Recently, I met up with three friends to walk the Tree of Life labyrinth that artist Dennis Bolohan was commissioned to design and install beside the library in Cookstown for Innisfil’s bicentennial celebrations which had been delayed due to COVID restrictions.
As a committed labyrinth walker and certified Labyrinth Facilitator I was curious to experience walking the Tree of Life design. The Chartres 11-circuit design is my chosen favourite, but I managed to keep an open mind as we made our way to the entrance where a sign gave us a brief overview of the labyrinth’s background and purpose.
Read moreAn historic glimpse of Trinity Square Park begins with a distant view to the time when the Taddle Creek meandered through what is now, a densely urban community. The park is on the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples.
Trinity Square Park today holds the footprint of its history in Toronto’s downtown.
Read moreReprinted from alive.com (April 2011) by Josie Padro
When a friend invited Jo Ann Stevenson to walk a labyrinth, she had no idea it would have such an impact on her life. As she followed the circular path, her thoughts turned to her recent cancer diagnosis.
“I was aware of the curves and that breast cancer seemed to me a curve that had been thrown into my life, so I had the feeling that I was walking on my life path,” says Stevenson.
Read moreReprinted from New York Times (December 20, 2007) by Anne Raver
Reisterstown, Md.
It was a gray, blustery December day when I walked the labyrinth in the woods behind Pamela White’s ranch-style house in Glyndon, an old community a few miles from my place. The town started out as a Methodist revival camp and a summer place, 10 degrees cooler than the city, for wealthy Baltimoreans. My grandmother used to go every summer and get closer to God under a big tent. The camp is long gone, and now the streets are lined with Victorian houses with wide porches, mixed in with 1950s ranch houses.
Ms. White has a two-acre stand of woods out back, with a low, curving stone wall at the edge of the forest, which slopes down to a natural bowl in the land where stones mark a spiraling path laid beneath tall oaks and poplars.
Read moreReprinted from Toronto Globe and Mail (June 16, 2007) by Melissa Whetsone
Every month, Leslie Bolt puts on her walking shoes, pulls the laces tight and heads from her home in Unionville to the Eaton Centre. But it's not visions of iPods or a new summer dress that fill her head. Instead, she pictures herself rising from her wheelchair and walking a labyrinth.
Just beyond the doors of the shopping mecca sits the Toronto Public Labyrinth. Within its circular shape, which measures about 22 metres in diameter, is a path marked by two-toned interlocking bricks. The path weaves walkers left and right before leading to the labyrinth's centre and back out.
Read moreFor centuries, labyrinths have been used to promote physical and spiritual health
Reprinted from Toronto Star (January 05, 2007) by Janice Mawhinney, Life Writer
Physiotherapist Angie Andreoli says it's an uplifting experience to watch patients from the Toronto Rehab foundation walk or wheel through the Toronto Public Labyrinth in Trinity Square Park.
"I have seen people with poor energy, who are unable to walk longer than the hallway, walk the labyrinth with purposefulness and a sense of joy. That is very special," she says.
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