounds with more softness. Maybe this time you hold your creative grief without collapsing. Maybe this time you let joy guide the work instead of proving. Every pass through the spiral reshapes you. Not because you’ve solved anything—but because you’ve stayed with yourself long enough to integrate.
This is why the Creative Rites exist—not to give us a linear map, but to give rhythm to the spiral. To name the seasons within the cycle. To support us in orienting to where we are, what we’re tending, and what’s being asked of us next. Because when we move without rhythm, we lose trust in the process. We start to think we’re behind, or broken, or inconsistent. We push for clarity instead of letting understanding arrive in its own time. We perform integration instead of living into it.
Walking the Spiral Way means trusting that your process has its own timing. It means honoring the seasons when your work is invisible. When you’re composting instead of creating. When you’re tending to the roots instead of reaching toward the next milestone. It means recognizing that descent is not failure—it’s part of the pattern. That grief isn’t the opposite of growth—it’s what makes space for it.
Most of us weren’t taught to move this way. We were taught to ascend. To improve. To get better, faster, clearer. But creative work doesn’t unfold like that. It’s not a staircase. It’s a return. And what you find each time you come back to the center is not the same. Because you are not the same.
The Spiral Way gives us permission to live in process. To release the need for constant articulation. To trust the work even when it’s not yet visible. To hold the tension of the in-between. And most importantly, it gives us a way to honor the thresholds we’re crossing—not with speed, but with ceremony. With attention. With rhythm that reflects our own.
You are not starting over. You are deepening.
You are not stuck. You are circling closer to the truth.
And the path, though it winds, is still leading you forward—toward something more rooted, more honest, more whole.
