Spinning. She knew the feeling as if it existed in her bones, as if the cataclysmic spinning of electrons in her very cells whirled her entire being into a state of fundamental unrest. She longed for those fleeting moments of rest, of peace eked out through so much work, but had again vanished. She longed for stability, but knew instability almost as a comfort, a place she’d been for more than half her almost thirty years. She knew that peace existed somewhere in her breath, in slowing down and tapping the vein of quiet solitude within, but couldn’t bring herself to find it. She knew that somewhere the choice existed to lower her outstretched arms, slow her twirling feet, let gravity take her hair back to down to rest on her back. But the maddening exhilaration of the twirl had taken over. She feared desperately that the velocity would increase until she was obliterated and would vanish in the fastness and speed of uncontrol until, in one perfect moment, she would combust. The obliteration sounded lovely, to vanish into a million tiny particles, spread out into the vastness she couldn’t feel while still contained in this tiny body.
But she also couldn’t shake the experience of her recent past, of the desperate hopelessness that had funneled her into peace, and knew that she had a choice. She could swirl herself into oblivion, or somehow, again swirl the ineffable beingness into herself.
She found the one, tiny, pin-sized dot deep within herself, that one dot of stillness, and breathed into it. She became that speck, realizing it like a black hole, infinite even in its smallness. And therein she found the vastness she yearned for, found it, against all odds, contained within herself. Within that speck she was suddenly connected again - energy whooshing upwards to the expanse of the cosmos, energy funneling down, becoming a divining rod connecting her to the slow moving quiet of the earth. The spinning still existed, she could sense it, but remotely now. As if she had created her own axis mundi, and while the world spun outside of her, gravity held her still within the hurricane's eye.
