Labyrinth

Seven-circuit labyrinth

It’s a word I’ve known all my life: the mysterious labyrinth appears in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur from Greek mythology, and my childhood was steeped in those sort of stories – I loved them. I didn’t really think much about labyrinths as a physical entity until the late 1990s when Lynn Hartwood, a sacred circle dance leader living in the North East Kingdom of Vermont, introduced me to labyrinth dances.

He liked to make labyrinths in the snow – I’m talking about the classic seven-circuit labyrinth that he, and I, too, learned to walk from memory. Lynn developed a “labyrinth step” for flattening the snow: you lift your first foot quite high – depending on the depth of the now – turn it outward at a 45 degree angle like a duck, and place it carefully in front of you, then repeat with the other foot, taking short steps to tamp down a path. It’s a sort of a forward herringbone and is designed to create the clearest possible path with the least number of steps. It works beautifully and, if I remember rightly, Lynn incorporated the labyrinth step into a dance he choreographed to a Loreena McKennit track.

I became adept at making snow labyrinths. Winter of 2000, when I was living in Orchard House at Camphill Village USA in Copake, NY, I walked out after a four-inch snow fall and created a labyrinth behind the house. I must have done a pretty good job because my house mother, Anna Ree, leaned out of a second floor window and said “Julia, you have an amazing sense of spatial awareness.” I hadn’t been aware of that but by 2000 I’d been circle dancing for seven years, and must have developed that skill. It goes to show how important a chance remark can be because Anna’s words revealed to me that not everyone has that sense, or, if they have it, has developed it. That was a revelation to keep in mind when leading circle dance and it’s informed my facilitation ever since.  In the wider framework, it led me to appreciate that what comes easily to me: writing, public speaking, dancing, remembering plant names, may not be so easy for others, just as what comes easily to them: singing, skiing, childcare, bread-making, may lie outside my natural talents.
 

Lynn led us in a different kind of labyrinth dance one night in Windsong and Paul’s lovely straw-bale sanctuary in Monkton, Vermont. He sprinkled grain all over the floor, put on a 50-minute track of music recorded in the womb-like temple of the mother goddess on the island of Malta, and led perhaps 15 dancers in a long dance. As we danced, we created the path of the labyrinth in the grain. Me, I remember the beginning of the dance and I remember the end of the dance but during the intervening 45 minutes I was somewhere else entirely, probably in the temple of the Mother Goddess.

The Burlington labyrinth

Since those days I’ve explored and created labyrinths in many places and many ways and just today I encountered one in downtown Burlington Vermont. Now, I’m an Aquarian and I take that for an excuse for my love of the incongruous, so there, beside the Post Office, among the surround- sound of fire engines screaming by, I walked the sacred path.

Backdrop of federal building and firetruck

And the labyrinth, of course, is more than a physical pattern in snow, grain, grass, stone or sand. It is a symbol, almost a manifestation of the subconscious. I've carried many questions, dilemmas and challenges into labyrinths with me, because walking into a labyrinth with focus and intention, I experience a journey into my inner being.  In and in and in, the paths may veer outwards but they lead inexorably to the center. There lies the heart of the matter: maybe the fearsome Minotaur, but here in Burlington a surprise awaited me: the central point, the pivot of this labyrinth is an ash tree (Fraxinus americana to those of us who remember plant names!)



Ash bark is said to resemble cantaloupe skin

Levity aside, the ash is a significant tree, being Yggdrasil, the tree of life, in Norse mythology, connecting the depths of the underworld with the heights of the heavens and providing a perch for the ravens of Odin who carry news of earthly deed to the gods.  In our local Abenaki tradition it is from the heart of the ash tree that the Great Spirit called forth the first human beings, the people of the dawnland.

 



Carefully placed bricks define the labyrinth

The Burlington labyrinth is traced in the grass around the ash tree with a double row of bricks, planted narrow edge up.



Leading ever inward

We’re in late Fall and parts of the outline were obscured by the golden fallen leaves of neighboring maples.  I was able to walk the path because of my superior spatial awareness and because only parts were hidden, but the leaves led me to discover that the bricks provided a tactile method of following the path. A person with limited or no vision could walk this labyrinth, could experience this journey, by following the bricks. Was this intentional in the design? It’s a beautiful aspect of the construction which elevates the provision of a labyrinth in a busy downtown, a considerate gesture in itself, to a higher plane of recognition of human differences and human compassion.

This idea resonates with me because I created the snow labyrinth at the Camphill Village for my dancers there, many of whom live with physical and intellectual disabilities. I set out lumieres made of candles in brown paper bags and that evening we danced in the labyrinth among their magical glow.  It didn’t matter that it started to snow, it didn’t matter that dancers blundered into the ridges and defaced my careful creation. It mattered a bit that the wind whipped up and caused the candles to ignite the paper bags – that was pretty spectacular!

 What mattered most of all was that the stars came out and we held hands, exploring the inner sanctum of the labyrinth and having a darned good time!

The candle-lit labyrinth brought to mind a line from an old Welsh song:  

“Dyma fford i fro gogoniant”,  
which translates as: “Behold a path to the vale of glory”, 
 from the song “Ar Hyd y Nos” – “All Through the Night”, about the gift of a starlit sky.
 

 

 
The End!