Spindle Whorl

My painting is from several years ago. I renamed it Spindle Whorl. “A spindle whorl is a disc or spherical object fitted onto the spindle to increase and maintain the speed of the spin.” So many cultures have created beautiful spindle whorls to help spin thread for cloth. But they are also a symbol of unity and the axis at the center of the cosmos, the still point at the turning center, from which everything is spun. Interesting coming up today–because of the name I gave my old business: Spindle of Fire, by which I meant the central axis of the solar system or perhaps the galaxy or universe. And the mitotic spindles in cell biology are the fibers that help pull one cell into divided daughter cells.

Today I’ve been reading about rest and silence. It’s the dark of the moon. The moon, invisible and waning into the conjunction with the sun, all her shared brightness enfolded back into and combust in the sun’s rays, a time of both stillness and fertility–the power of latency and fallowness to regenerate growth, the moment before reaching again into outward or upward motion. It might be the moment of mitosis, as everything begins to collect and condense, in preparation for the emergence of a radical change, weakening, dissolving the structure of what has been, an empowerment and transmission into each half of the conjoining body, a twisting and a turning as energy is exchanged, centripetal force gathering, then reversing, magnetic spindles of energy midwifing the remembering new bodies apart, lost boundaries reforming, unity unfolding into embryonic separation and a trajectory of increasing distinction until the cycle returns.

Interesting because I was born at the last degree of the sign of the Moon, the last stage before it turns into the sign of the Sun.  And that moment is now. Once again.