The Labyrinth: My Artist’s Date

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CAM00580Almost a year ago I went out in the rain and wind to find a labyrinth near the retreat center where I was staying. I didn’t find it, but I hiked up the hill into old-growth timber, dipped my hands into a stream, and, generally, communed with nature. Nice. Then, on the way back to the retreat center, I slipped on the lawn, fell down, and broke my ankle in two places. Stumbling up, to my feet again (ouch!), I saw the labyrinth marked out with stones, just a stone’s throw behind the buildings. Needless to say, I limped back inside. No labyrinth that day.

Earlier this week, my friend Carla told me about her Artist-Date visit to a labyrinth. I remembered that, near my mom’s home in Allyn, there is a little sign that says, “Labyrinth Open.” Yesterday, inspired by Carla, and disheartened by a not very positive visit with Mom, I decided to investigate. Interesting how I have seen this sign every time I’ve visited Mom in the last four months, but it took a little prompting before it occurred to me that I might walk it.

The parking lot at St. Hugh’s Episcopal Church was empty, and a sign on the office door to the side said “Closed.” I felt like I was trespassing, but there was that “Labyrinth Open” sign. And my Artist’s Date is supposed to get me out of my comfort zone–which made feeling uncomfortable a good thing, right? (And then the whole not irrelevant history with the broken ankle.) So I got out of my car and started walking around the church. I found the memorial garden and a memorial bench. I didn’t see a labyrinth. I found an information board and a brochure that told about the labyrinth and the St. Hugh’s congregation’s tradition of a “blessing bowl” full of stones, and an invitation to take away a stone. Still, no labyrinth.

I expected something obvious, lavender hedges maybe or raised stones. Maybe I expected something like a hero’s journey with obstacles, maybe stations of the cross. Instead I found only this flat patio with a creche at the center. As I hiked around the perimeter, investigating, however, I began to see that the colors of the patio stones formed a spiral pattern. I stepped onto the outer path and I began to walk. labyrinth2

I thought about Mom as I walked, my mother who no longer walks. I gave thanks for Mom’s long life and many blessings, and I gave thanks for my healed ankle. The blessing bowl full of stones sat beside the path and I picked out a white stone and put it in my pocket. When I had walked all the way to the center of the labyrinth, I spent a moment looking up, at the view of Hood Canal, and then I walked back through the spiral and out of the labyrinth. And that was that. My Artist’s Date.

Certain novels are like this, quiet, unobtrusive, little journeys that can seem almost pointless, except to the discerning reader, that perfect reader (as Hawthorne defined him or her in one of his prefaces).

We are, all of us (writing, or not writing) on a path. Once in a while we open our eyes and see the path.

Don’t Chicken Out

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“I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back I can see that I used my family and my jobs and everything else I could come up with as excuses. I kept myself ridiculously busy because I was afraid if I had any extra time, I might have to look at the fact that I’d chickened out on living the life I was born to live.” -Claire Cook

Pearls of Wisdom

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from http://www.sunsetshoesonline.net/index.php/catalogsearch/result/?q=pearl+bracelet

A friend read this aloud to me recently. When she sent me the link to where she had found it, I was delighted to see that its author is Rachel Naomi Remen, author of Kitchen Table Wisdom. 

It appears on the website, Living Life Fully.

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Some of the oldest and most delightful written words in the English language are the collective nouns dating from medieval times used to describe groups of birds and beasts.  Many of these go back five hundred years or more, and lists of them appeared as early as 1440 in some of the first books printed in English.  These words frequently offer an insight into the nature of the animals or birds they describe.  Sometimes this is factual and sometimes poetic.  Occasionally it is profound:  a pride of lions, a party of jays, an ostentation of peacocks, an exaltation of larks, a gaggle of geese, a charm of finches, a bed of clams, a school of fish, a cloud of gnats, and a parliament of owls are some examples.  Over time, these sorts of words have been extended to other things as well.  One of my favorites is pearls of wisdom.

An oyster is soft, tender, and vulnerable.  Without the sanctuary of its shell it could not survive.  But oysters must open their shells in order to “breathe” water.  Sometimes while an oyster is breathing, a grain of sand will enter its shell and become a part of its life from then on.

