I keep coming back to the ouroboros. The serpent biting its own tail, closing itself into a perfect circle. The word is Greek, built from tail and eating, but the image is far older than the word itself. It shows up carved into Egyptian tombs more than three thousand years ago, drawn beside gods who governed the turning of day into night. Later it surfaces in Greek and Roman thought, then in alchemy, where it came to stand for the idea that nothing in the universe truly disappears, it only changes shape and starts again. The Norse had their own version too, a serpent vast enough to wrap around the entire world. Different centuries, different tongues, yet the same shape kept returning, as if every culture needed some way to draw infinity rather than just describe it.
What pulls me toward it is the contradiction sitting quietly at its centre. A mouth closing on a tail looks like an ending. But here, the ending is what feeds the beginning. Destruction and renewal stop being opposites and become the same motion, just seen from two different angles. A year ends and folds straight into the next. A version of you fades slowly, and something else picks up the thread, uninvited, and keeps walking.
That is probably why it stayed with me long enough to end up in a song. The circular shape solves something a straight line never could. A line has a beginning and an end. A circle has neither, and that feels closer to how a life actually moves. You loop. You return to old selves wearing new skin. You repeat a mistake and call it growth.
The new song “Ouroboros” is the culmination of a lot of ideas about the concept, mixed with infinity. I won’t say much more about the song itself just yet. The serpent earned its place gently, and I would like the song to arrive the same way.
This post originally appeared on Trevj Music on Substack