a reflection of the cosmos

I believe that the universe repeats itself in secret. That the stars weren’t content to stay in the sky, so they came down and scattered themselves across skin as freckles. That trees, not satisfied with growing up, decided to grow inward too-- curling into our lungs so we’d always remember how to breathe with the earth. That lightning got bored of striking from cloud to ground and now runs inside us, disguised as veins. I used to think I was spinning alone, a little planet unmoored-- but maybe I’ve just been turning the way everything else does.

Cosmogyral. The word means to revolve around the universe, but I think it also means to remember that we belong to it.

There’s a common phrase people tend to fall back on: we’re all just living on a floating rock. While that may be true, I do not think we are separate from nature. We are its expression. The body is not a container, but a continuation.

What greater proof than our own flesh? We breathe in what trees breathe out. Trees breathe in what we breathe out. Our own fingerprints, mimicking the rings of a tree stump. From our fingertips to our bones, we are Nature's image.

Most people have heard of the Fibonacci sequence or fractals, even if only in passing. It’s a series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two before it (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc). What’s strange, or maybe beautiful, is how this simple math shows up in nature: in the spirals of sunflowers, pinecones, and hurricanes. Even in the way tree branches split or petals are arranged. Fractals are similar-- infinitely repeating patterns that look the same no matter how far you zoom in or out, like snowflakes, lightning bolts, or the branching of rivers and veins. We point them out with awe, as if noticing them grants us temporary access to some hidden truth.

But what does it mean? That the same pattern found in the swirl of our fingerprints also exists in the arms of the Milky Way? That the curve of a wave crashing onto shore echoes the spiral of a shell?

I think we look for these patterns not just because they’re everywhere, but because they comfort us. They tell us that even in the vastness of space and the mess of being human, something holds. Something repeats. Something spirals, yes-- but it spirals with form. And maybe if we can trace that form in the world, we can start to find it in ourselves. Not a straight line, not a perfect circle-- but a curve that keeps returning, again and again, to something familiar.

It was tradition for my grandmother to take my brother and I to The Nutcracker, a two-act classical ballet. My grandfather would be in the orchestra, playing a violin he had repaired just hours prior in his workshop. Every year, without fail, I was awestruck. It’s the reason why, to this day, Tchaikovsky remains one of my favourite composers.

There was such grace in the way the ballerinas spun, leapt, and even stood still. It wasn’t long before the show ended, and so I spent the rest of the year reliving the experience through nature's movement: the delicacy of snowfalls, the spontaneity of rain-- drizzling to pouring and back again, the warmth of sunlight on my skin, the orange leaves waltzing with the wind. And then, suddenly, it will be winter again, and I will be back in the theater, watching the gracefulness I had come to recognize everywhere. The fluidity I now knew so intimately in everything.

Through their dance I learned that spinning is not always disorientation. We constantly resist chaos, refusing to be pushed, swayed, or pulled by anything that isn’t of our own accord.

But the universe itself is spinning. Stars, planets, our thoughts, and all.

Of course, that’s not to say I don’t have my share of ungraceful seasons. There will always be a perpetual feeling of lostness engraved in us-- scattered, like we are orbiting nothing. Mine stems from change: people leaving, places closing, pieces of myself I thought were permanent flaking away. I always feel left behind, a sense of grief for everything that once was, weighing me down. I feel so aware of time passing in every moment of my life, and it consumes every fold in my brain, leaving traces of anxiety in the deepest parts.

I try to hold still. I think if I could anchor myself-- make lists, clean my room, do laundry, write Substack essays-- I can stop the spinning. But it never works. Because the truth is, stillness isn’t safety. Stillness, sometimes, is just fear dressed up as control.

“Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the figure be composite -- a pair of winged horses and a charioteer.

Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him.”

- Plato, Phaedrus

What saves me isn’t silence or stability. It is movement. It’s walking until my thoughts catch up. Crying until they pass. It is music, and conversation, and small, almost imperceptible things: steam curling from tea, headlights bending around corners, the wind pushing hair into my face. The little things.

I don’t realize it in the moment, but this isn’t me unraveling-- I’m just finally in orbit. I was simply too close to see the shape of it. And when I finally zoom out, I recognize something ancient in the chaos. A spiral. A rhythm. A dance I’d seen before.

Being lost isn’t about location, but forgetting our place in the pattern. Maybe the reason we long for the stars is because we already carry them. Find the constellation your freckles map, seek the bigger picture. It’s more than just about a floating rock.

We are the universe becoming conscious of itself.

We aren’t spinning out-- we’re just following the orbit we were made for.