The Inner Coil
It can look like a crashing wave or a vortex of wind. Often, it is portrayed as one touching the other. When I see the Koru symbol, I feel a strange mix of calmness and wanderlust. I’m at peace, but I want to explore. The Koru is the coil neatly wound, ready to expand.
The word Koru comes from the Māori of New Zealand. The literal translation is “loop.” It is the circular path, the circumnavigation. The symbol is loaded with meaning, but the original inspiration was the fern leaf when it is young and furled. For the Māori, Koru means new beginnings. It is the start of the search. A journey that never ends.
The inner coil has special meaning. It signifies a return to the point of origin, the closing of the loop. The thing about circles is this: the path may bend back to where you started, but you are not the same person when you arrive. The journey leads somewhere and nowhere. The journey is in you.
As T.S. Eliot put it:
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
When we return to childhood homes, the branches that we once dangled from we now stoop under. The rocks we daringly leapt between we now cross with a single step. At the same time, so much that we took for granted looms large. Things we never noticed before. The physical spaces shrink while emotional gulfs yawn wide. How did our parents know so much at their age? They were younger then than we are now. Leaps of the imagination are needed now; when we were young, we assumed it must be easy.
The sublime in life is rarely easy, which makes it all the more worth it when it’s discovered. What I love about the word Koru, and the symbol,
Language may be the most powerful of human inventions. Most of our storehouse of knowledge is conveyed and passed along through the written and spoken word. If we include the language of mathematics, then everything we might call progress has depended on strings of letters and numbers that our brains are able to parse into meaning. The arch of a bridge, a towering skyline, the complexity of an automobile, all things concrete and rebar.
But something is lost in the concrete, and there is great power in the abstract. What language cannot convey, we often find expressed through dance, music, art, or symbology. Symbols are especially powerful. While words have defined meanings and borders, symbols are able to convey complex and shifting ideas. These ideas can even build up over time, layer upon layer stacked into the same symbol.
Because of this power, we often turn words into symbols so they can employ some of that same power. Words like Peace, Art, and Freedom.
One of my favorite words and symbols is Koru, from the Māori of New Zealand.