And go round and round and round in a spiral game

I love the new stockings from Bent Creek.  That snowman just makes me smile.  I'm thinking that the hubster and I need stockings that we can hang at our house, even if our stockings only really get filled in New Hampshire (it's the only place Santa knows where to find me).  You know I've done the series of Shepherd's Bush stockings for the family (Mary's, Peter's, Sophie's, Bertie's, and Robert's).  But I just love that snowman!  I think it's the combination of color and the spirals.    I love spirals.  I'm so glad they've come to cross-stitch and general craft design.  (The spiral was one of the first paper punches I bought!)  I used to doodle them all over my school notebooks--a series of interlocking double spirals.  Do you think it's because I don't know my path?  Because I sense that there's not much reason to life, that is, that there is no path (despite what the hyper-organized and those who march lock step to the top of their careers might think)? 

I thought I would see if there was a simple explanation of spiral symbolism out there.  There isn't.  Spirals have been used in many cultures throughout the ages.  Of course, then, the meanings are multiple.  Spirals represent the cosmos, the id, cycles of growth and change (i.e. the passage of time).  Once, I must have been about 13, I asked my mother if she thought linearly.  She considered briefly and then said, "I don't think." (This is patently untrue, but I digress.)  She asked why I wanted to know.  "Because," I said, "I think I think in a spiral.  It's not like you come back to the same starting point, but I do cycle through thoughts over and over again."  You can see why my mother told her friends she never knew what I was talking about when she drove me to and from school.  So when I was looking up the spiral thing, I found this.  Interesting.  Something I intuited as a child.

We do not go round a circle (of existence). That is an illusion, just as the cycling of the planets and the stars is an illusion.We move along a spiral track. It is not quite the same journey from the cradle to the grave each time. Sometimes the differences are small. Sometimes they are very important. We must set out each time on the same road but along that road we have a choice of adventures.  -J. B Priestley, I Have Been Here Before

So I think my next adventure might be the Bent Creek stocking.