The large outdoor grass Labyrinth at the Foundation of Light, adjacent to the circle of standing stones at the southeast corner of Ellis Hollow and Turkey Hill Roads, was constructed on May 16, 1998. Based on the 11-circuit medieval model originally laid in the floor of the nave in the cathedral at Chartres, France, the FOL labyrinth has a diameter of 54’ and paths 18” wide to accommodate passage of those walking in alongside those on the passage out. This labyrinth is open to the public 24 hours a day. It has been the locus for many ceremonies and cultural events, and a source of joy, curiosity, and contemplation for thousands of visitors.
Many are familiar with the turf labyrinths and hedge mazes scattered throughout the British Isles. The first historical mention of a labyrinth, by Herodotus, recounts a structure in Africa; the earliest form of certain date is believed to be a clay tablet from Europe: Pylos, 1250 B.C. The symbol is found in Hopi baskets of the Southwest woven with the motif of the man in the maze. The recent usage of labyrinth, however, means a single-path maze. You can’t get lost. The only danger, if such it be, is that you get found.
Art is psychosomatic and it knows when to make its demands. When poets speak of a single work’s gestation, we refer to the sometimes hourlong, sometimes yearslong, search for a match between language, our daily currency, and the priceless source of the realized poem: an intuitive flash, instantaneous; auditory but often nonverbal. Touched, the heart challenges us to unify the twists and turns of a multisensory hunch; our language seeks to align words in such a way that, however complex the material, readers will follow a unicursal path toward a perceived center.
I had been following my particular hunch a long time: a many-sectioned disrupted narrative of domesticity. Incrementally, in the interests of simplicity, I’d cut sections referring to public events and political violence. What do the swimming on a Sunday or ridding the garden of woodchucks have in common with the fall of the iron curtain or the bombing of Iraq back into the stone age? Everything, said the poem whose umpteenth draft wasn’t working. Our individual households are dots of dust on a larger household, the globe.
Stone labyrinths were built on the coasts of ancient Sweden and Finland; in medieval Europe the symbol appears in illuminated manuscripts. Poets such as Ovid, Petrarch, and Lady Mary Wroth have drawn the motif of the labyrinth as salvation, entrapment, or development of the soul.
When my internal editor began to speak about all the times the poem had not come right, I told her to hold it. For a few days I reviewed the notes and drafts, the rearrangements, the priorities; both poem and I were ready for the final transcription. Sensing this kind of hunch is as important as sensing the poem in the first place. I promised myself to get started if I woke early enough, by 7:00 a.m., to get a good chunk done before I had to leave for campus.
The pattern has been decoratively used on a wide variety of human artifacts, from coins to rhytons to printers’ dingbats. The form has even appeared as graffiti carved in a miner’s shaft in Britain. Labyrinths come in different shapes, some circular, some square, and the complexity of the path design can also vary.
The poem had its own plans. I was awake at five, dream in cone hand, coffee in the other. I stood at the drafting table, parallel with my favorite tall locust outside the second story window. Locusts keep their leaves into the autumn. This time the poem knew its own mind; it flowed, no question about it. I’d promised my husband I’d be ready to leave the house by 9 or 9:15 and at 8:45 the last dot hit the page. I got out of the car by the gym and kissed him goodby, my reward not just a long workout but also the half-hour guided relaxation that for weeks I’d been vowing to attend. I need a certain tension to compose, but now…hey!
The instructor puzzled over the whereabouts of all the participants from the previous weeks; we hardly minded—lucky us, only two. Following his voice we became so still that the world slipped away, as we lay on our backs, knees bent over bolsters, feet solid on the carpeted floor. Instrumental music played softly. From time to time, the building’s cavernous ventilation system groaned.
A birthing place for creativity, a map of the imaginal world, the labyrinth is a universal symbol of wholeness found in man of the world’s cultures, from Egypt to China. K MT 9, 1 (1998), a magazine of Egyptology, notes of Sobekneferu (1789-85 BC, last ruler of the 12th dynasty): “She completed the Hawara mortuary temple of the third Amenemhat (known to readers of Herodotus as the ‘Labyrinth’)…. Today, unfortunately, that vast structure has been reduced to odd damaged blocks and a waste of sand.” Throughout the centuries and the globe, in turf and in stone, in the visual arts and in literature, walking a labyrinth has functioned as a symbolic representation of life’s quest. To walk the labyrinth is to wind along a clear unicursal path to the center area, then to retrace the same steps outward, guided by the circuit path.
The session seemed as timeless as poetry; at the end, there was some apology of running over, but I didn’t mind, as there was no pressing business at the office. What presses when you’re truly relaxed? I dressed and then walked across Triphammer Bridge, nearly noon, the sun brilliant, the year’s chlorophyll cycle collapsing, the leaves gaining color.
The labyrinth is an archetypal tool for harmonizing movements of the body, turns of the mind, and self-discovery of the human spirit. It is profoundly humane in terms of the mathematics necessary in its design and the aesthetics of its completed form, and like any true cultural artifact its function is to move the heart, kindle the imagination, and inform our earthly journey.
Inside Rockefeller Hall a broadcast was blaring from a professor’s office. Two students sat on the corridor, their backs against the tiles, staring at nothing below a bulletin board on the opposite wall. I sensed an odd energy. Oh. Beyond the perceptions I’d been privately enjoying was the rest of the world. But what a day I’d had already, full and centering. I unlocked my office, sorted some papers, turned on the computer.
