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.
I met Ms. White, a garden designer, about a year ago in a master
gardening composting class, where she showed off her homemade
worm bin and gave me the recipe for a deer repellent that won’t
wash off with the rain. She was bright and inquisitive, drove
a little white pickup truck and appeared ready for anything in
her tidy jeans and sturdy shoes. So when she told me about her
labyrinth, I was intrigued.
Maybe I was looking for some connection to the ancients that could
help me deal with two deaths in my family in one year —
first my brother and then my mother. Or maybe I can’t stand
the darkness that descends at this time of year, as the earth
tilts away from the sun. I count the days until the winter solstice
— Dec. 22 this year — when the days start to grow
longer again.
The design of a labyrinth echos spirals in nature, from a snail’s
shell to the inner ear to the winding of a bean vine as it springs
from the earth. Evidence of labyrinths has been found in Minoan
Crete as well as Europe, India and the American Southwest, according
to Hermann Kern’s “Through the Labyrinth: Designs
and Meanings Over 5,000 Years” (Prestel, 2000), translated
by Abigail Clay and edited by Robert Ferré, a labyrinth
builder and teacher in St. Louis, and Jeff Saward, a British authority
on labyrinths. Mr. Kern, a German historian who died in 1985,
was probably the world’s foremost scholar on labyrinths.
Ms. White handed me this 260-page tome and a stack of other books
before I left that day, stoked on hot tea and homemade cookies.
This ancient form has long been used for walking meditations in
which those who enter shed the burdens of the world, or their
fears, or even evil spirits.
“There are labyrinths in the mosaics of Pompeii,”
said Ms. White, who has studied with Mr. Ferré in St. Louis,
and walked many labyrinths in this country as well as Europe.
“Fishermen had a great belief in labyrinths. They would
walk the labyrinth before going to sea, to shed the evil spirits
that sank their ships or made the weather bad.”
A labyrinth
differs from a maze, which can have more than one entrance and
many choices of paths that often dead-end if you take the wrong
turn.
“With a labyrinth, you know you’re going to the center,”
she said. “It’s unicursal: one path to the center
and one path out.”
The two most familiar labyrinth types are the classical, or Cretan,
form, which has 7 concentric paths around the center, and the
medieval form, which has 11 circuits around the center, like the
one at the Chartres cathedral in France.
The simpler Cretan form recalls the Greek legend of the Minotaur,
half- man, half-bull, hidden in the labyrinth that Daedalus built
for King Minos. When Theseus, the son of Aegeus, the king of Athens,
killed the Minotaur, he found his way out by following the ball
of thread that Ariadne, Minos’s daughter, gave him to unwind
along the twisting path.
That journey into the unknown — and the return — occurs
in many cultures.
“It is a very nice metaphor for life,” Ms. White said.
“Because we really are on the same path, just at different
times and different ways. But we’re really all there together.”
The spiraling path, wide enough for one, with room for another
to pass, was made of wood chips, and lined with rough-hewn Pennsylvania
bluestones. And it seemed at home there, among the fallen oak
leaves and the rotted stumps of trees, full of beetles and worms
that Ms. White leaves for the birds.
“I knew when I saw the property that there would be a labyrinth
down there,” Ms. White said. “It was a natural amphitheater.”
(Her first labyrinth was behind a town house — flat stones
set into the lawn, so it could be mowed. Some labyrinths are carved
in the sand on a beach, to be erased by the tide, while others,
made of turf, have lasted for centuries.)
In the spring of 2005, Ms. White worked with a labyrinth designer,
Michael Clarridge; her husband, John Lowery; and their son, Curtis
Lowery, to set the circular space into the forest, with as little
disturbance as possible. They cleared invasive species, like euonymus
and barberry, and moved saplings of native redbud and spicebush.
They replanted the natives in another part of the woods to honor
what grew here long before humans laid their paths. They left
a soaring tulip poplar where it was, to be encountered in the
middle of the path.
The whole labyrinth was no more than 30 feet in diameter. Walking
that spiraling path, which turned back on itself several times
— and turned me 180 degrees — before setting off in
another direction, seems to switch the tracks in the brain. It’s
like the shift when you swing into a waltz; you have to stop thinking
and give in to the music, or you will miss a step and falter.
This labyrinth in the woods released my mind in other ways too.
The sharp call of birds brought my head up to the sky, to watch
their dark shapes flying over the black treetops. There wasn’t
room in my head for anything else.
“When I’m worrying about something, this is the perfect
space for quieting my thoughts and just being in the moment,”
Ms. White said.
So now I followed behind her, in lovely silence. I had to put
my arm around that poplar to keep my balance as I edged around
it on the path. On the way back, I held it with my other arm,
a kind of do-si-do with a tree. I don’t know if I felt its
energy or not, but I certainly experienced how alive it was, and
its singular place in the forest.
Walking meditations are different from sitting ones, in which
you remain still, listening to your own breath. Here, the rhythm
is in the feet and the arms. Some people dance down the spiral;
children run it.
I can imagine what walking such a path could do for half an hour
a day, every day for a year. I can imagine the tiny changes in
lichen on a rock, droplets on a branch, buds on a twig.
Ms. White said she walked her first labyrinth, in Marblehead,
Mass., with her best friend, who had received a diagnosis of ovarian
cancer.
“It was in the snow, outside of a church, and the path was
surrounded by herbs, like thyme and rosemary,” Ms. White
said. “I had a long coat on, which kept brushing the herbs,
and I remember the scent.”
And so, as winter arrives — and the planet tilts back toward
the sun, bringing us closer to spring — I will be looking
around my own farm for a place to build a labyrinth. It might
just announce itself, on the brow of a hill, where you could gaze
in all directions.
Tracing a Path
Labyrinths are easy to draw, find and research, as shown on the
Labyrinth Society’s Web site (labyrinthsociety.org),
a good source of information, both historical and practical. There
are many labyrinths in New York City, including one in Battery
Park, designed by Ariane Burgess, to commemorate those who died
in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Other labyrinths may
be found by clicking on the link to the labyrinth locator at the
Web site.
