A big part of my belief system, which I don’t often indulge nor talk about (Jupiter in Virgo), is that I think that the universe is shaped like a spiral.

I don’t really have much empirical evidence about this. I’m not a physicist and I’ve never seen a picture. I do know that our solar system, revolving around a moving sun, is shaped like and moves as a spiral. I’ve seen a motion graphics of this at some point on a Youtube science channel.

The reason why I believe that the universe is spiral shaped is because that’s how I’ve noticed we experience time. We tend to experience similar things over and over again, getting frustrated often and familiar often. We tend to experience iterations of the same thing. However, iterations are not repetitions but reproductions. Each generation of an iteration changes the iteration again and again until we are right back where we started, which is also nowhere close to where we started.

This is, I think, why I like to backtrack with clients and trace memory. We know our cycles intimately because we remember our last Jupiter returns, our last Saturn returns. We know what these cycles are about even if we don’t know what the world will look like at the next phase of the cycle. We can get to know what we want out of the cycle and, by doing so, get to know what we will into being.

Our genealogies are echoed by the birth chart. The tenth house may be the mother but the seventh is the mother’s mother, whose mother is the fourth, and whose mother is the first, which is also the incarnated self.

The universe moves like a spiral because change moves like a spiral. Change brings up the old and metabolizes it by changing it. Change is about changing the way that we remember history as well as the way we move into the future. Change is not about the future—change is about changing the types of futures that are possible.

Change moves like a spiral because there isn’t just one future. There are as many futures as there are people. Change moves like a spiral because change is not about getting to the future as if the future were a place, undiscovered and waiting, but a place that lives in the past. The only way to change the types of futures possible is to change the way that we remember the past.

Our assumptions about how we remember the past are never right because they are always outdated. We remember that we were immature, that we should have done something a certain way, and that we could have gotten some outcome if only we did something differently. We don’t often have compassion for our past selves and this is tragic. Because change is evidence of compassion.

The question is—if the universe is truly shaped like a spiral, then where is the forward motion coming from? Is it the outer rings of the spiral? Does the external drive change? Or does the universe burrow into its center?

I read a book on recent discoveries in quantum physics and I learned something very shocking. I learned that, while particles of matter are infinite and wavelike, that space, or the absence of particles, are actually granular and finite. By space, I’m not talking about empty air but the absence of anything at all located between atomic structures and between quarks.

Space is finite. You can stack space but you can’t stack matter because matter is infinite. Matter wobbles, wavelike and incalculable, while emptiness is predictable. Space is, for all intents and purposes, knowable but matter is unknowable.

There’s also the question of whether we are made up of matter or space. I’m guessing that both have to be in play. Existence is a dynamic of knowable and unknowable parts.

I believe that the spiral that is the universe moves both at the center and at the exterior. However, I believe that exteriors are knowable. I don’t fancy the same about interiors. There is something unknowable, inscrutable, incomprehensible about interiors the same way that there is something unpredictable about what matters. I believe that what does not matter—space—is predictable. However, what matters is fundamentally, at its root, indescribable.

And, so, I believe that true change—the type that changes history as well as the types of futures imaginable—occurs at the center of the spiral. I believe that change occurs within what matters and what remains unknowable. I believe that there is motion, but only motion, in the knowable pieces of the universe but motion, which is about predictable futures and linear time models, is not very interesting and does not matter.

But what do I know? I’m not a scientist and I’ve never even gone to grad school. I’m just an astrologer and fanfiction writer with nothing better to do on a Monday night than to think about the shape of the universe. I’m just making this up.