Remembrance of labyrinths past — and yet to come

By John Darling

We take the kids to the labyrinth at Unitarian — been doing it for years. They have, I’m sure, many mysterious memories of people walking the winding path in the shadowed, candle-lit darkness, while someone plays the drum, rattles, piano or some strange, stringed instrument, as it moves them.

People are hushed, walking and sitting on the side of the room, thinking, pondering, contemplating. It’s this one good time of the year to do that, although the new solar year is already started. They do it here in the final four days of the calendar year and the first day of the new year.

What’s amazing is that people know what to do. There is no instruction, just an invitation from the ancient labyrinth, to walk to the center. It’s absolutely fascinating, seeing what people do with this, a sacred space, just handed to them, free, open for many hours each night to make as sacred as they want to make it.

When I enter the room, I always feel such an immense sense of relief. Here, at last is a quiet and unmistakably sacred space, a chamber where no one can reach you on the phone, where no one can even strike up a conversation with you, not a long one anyway. They do look at you, though. Right in the eyes. And they smile. Not a big smile. More like a knowing smile, as if to say, can you believe the beauty of this place — not that any “thing” about it is beautiful. It’s not. It’s just a room, with a cloth labyrinth on the floor.

I always marvel at the how of things like this. People write long books and develop arduous seminars all hoping to get you to this place. They usually succeed, but it seems like a big investment in our Protestant-Victorian-Western belief that nothing is gained without much suffering and labor. So, how does this labyrinth do it?

It’s not the building. It’s not the religion normally practiced there. It’s no wise scripture therein. It seems a combination — the time of year (darkest hours, longest nights), the arduousness, mostly unconscious, of treading through these long days of dampness and little light and then the labyrinth itself: a mystery, a puzzle, a quandary, an unanswered question, a center to hold the answer to that question, if…if…if.

If it’s time for you to open your eyes to the answer to that question. If your heart has been hurt enough that it finally can let go, give up, surrender, not care if it’s losing the game, failing the quest — and you just open soul to universe and let them breathe on each other and finally kiss. And then wisdom, that understanding you’ve needed for so long, just passes between them and you mark off your steps out of the labyrinth.

That’s what it’s for. It the goalless goal, the questionless answer, the meaningless meaning, the journey without destination, the act of being present without understanding.

The labyrinth affirms this right off by taking you straightaway nearly to the center, the goal, then diverts you away to these winding, Byzantine switchbacks to nowhere, which serve the purpose of frustrating the mind and ego and all its sense of right-wrong, good-bad, success-failure — and it’s oh-so-dear need for control.

The mind is often petulant, wanting answers, thinking it has posed a good, wise question, which it will get answered and soon. But the more it clings to that, the more it comes up empty-handed — and tries to pronounce the labyrinth a childish waste of time.

But like all riddles, mazes, myths, koans, it’s meant to be a model of the mystery of life and death itself. Why are we born these delightful, enlightened joyous beings, only destined to many heartbreaks and frustrations (along with the other), then decline into the death of everything we’ve ever thought, done or been?

We don’t know, can’t know, though the religions salve us with promises of better places, provided we find the answer they’ve found. What the labyrinth salves us with is the beauty of living in the mystery, but not knowing the answers.

We used to be happy with that, back before civilization, you can feel it. We know how to walk this labyrinth. We know how to “drop down” into it and let it happen to us. We used to walk the earth this way. Once we were content in its mystery, which we could only witness, deeply feel, occasionally celebrate and know we were so much a part of it that it simply could not be spoken without separating us from it.

Which is where literacy, religion, beliefs and urban life have taken us. Ah, but the labyrinth, just in the past decade, has come back into our lives, a representation of “other,” which reminds us that the other still lives in us, in our cells and in the strange familiarity of the unfamiliar. Indeed, finally, what it teaches us is that it’s all familiar to us and there is no “other.”

Related story: Winding down: Labyrinth walk founder announces this year’s 25th annual New Year’s will be her last leading the walk

John Darling lived in Ashland from 1971 until he died at age 77 in January 2021. A US Marine Corps journalist, he went on to write for the Oregonian, Mail Tribune, Daily Tidings, and United Press International, among others, along with stints as a news anchor at KOBI, executive assistant to the Oregon Senate President and press secretary of campaigns for Oregon governor and U.S. Senate. Ashland.news is, with permission, publishing excerpts from his collection “The Divine Addiction: Essays Out of Oregon.”