Today is the first day of Spring... I felt it was a good time to do a moving meditation. There is a Labyrinth at the Congregational Church down the road. The intricate passageways lead you both toward and away from the center. Walking it as a ritual, you are supposed to feel the symbolic relationship of the pathways of the labyrinth to the pathways of your life. I felt as though I was peeling back years like an onion...sometimes I had a clear vision of the goal and at other times I was way out on the edges facing the opposite direction. I could see my ages from the childhood years of self absorption and glee in details of nature, living in the wide arc of unending summers, through the knotted teenage years of reversals and more reversals, to the wisdom of motherhood, a time erect and purposeful. To the present where I tread carefully wondering at the age of my limbs and the invisibility of grey haired women. In America we no longer even pretended to prioritize any care of the elderly or the infirm. They are being rapidly cut from social services. Better for business to put them out of sight.
If the history of other man-made cultures repeats itself, the artists and writers are next. I shudder.
The name Labyrinth has ties to the Greek Minoan royalty. There is a story that the king of Crete had a large labyrinth built to hold in the dangerous Minotaur. (We have been studying Picasso's art all week in class and I can see the half beast, half man in his etchings.)All I know is that when I got to the center of the Labyrinth I felt a swelling glee. I spun with arms outstretched embracing the planets above and dancing across the earth at my feet. I was half woman and half beast, for just a moment of spring.
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