Coil-Spring Jubilee

Novenas, Spin, and Potential Energy Prayer

Image by Gertrud Bodenwieser

One of my most chased after experiences as a child was the state of spinning. I would spend hours cosplaying Whirling Dervish in our living room (I’m thankful this obsessive mystical yearning found this practice instead of a smart phone). I’d spin and spin and spin until the ceiling seemed to obey my churning movement, coiling into a speckled gyre, curving inwards with the same modesty of a diurnal flower clasping its petals at dusk. I loved rickety county fair rides that swung your seats out into orbit, feet arced like a passing comet over the hot dog vendors and agricultural animal displays. But my favorite experience of spinning involved tension and rapid release, a mechanism best achieved by spinning a playground swing against its chains or, in the best-case scenario, spinning a tire swing against its tether until it was taut with potential. I’d clutch the tire before the spinner would release and I’d lean my head back into the snap and whirl. The unrestrained spin dropped me right into bodily surrender, my whirring thoughts whipped from my head back into the mellower width of my belly and breath.

Now, many years later, I know that this experience I chased is caused by something called the coil spring mechanism. When you coil something like a spring, or twist a material against its shape, you store potential energy in it. Upon release of the “coil”, this potential energy is rapidly converted to kinetic energy causing the object to spin. This mechanism hums throughout our daily life, hiding in spinning tops and clockwork and toasters. It is an evolutionary refrain, appearing in climbing plant tendrils characterized by two or more helices of opposite handedness joined to produce something like springs that provide both a climbing anchor and shock absorption. You can see this function in everything from passion flowers to cucumbers. The coil spring mechanism hides in animal tendons storing energy for locomotion and is even more microscopically coded into “molecular coiled-coils” in proteins. Our very cellular make up is composed of these delicately taut spirals, coiling and uncoiling to produce the spinning dance of our material existence.

We coil and coil. We feel the taut buzz in our shins, we arc away from straight lines. We twist against our stalks, testing the stretch of our spines.

And then we release. We spin. We hope the potential energy stored will shoot us into the next shape, the next world, the escape, the stars.

Or if you are like me, it’s the spin you live for. The moment when the world streaks by and we feel ourselves embodying energy’s sheer expenditure.

It is this sensation of release and whirl that came to mind recently when I was considering my upcoming 54-day novena.

A novena is a devotional practice that dates back to the middle ages, originally encompassing a nine day petitionary prayer but expanding out to three sets of nine day prayers in 19th century Italy when a sickly girl named Fortuna Agrelli received miraculous healing after following the advice of a vision to complete three joined novenas. For the past eleven or so years I have participated in my parent’s interfaith ecological prayer community The Way of the Rose. Using the pagan roots of rosary practice, members come together to pray in groups online and in person, honoring that prayer is strongest when it exists within an ecosystem of other prayers. Everyone’s devotional roots intertwine. The answer to one person’s prayer becomes an answered prayer for the whole community. One of the medieval frameworks rewilded by the community has been the 54-day Novena. For 54 days you can pray deeply and intensely for one petition. No petition is too lowly. Pray for help making your car payment. Pray for specific and urgent help. Call on your ancestors – human and more than human – for help. And as your pray, you watch what happens as the moon spirals through two cycles. For me, the most potent part of this practice is pivot that occurs on day 27 when, whether or not anything has happened, you begin to pray in gratitude for your answered prayer. This shift for me is what roots this practice below the vapidity of modern manifestation, opening up the door for unexpected outcomes. How many times have I prayed for something that ultimately was not good for me? How many times has something happened during a petition season that seems odd but many years down the line turns out to have been an oblique answer to my original prayer. It also troubles the idea of transactional prayer – or as my parent’s call it “vending machine prayer”. It’s not about putting your coin into god’s machine, proudly expecting to receive something in return. It’s about locating your desire as being a powerful compass into collaborating with the world and its mysteries. It’s about asking our desires difficult questions over a concentrated period of time: “What are you really? Where have you really led me? Thank you for all you’ve shown me. How is this weird situation an ecological response to my inquiry?”

