The history of science remembers more than just formal facts about scientific discoveries. These side stories are often inspiring. One of them, the story of an unfulfilled death wish of Jacob Bernoulli regarding spirals, inspired us to look around ourselves. And we saw natural spirals around us, which led to the creation of a Hooke's pendulum, an artificial creator of Bernoulli's "spira mirabilis." Mathematics helped us to investigate that strange curve and to control this little sandy route to making our predecessor's wish come true.