Turns come at irregular intervals—some seemingly right after the last turn, others just as I’m getting into a walking rhythm. My legs falter. Knees can’t get the hang of these tight turns. Still, the path beckons me forward, cradles me.
This labyrinth follows the medieval, or Chartres design. In contrast to mazes, labyrinths—whether designed along medieval, classical/Cretan, Roman, Hopi, or other patterns—have a single path in and out. There are no intersections. There is no getting lost. The walker may meditate, gaze upon the surroundings, or simply keep watch for the next turn.
The medieval labyrinth takes you to the center through a tantalizing sequence of approach and diversion. Almost there! Whoops, nope. When you finally do reach the center—which feels like an achievement—you then return via the same path, feet pointing in the opposite direction. If other walkers are present, you must pass each other. Share the path.
My first labyrinth walk taught me how hard it is to walk slowly. Deliberately placing one foot, then the other, within the designated pathway keeps the walker’s mind located in the body, the way focusing on breath facilitates mindfulness. Also, it takes core muscles to walk a labyrinth slowly. How fitting that this spiritual practice is a core workout.
Poplar, oaks, a few maples take turns throwing their shade over the path as the sun climbs the sky. I’m thinking about how the eye-level view through the varied trees keeps changing—even on a path just a few feet to the side of one I just walked.
About halfway through, looking at trees I’ve seen and seen and seen again, sunlight winks at me! Past some trunks and through some sapling branches, other leaves on other plants parted as one and the light—the Light!—it winked at me with the joy of Granddad’s sparkling blue-eyed wink, which always had a grin below it. This wink smiles with lips of birdsong, teeth of trunks, breath of breeze, skin of soil.
This is my voice, I saw, as clearly as if pasted on a billboard. This is how I speak.
Awe! Excitement! Warmth, and a sense of having arrived somewhere at last. I listen in as many ways as I can for what will follow. I hear this: three robins on repeat, and a squalling child in a nearby cabin.
Hang on. Can it really be that I was just spoken to by the Divine? Because now: nothing. Nothing but questions: What is it to be in the presence of a voice that is silent? How to distinguish silence from not hearing? How awful would it feel to be in the Presence but miss the song, the story? To know that Voice dwells hereabouts but not to hear it?
I wonder whether I should wait for more. Somehow, this feels larger than simply a private moment. Am I listener only, or also translator?
Child, no sooner do I give you what you seek then you get all verklempt about it.
On the Stage of Sky
After the great Wink (which stopped me in my tracks for a good while), after arriving in the middle and stepping into each of the six petal-like lobes in turn, I stand in the center. Stretch upward, then lie on my back and soak in the sky, its canvas a lopsided X shaped by the tops of the encircling trees.
A small wisp of cloud—water vapor keeping company with itself—inches onto the stage of that sky, to stretch and re-form as it rides the breeze. A sliver of morning moon holds still on the blue backdrop. Soundtrack of leaf murmur and robin song. I watch with the kind of focused abstraction a lava lamp may induce.
Dragon. Candlestick. Map. Turtle. Deerstalker cap. Map. Skull. Pterodactyl. Map. Perhaps the recurrence of maps reflects the theme of wayfinding I’ve been preoccupied with? Rorschach could have used clouds.
Beauty drifts by in a multitude of forms, never holding still. I watch the whole show outside of time. When its leading lady exits downwind, I rise and follow the path out, reversing the steps that brought me in.
Different turns with different levels of difficulty. Left. Right. Sharp. Oblique. Too quickly, I’m exiting. Sky now empty of performing clouds
I sit among a nearby cluster of flat-topped sitting stones. Looking up, I gaze through a leaf webbed by leaf miners. It frames the blue sky in odd-shaped frames: negative space become positive.
Monumentitis
Christian and Jewish scriptures (the limit of my knowledge of sacred texts) are full of prophets and holy men going up to the mountaintop or into the wilderness to be alone with the rest of creation and hear their God’s voice unmuted.
In the case of the Voice in the Wink, the little woods were the voice. A moment in which it all came together as one Being, lit and warmed by sun: saplings reaching, leaves wiggling, invisibilities busy in soil, on bark and leaf.
I am awestruck. Have an overwhelming urge to make some kind of monument or sacred marker. I almost understand why hikers and picnickers build rock cairns everywhere. (Please resist that impulse. “A lot of invertebrates, lizards, fish, fungi, and more thrive in the cool, sheltered conditions underneath stones; peeling them up puts those denizens at a disadvantage, even if you disassemble your stack later,” wrote Adam Roy in Backpacker magazine. This has been a public service announcement.)
A phrase comes to mind: “We Must Make a Kingdom of It.” It’s the title of a Gregory Orr book and poem—a love poem that foreshadows his later book, Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved, which I’ve written about before. In the last stanza of the Kingdom poem, he writes:
It was green, I saw it—tendril flickering from dry soil like a grass snake’s tongue; call it “flame”—light become life, what the word wants, what the earth in its turning yearns for… —Gregory Orr, from "We Must Make a Kingdom of It"
How striking to come upon these lines when casting about for an image that captures the urge to memorialize a “thin place.” (Read that Guardian article and you will come full circle to my essay on the ineffable, the numinous.) And yet marking it as a holy moment or place might set me up to search endlessly for, if not invent, another such encounter. This is my fear.
Conveniently, on the day following the Wink in the Woods, I hear Hilary Raining say, “Let fear be a marker on the journey.” As in, not the driver of the bus. Our brains want to keep us safe, but some kinds of safety can mean ceasing to grow. She cautions us not to chase the mystical moment. Rather than seek replication, see it as a stage—a beautiful stage—along the journey. The stage of that blue sky springs to mind and I smile.
Epilogue
Shortly after that day, I came across two especially relevant passages:
Words by
, which appeared on my phone via Substack: “The gift of creativity is starting anew trying to say things which are both true and necessary, in the way that only you can say them.” Her statement gave me the kick I needed to try and put this experience into words. (That, despite wisdom Westina Matthews spoke to me: The holy awe of the presence cannot be described; it can only be experienced. Still, I try.)“But ask the animals, and they will teach you, the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you, and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? (Job 12:7–9, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition). What an inspiration to care for this beautiful Earth.
Finally, I’m grateful for the Kanuga Conference, Retreat and Camp Center, which held the space for this story to happen.
My heart resonates with your tuning-fork words. Thank you, Kelly.
What an uplifting piece. Thank you