I’ve been on a boat for the past week and I really wanted to write about that, or at least I thought I did. I wrote several different starts to posts yesterday after walking the labyrinth, felt like wave after wave of different things flowing through, but nothing felt right. Ordinarily I sit down and the words just flow through my fingers.
Today as I was walking I started thinking about tenses in languages. And how this blog wants to be written in the present tense. It feels awkward to write about anything other than what is happening for me now. When I write about my journeys in the labyrinth they become present tense almost immediately.
I’m walking the maiden circle, speeding up and slowing down, playing with my physical tempo because I’ve read a book called The Way of the Labyrinth by Helen Curry, which presents the labyrinth as Labyrinth, capital L. And I’m noticing that I like to play with the tempo. I’m not interested in what Should happen in a labyrinth, but rather what Is happening in a labyrinth, and I picked up some shoulds from that book. They may or may not have been there, but I read them into the book.
Ack!
In maiden, I’m speeding and slowing, as I round the curve to enter the mother spiral I notice all the fissures in the ground. There are cracks, mostly in the Mother spiral, that radiate out from the center of the spiral. Floods of metaphors pour into my head about fissures on the mother path, radiating out from the center, then I round the curve to head into crone. The fissures stop, the mind quiets, everything quiets. I’m in the center. The birds are still, the trees are still. I am still. Integrating the bits of thoughts from the previous two spirals. Integrating what has come before with what is happening now to the extent that I allow it to integrate.
I don’t have the words to describe my learnings. That’s happening more and more.
I simply know that some old story has dropped away and in its absence is peace.