The phone rang. “How are you?” said my husband’s voice.
“Oh fine. How are you?”
“Oh,” he said. “You don’t know.”
It was September 11. We never do know what the next turn on the path will show us. My solitary poetic feat, completing the disruptive narrative, had synchronized itself with a moment of national vulnerability and grief.
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As a war was declared in the aftermath of the WTC collapse, my friends at the Light on the Hill Retreat Center in Van Etten telephoned. Would I give a workshop on labyrinths on October 6, prior to installing one outdoors there, open to the public, for world peace. Using sound and language, we gathered to give simultaneous voice to each part of the pairs spirit and body, terror and peace, divine and daemonic, seeking transformation for ourselves and for our world. After lunch we set thousands of white stones, a gleaming outline, on a high plateau that looks down the Susquehanna valley into Pennsylvania. Walking the circuits, we had the opportunity to see lives pass before our eyes—both our own and those of others.
The pattern of the labyrinth and its symbolic associations works well with writing, an activity that for many people can become a psychological or emotional maze. The labyrinth replaces the dimension we’re most driven by, time (the minotaur said to be responsible for many of us not writing, or not writing well) with space. When I asked college students in ‘Mind and Memory: An Exploration of Creativity in the Arts and Sciences’ to share with me their thoughts about their writing, some e-mail was nearly as long as the paper it described. I made a composite of the students’ reflections, a legend for an essay. The cuts and pastes rendered individuals anonymous, venerable as a medieval guild, as the legend described the floods and droughts of the writing process, the best thought and the second-thoughts. Each section of the text of their composite reflections about writing matches one of the turns of the classical 7-circuit labyrinth, a place where the walker is shifted by the path to look in a new direction.
Among the series of cultural events funded by the Community Arts Partnership that accompanied the creation of the Foundation of Light labyrinth was a writing workshop at the Moosewood Café. Art creates a sanctuary within the everyday: in ‘Litanies and Labyrinths’ I use the most mundane writing we are capable of—a quick list—as foundation for the kind of list that people remember, recite, and pass along to others—a litany. Most moving for me, however, is a return to the oral tradition. At Light on the Hill Retreat Center, after individuals composed two brief texts, each had a partner recite one text while the writer recited the other—simultaneously, and slowly. The rest of us listened to the paired voices. I call this format overtones or voiceovers when I use it for a poem. Many pairs had a paradoxical or even conflictual relationship with each other, which seems to me an accurate representation of the multiple thoughts, wishes, identities that each of us contains.
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In an eleven-circuit labyrinth such as the one at the Foundation of Light, the path meanders throughout the whole circuit. There are 34 turns on the path going in to the center. Depending on the pace, the walk to the center can take 45 minutes or 5; the spirit of the walk can be serious or playful. People often walk in groups, following the same path but in different locations on the circuits, developing both individual awareness and a sense of community.
As labyrinths spring up across the United States in hospitals, churches, community centers, private lawns, fields, I have pondered the revived tradition of seeking, walking and building them. They seem a contemplative and collective antidote to an increasingly tense, fast and overly individualistic way of life. People use them at times of uncertainty, when facing an important decision, for healing emotional wounds, during illness and bereavement, when awestruck by joy. To walk a labyrinth can be an act of praise, thanksgiving, mourning, festivity, prayer, rejoicing, inspiration, hope. One of the best teachers of labyrinth use is a three year old, for in addition to walking, one can also skip, run or dance. A labyrinth can facilitate a state of calming, energizing, finding what you’ve always looked for, facing the unexpected, allowing the path ahead to become clear.
I’ve been privileged to participate in making three of the many labyrinths in our area, including the one that our geometric genius loci, David Gallagher, installed as Wisdom’s Goldenrod Center for Philosophic Studies. My file holds correspondence and calls with arts councils, churches, colleges, healing and recovery centers, and private individuals from various parts of the country, many of whom took a guided walk or visited the Foundation of Light Labyrinth in order to create their own elsewhere. Late October brought an e-mail: “Hi, I wrote about your Labyrinth on pages 89-90 of the just-released guidebook Eccentric America. Thought you might want to know.—Jan Friedman. The book is subtitled ‘the Bradt guide to all that’s Weird and Wacky in the USA.’ Now I know. I wish our many other labyrinths made the list, for at the rate they’re proliferating, it will soon be time for a Finger Lakes Labyrinth Trail.
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I was teaching during the Columbine high school massacre. Al-Qaeda has more resources and a bigger network but the mind to me seems similar to that of those sorry teenagers, in its aim to destroy the existing world and create another. We all go about creating another world to live in; that—individually and collectively—is our fundamental problem as human beings. Thin of creation myths that chart the fall, the memory of the ideal life. Think of a few hours or a few days from now, your plans for…. But imagination is also our joy. We long for pattern, for a form to hold our slurry. So, if our consciousness has not evolved past generating mental constructs that separate us from the world we live in, we can literalize the separation. Measure it, mark it. See it. And walk it.
And love it. It is so becoming, our path. Let us become one with it. We do not know what tomorrow will bring. Or today. The shape of the labyrinth creates a symbolic, resonant space to use in daily life. Like a work of art, its function is to go beyond what you expect. And in doing so, to bring you to what you truly know.
—originally published as ‘Passages’ in The Bookpress, December 2001—