I’ve been on a cruise for a week. It took a while to get used to the motion of the boat, and now that I’m off the boat it seems to be taking awhile to get used to the motion of the earth.

Walking the labyrinth this morning felt so familiar and unfamiliar. There are cracks and fissures running through the whole thing, though mostly in the mother spiral, which, not surprisingly, completely matches what’s happening for me. My definitions of me as mother are shifting and changing as my children grow up. The fissures made me smile. I noticed I was making up stories about how the weather must have been while I was gone to have the land dry out like that.

This morning the air is crisp and still, though the leaves on the trees are moving ever so slightly.

I head right into the labyrinth, eager to start, notice about three steps in that I haven’t paused at the beginning to signal to my brain that I am starting. I pause in that step, decide I don’t want to start again, chuckle a little at my impatience and head on in.

Laughing at myself now as I hop back and forth from subject to subject. Writing, deleting, writing more, different directions, pulled by one thought after another. So many changes, no changes at all.

There are rituals I want to create for the labyrinth. I read about weddings taking place in labyrinth. This sounded so profound I found myself weeping with joy as I read it.

While on the boat, I was reading The Way of the Labyrinth by Helen Curry. That book also felt familiar and not familiar at the same time.