Just for a little Facebook creativity project this month, I chose to take my camera with me on a daily walk and post a daily photo of my mini-journeys and get a little exercise as well. Today’s walk was on my backyard labyrinth. A pretty simple walk and not a great distance. This was perfect as I am recovering from a cold and I don’t feel all that peppy.
I paused as I entered the quiet walking path. I always enjoy the circular rungs formed by the bricks that Tom so carefully designed this summer. As I began to walk the path in toward the center, a song started playing on my Itunes station (inner playing system, not the electronic version). “I Love to Tell the Story” a sacred hymn we sang a lot back in the year 2000 – the Catholic Church Jubilee celebration. I went on pilgrimages that year to Rome, Chartres France and to the Encuentro Multi-Culture Celebration in Los Angeles and it seems that is when we sang it a lot.
Actually, I don’t really remember if it was “tell” the story or “hear” the story, but it continued like “tell the story” as I continued around the circuits of the labyrinth. So I will tell the story of my walk today.
A labyrinth walk is a pilgrimage in a way, but not like the ones I mentioned above which involved all the intricacies of flight reservations, packing, meeting strangers along the way, being in and out of different time zones. It is just a common, ordinary walk on a common, ordinary day. It can bring calm and balance to your spirit. It can provide a space for an answer “to appear” to a question you’ve been pondering. It can be the aisle of a church for reflection and prayer needs. It looks like just brick and grass. But that is deceiving.
I was wearing Tom’s shoes. Perhaps that made me aware of blessings of healings to offer for him as he recovers from his recent skin cancer operations. I didn’t know that particular song was going to pop into my head (and play loudly, I might add). It might have had something to do with my earlier morning writing and prayer as I develop some writing programs to offer to the senior population of our world.
I had just experienced a “Spirit-Wink” when I came across a short E-course that looks like it would support my beginning curriculum for my course. I call it a Spirit-Wink because I just happened upon the information while looking for something else. So — you know — it just happened….yeah, and it felt just perfect, like I was really looking for it. That’s how I get help. And I love to help a person find the extraordinary in what she thinks is her ordinary life and write about it.
I am making a decision about taking this course. The fee is a modest amount and I just have to be willing to put in the work, which I actually was not looking for. I continue to walk and I think the decision has been made. It was put on my path, the one I am currently on.
I see three stones on three different circuits. It makes me laugh as I remember my granddaughter Amy and her friend Logan who often play, run, skip and jump on this labyrinth. I like to build small cairnes (stone stacks) along the labyrinth when I am on it. It occurs to me, the children also like to play games with these stones and they are in these places for their own particular reasons. Maybe tomorrow, I will restack my cairn. Today, I just walk.
Soon, I encounter a small obstacle on my path. Today, it looks small to me, but I am reminded just how large I can sometimes choose to make a small obstacle.
Perhaps it is a matter of perspective, choice, desire and surrender? Maybe some or all?
Things are not always neat and tidy in life, not in my life, and I assume for the most part, not in others’ lives as well. There is a purpose to be served in the existence of imperfection and chaos. They are the ingredients of transformation. I greet the grass that has sprouted up between the bricks.
A playful grasshopper sprints and jumps upon the brick path and grass, hardly ever staying in one spot long enough for my camera to focus upon him. Now who does that remind me of? I’ve been one who has lots of things going on, many sticks in the fire, and a candle burning at both ends. That was then. This is now…..admittedly a slower pace with the glory of multi-tasking permanently filed away.
I reach the center. I have walked the path into the center, focusing on just the next step ahead. I trust the path. I know it brings me inward — to the center. I understand that, once I agree to walk the path, I will not be stopped, tricked or betrayed into a blocked pathway. It may at times seem that I am close to and entering the center, then it swings me away to a far sweeping perimeter path, perhaps to the other side of the labyrinth. I continue. This is a living metaphor of all that happens in a human life: Thinking I’m close, no, I am not there yet. Taking a longer, circular path, not a “straight shot” efficient line to the goal….well, there’s a thought. I just walk the path.
As I start back out of the center of the labyrinth, my mind falls upon the desert and green lands of life as I’ve lived it. They are each a reality. But each time the experience of desert existed in my life, I was led to the green pastures once again. Our labyrinth grass path reminds me of this spiritual truth as part of it was killed in preparation for the stones to be laid in the path. The stones will come in the spring. The path will have a new texture, just as life always does.
Leaving center and returning on the path out of the labyrinth symbolizes my walk back into my “today” life. I’ve received a lot from my labyrinth pilgrimage today without even going through a security check.
I return to the things at hand. Back to my writer’s table. Back to preparing for more work. Back to getting dinner cooking in the oven. Back to feeling grateful for my gift of life.
Napkinwriter 