Such grains of sand cause pain, but an oyster does not alter its soft nature because of this.  It does not become hard and leathery in order not to feel.  It continues to entrust itself to the ocean, to open and breathe in order to live.  But it does respond.

Slowly and patiently, the oyster wraps the grain of sand in thin translucent layers until, over time, it has created something of great value in the place where it was most vulnerable to its pain.  A pearl might be thought of as an oyster’s response to its suffering.  Not every oyster can do this.  Oysters that do are far more valuable to people than oysters that do not.

Sand is a way of life for an oyster.  If you are soft and tender and must live on the sandy floor of the ocean, making pearls becomes a necessity if you are to live well.

Disappointment and loss are a part of every life.  Many times we can put such things behind us and get on with the rest of our lives.  But not everything is amenable to this approach.  Some things are too big or too deep to do this, and we will have to leave important parts of ourselves behind if we treat them in this way.  These are the places where wisdom begins to grow in us.  It begins with suffering that we do not avoid or rationalize or put behind us.  It starts with the realization that our loss, whatever it is, has become a part of us and has altered our lives so profoundly that we cannot go back to the way it was before.

Something in us can transform such suffering into wisdom.  The process of turning pain into wisdom often looks like a sorting process.  First we experience everything.  Then one by one we let things go, the anger, the blame, the sense of injustice, and finally even the pain itself, until all we have left is a deeper sense of the value of life and a greater capacity to live it.

-o-

May 2015 be your best year yet!CAM00323

Readers’ Anonymous

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My name is Bethany and I am a read-aholic.

As addictions go, not a bad one, I know. Even if you buy all of your books, reading costs way less than heroin or even marijuana (well, I think it costs less, and you definitely can’t borrow drugs from a library and then return them!).

And, after all, books teach us about the world and about ourselves, if we’re lucky (if we’re conscious!). If you don’t believe me, check out Nina Sankovitch’s TOLSTOY AND THE PURPLE CHAIR, which is sort of about a woman reading a book a day for a year; or try Will Schwalbe’s THE END OF YOUR LIFE BOOK CLUB, about the author and his dying mother and the books they read in her last year or so of life.)

Being a reader, most of the time, feels extraordinarily lucky to me. I can’t imagine not reading. Even so, being asked to not read for a week, and — more or less — complying, forced me to be more aware of the extent to which I use reading as an escape from my family, from stress, not to mention from almost every other other possibly interesting activity. The museum? A movie? The zoo? Couldn’t I just drink a latte and read for a couple of hours?

And it’s not just one book — I am one of those readers who keeps several books going at once. (A week ago, when I finally plunged into Week Four of THE ARTIST’S WAY, I was somewhere in the middle of a Maisie Dobbs mystery; Rebecca Solnit’s new paperback of essays, THE FARAWAY NEARBY; a book about Alzheimers, which I seem to have now misplaced; a very short novel by Japanese poet Tikashi Haraide called THE GUEST CAT [it was supposed to be passed on as a Christmas gift, but its true owner won’t mind waiting a week]; Louise Desalvo’s THE ART OF SLOW WRITING; and, oh yeah, THE ARTIST’S WAY.)

I was not entirely faithful. I picked up the newspaper as I ate breakfast almost every morning. For the first few days I kept checking my email and text messages obsessively for something I just had to read. For the first day and a half I continued listening to a book on CD (another one: THE SCARLET LETTER). When the new issue of THE SUN arrived in the mail, I read one article — very very quickly, like an alcoholic gulping down a glass of scotch before anyone could catch me at it. I read my own pages on the days that I worked (which was less than usual as it was Christmas week, but still).

No matter, even with these lapses and negotiations with Julia Cameron’s goal of not-reading-pretty-much-at-all, the week of reading deprivation made a difference. I took my dog and my daughters for a walk on a nearby beach on Christmas day. I listened to Bon Jovi and Joan Baez while I drove. I people-watched. I did a very little bit of decluttering. I watched several movies I had been wanting to watch but not getting around to (including Violette  and World War Z — eclectic tastes). I called a couple of friends who had called me recently and left messages. On Sunday, determined to take a book-less nap with the dog, I instead decided to go back to the beach with him for a walk (a really wonderful walk) and when I came home I gave him a bath.This morning, when my reading fast was up, I was, weirdly, a little disappointed. And then I read.