Suzanne Scott Constantine
Mixed media on board, 2024. One 16” diameter round plus three 4” diameter rounds.

The spiral represents the reality of our lives. We long for our lives to follow a linear, steady, step-by-step progression of growth and change. Yet in reality our personal narratives – as well as our communal ones – seem to repeat over and over, going deeper each time we circle back to and confront the “same old situation.” The one that we are trying to escape. Or the one that needs healing.

The paradox of the spiral is that, as the spiral’s power pulls us down into the maelstrom, we remain the same people at every level; yet if we can traverse the spiral as if it were a labyrinth, we also are changed by new insights. Forever the same; forever changed. I am again that person in the silhouette, standing in as witness who cooperates with the spiral, without judgment.

That is my aspiration — to become a calm and wide-awake observer to what is unfolding around me, open to what the vortex may reveal.