What the Triskelion Means

There is a stone at Newgrange, Ireland, carved before the Egyptians built their pyramids. Three spiral arms, each turning inward toward a hollow center. Together, one shape. Nobody knows what the people who carved it meant. They didn't leave a note.

What they left was the shape.

I've been living under this shape my whole working life without having a name for it. I picked it as a logo because it looked like what I believed. Turns out believing it first and naming it second is the right order.

The early church took the triskelion for the Trinity. Not the triangle, not the three circles, not the shamrock Patrick supposedly held up in the rain. The spiral. Three arms, each distinct, each turning, together one thing. The Greek word they used for what the Trinity does is perichoresis. A dance. A mutual indwelling. Father in the Son. Son in the Spirit. Each fully present, each fully themselves, each fully the one thing.

The unity isn't sameness. It's communion.

What that means practically: the three persons of the Trinity are not managed by a fourth, higher thing. There is no hub. The shape holds not because something sits at the center keeping it together but because each arm is moving toward the others. The motion itself is the bond. Take the motion away, put a hub in the middle, and you don't have a Trinity anymore. You have a corporate org chart with God at the top.

Most organizational charts look like this. One bright point, everything arranged around it. The hub-and-spoke is efficient. It is also the most fragile shape in nature: one point fails and the whole thing stops. Ireland's potato famine was a hub-and-spoke problem. The Irish had one variety. One pest, one famine, a million dead in three years. The Andean farmers who gave us the potato in the first place had four thousand varieties. Not because they planned for failure. Because they built a shape that could survive what they hadn't imagined yet.

The triskelion has no hub. Three centers. Each load-bearing. Each necessary. Each pouring toward the others. That is not a design flaw. That is the theology.

I see this shape everywhere I build.

In marriage: there is you, there is your spouse, and there is the relationship itself, which is a third living thing, distinct from both of you, requiring its own tending. You don't manage a marriage from the center. You tend three arms. The arms that don't match are not the problem. The motion between them is the material.

In business: there is the person you're serving, the problem they actually have (not the one they told you about), and the message that lives at the intersection. The Blueprint I run with clients has three lenses for exactly this reason. Most consultants sit at the center and dispense advice. I'm not trying to be the center. I'm trying to find the shape.

In the methodology itself: the thing I kept bumping into before I had words for it was that the companies and organizations I most wanted to build looked nothing like the guru model. One person at the center, everything flowing out from their authority. That model produces systems that are efficient and fragile. One scandal, one health crisis, one exit, and the whole thing collapses.

What I kept reaching for was something more like a network. Many centers. Each load-bearing. Each fully present. Each necessary. Each oriented toward the others. I didn't know the word for it. Then I read about perichoresis and Newgrange and Joel Salatin's stacked enterprises and Mike Breen's equilateral triangle and I realized I had been drawing the same shape in different contexts without knowing I was drawing anything at all.

The center of the triskelion is hollow. That is not an absence. It's what kenosis makes room for.

Kenosis is the theological word for self-emptying. Each arm pours itself toward the others. From the outside, the shape looks polycentric. Three load-bearing arms, no hub. From the inside, each arm is practicing a kind of ongoing release. Not giving up its distinctness. Pouring its distinctness toward the others. The hollow center is where the third thing forms. The thing that belongs to none of the arms alone. The creativity that requires the tension. The community that can't exist without the motion.

I've been building a lot of things. A market. A consultancy. A marriage. A methodology. A couple of children who will become whatever they become with or without my management.

Every one of them runs underneath the same shape. Three arms. None dominant. The hollow center that holds by motion, not control.

I didn't plan it that way. It keeps being true.

The people of Newgrange carved the spiral into stone before they had a word for Trinity, before they had a word for perichoresis, before they had a word for kenosis. They just carved what they saw. Three things turning together, none of them stopped, the center open.

That's the shape that holds.

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