Once when I prayed for love and children, I ripped my kneecap off on the first day of the novena. It took me a long time to understand how those two things fit together, but now it seems obvious. Caught in a season of over-exercising to deal with the stress of early quarantine isolation, the injury grounded me, causing me to slow down and begin to heal my frazzled fertility. I wish I hadn’t needed such a loud answer as a physical injury, but I am often a poor listener when it comes to my own body.

For many years I have prayed these 54-day petitions, coming slowly to the realization that it’s not about receiving anything so much as it is a practice in drawing close attention to how our desires shape our actions. The posture of questioning opens up space for the world to respond, in ways that are often fairly surprising. And then during the final 28 days of gratitude, we have to let these surprises change us. We have to let go of the coiled energy and be prepared to spin. It is powerful to live under the zodiac of a certain longing for a season. To let our desires exceed their original articulation. How can we be grateful for whatever weather arrives to rearrange our core longings?

It is very rare that I pray for something and then it happens. I have prayed for health many times and in manifold ways. What I’ve learned from this practice is not to pray for the same thing again and again. I receive the answer and then I let my devotional “questions” change. Mostly, my prayers seem to work like a compass, helping me to get better at orienting towards the type of community and deep life I want to cultivate.

And then very rarely the answers are big and wild enough that you realize your body must find a way to both embody the spin and release its kinetic gift. You must hold on tight to the chains as the tire spirals you out, faster and faster as it spends with delight many years of coiled potential energy prayer.

My last novena I prayed to shift from the sprint to the marathon in my life, cultivating long term practices, art-making routines, healthcare approaches, and relationships built for sustainability and longevity. And when I came to the end of it and saw the ways my life had changed rather surprisingly I realized I needed to take a Jubilee novena.

The idea of Jubilee originates in early Judaism, mentioned in Leviticus, referencing a practice of erasing debts, releasing slaves, and letting the land lie fallow and then be redistributed at the end of seven cycles of seven-year shmita (sabbatical) years. Like a sabbath day writ over a period of years rather than days, the Jubilee year can be seen as a time to say that, for now, the work is enough. The prayers are answered. We can live inside our joys and let them grow without accelerating into the next longing, the next desire, the next effort. Often when I teach around chronic and incurable illness, I invite people into a Healing Jubilee, where we reclaim the tradition of Jubilee and come together to say, no matter how sick and burdened we are, there is no more healing to be done. For today, for this moment together, we do not need to work on our bodies. We do not need to be well. Jubilee may come from the word yovel. While its meaning is uncertain, yovel’s Hebrew root may refer to the ram horn that was blown to signal the beginning of the sacred year. It has also been linked to the Proto-Indo European word Yu which meant to “shout with joy”. When I think of Jubilee, I think of that interspecies shout for joy.

There are seasons for twisting and twisting and there are seasons for releasing and letting our answered prayers spin us into wilder shapes and destinations than we could ever expect or personally author.

I am currently in a season of Jubilee, of kinetic release. There is still a lot of pain and mostly weird, oblique answers to devotional questions about health and physical well-being. But there is plenty to shout for joy about. And I sincerely believe I need to get better at letting joy take root in my body and my life, growing as deep and strong as it can so that its branches can offer shade for other beings, bearing fruit that nourishes not only me but my extended community.

For the next 54 days I am not praying a petition. The whole thing is gratitude. The land lies fallow, sated and softened with its own exuberance.

For me, the embodied sense of this devotional shape is of the coil spring mechanism.

For many seasons I have torqued against circumstance, praying and praying and building up energy. But now is the scary part. I let go. I unfurl. I spin.

I hope that wherever I land, my gratitude is a horn-blast, a shout for joy, a jubilee that honors all the gifts and seeds that have fallen into my soil.

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I am overwhelmed with gratitude by how many of you have showed up here to support my work and widen my thinking. Right now you are literally keeping me alive and funding the out-of-pocket medical expenses that allow me to receive IV nutrition and connective tissue specialists.

I am grateful in a way that is wide and deep and low. I hope you can feel some sonorous note of it - the hum and grind of ice relaxing under the sun - in your body. I am sending the song of my thanks your way. I love you all so much