Reprinted 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.