Ouroborus: My End Is My Beginning

For forty-six years I taught English, speech, and drama on the high school and middle school levels. For fourteen of those summers I served as a Master Teacher at Rice Summer School in Houston. After a long and fruitful career, I retired, determined to use the free time that was now available to me to write, to engage in creative endeavors, and to spend much more time with my family. Because I had worked for so many years, including summers, I didn't fully understand how this time that unfolded before me would change my life. The novel I had started writing years before suddenly took off, and by the end of that first year I was finished. Everything improved--my relationships with family and friends, the garden, my new book club, our house and its maintenance, and even my health. The end of a long teaching career was the beginning of a new life in unfathomable ways.

Teaching literature eventually led me to taking courses at the C.G. Jung Center in Houston for fourteen years, and the language of symbolism became an integral part of my classroom experience. The stages of life/death/rebirth could be identified in every hero journey story, and soon students could recognize this archetype in their own lives as well. One of the most powerful symbols of that journey is the ouroborus, the snake biting its tail and forming a never ending circle.

Ouroboros (pronounced aw ro bawr us) in Greek means "tail devourer." The original depiction was a snake biting its tail in a circle, but the snake is sometimes characterized as a dragon instead, and it isn't Greek in origin but Egyptian. The oldest depiction of it appears on a golden shrine in the tomb of Tutankhamen in 13th century BC. Generally it refers to cyclical time rather than linear, and the Egyptians understood this symbol through the yearly flooding of the Nile River as well as the sun's cyclical journey.

And so this archetypal symbol of renewal and regeneration reminds us all of the rebirth we implore. It's about do-overs and second chances, finally getting it right. On a simplistic but nevertheless important level, it includes recycling and repurposing, perhaps even replanting each spring, changing jobs, and renewing our lifestyle to accommodate the changes in our lives we must make. We love second chances, starting afresh with a new outlook and new possibilities. Many of us never keep our New Year's resolutions, but we make them anyway. Just the idea of a second chance is mesmerizing.

But then there are the more serious renewals: finding a more suitable partner after a failed relationship, renewal of wedding vows to strengthen a marriage that perhaps needed a shot in the arm, recovering from a serious accident or illness and learning how to live with new rules of the game.

Saying goodbye to the old life is rarely easy. Starting over can be scary and intimidating, maybe even painful, because not only do we all fear the unknown to one extent or another, but we liked the comfort of that old life.

When I lost my beloved Patrick, grief had to take a back seat to the responsibilities that coincide with this kind of loss. It was unexpected and yet putting the brakes on my grief gave me a chance to think and take care of myself slowly. As the necessary tasks came to an end, I suddenly realized how alone I was. I kept expecting him to walk into the kitchen or sit in his favorite chair to watch our lovely BBC series. I expected to look up and see him sitting at his computer or his drawing board. All along I knew I was beginning to carve out a new life for myself, not the one I wanted, but one where his spirit would feel clearly present to me in so many areas of my life that it was almost palpable. I began burning scented candles to create a new atmosphere, but it only added to the sacredness of the space we inhabited together.

I have no doubt that ancient Egyptians and Greeks also thought about rebirth in the context of death. The concreteness of their symbols, especially the ouroborus, belies their belief system about life and death, art transcending words. The end was a beginning for them as it is for us centuries later. As I traverse this journey of loss and renewal, the ouroborus certainly speaks of new beginnings for me.