Labyrinth Walk by Lori Kershner
March 3rd, 2011My first instinct is to call it a maze, but it is not. A maze is designed to tease and trap the mind: one way in; a different way out. False passages. Dead ends. You can win or lose when you engage with a maze.
A labyrinth, however, begins and ends in the same space (although the beginning and the ending are differentiated by the experience in between). Alpha and Omega are one and the same. Is a labyrinth designed to tease? Perhaps– if you’ve moved within the sphere of a labyrinth, you’ll know that there’s an initial taunt (or taste) as you pass near the center, only to veer out and around, turning and twisting until you aren’t quite sure how far you’ve gone or how much longer it will take you to reach that central core. A labyrinth can be disorienting, but it always leads toward the center. As you meander, you can ponder that center, focus on breath, footsteps. Although you may meditate on Love or Pain or Life (or your thoughts might ping-pong around, as they often do), one foot still goes in front of the other.
I was thinking about the nature of the labyrinth the other day, while stomping through the feet of snow that had fallen before the rains. Lisa had stomped the way before me, and her snowshoe trail was still raw, in that wonky way in which we pass through new-fallen snow. The snow that day was crystalline, almost glowing within the cyan pools of shadow light.
It was a strange pause between snowfalls: blue sky overhead, fog rolling into the valley, gray snow-filled air in the near distance. And between the sound of my snowshoes crunching clumsily in the off-prints between Lisa’s tracks, I began to think about how I could meditate about the labyrinth during matins. (And like most self-referential meditators, I promptly caught my snowshoe under a crust of snow, almost righted myself,and fell backward, still on the path). I had a moment of small terror when I couldn’t get up right away, but with a little rocking back and forth on the snowshoe, jamming my left hand behind me on the metal frame and thrusting my other arm forward,I was able to wobble into an upright position. This too is part of a spiritual journey, I thought. Through the weight of snow, this journey through the labyrinth was long. And it was not quiet: we often think that meditation is quiet just like we often think of prayer as a nighttime activity with darkness and/or candles. But prayer can be noisy, and it definitely can be meandering and arduous, while still oriented around the center.
The center of our winter labyrinth, covered in crystalline white, is shaped kind of like a donut in reverse. In the summer, I remember being surprised by the stone and cross at the center, the offerings of dandelions and small pebbles– I had always associated the center of a labyrinth with emptiness (that space within us, where we have poured ourselves out and opened ourselves to the moment). A still center of the universe. But in the snow, I love knowing that the cross and the stone and all of the detritus of prayer and offering are buried and present. Powerfully quiet and resonant.
And as I turned to make the winding journey back, I thought about the resonance of the labyrinth: how we leave the space feeling a bit more open, following the echoes of other footsteps, other journeys along the same path; how the replication of the labyrinth over the world fuses our personal journeys over space and time; how the labyrinth could also be an etching within us, as we center ourselves within God’s love.