Eight: What the Labyrinth Knows

The first thing a labyrinth can do is confuse me.

I know this because I built one, in the river meadow to the north-east of the ancient church that neighbours Church Farm, and I have walked it in every season and every state of mind available to a human being.

I step onto the path expecting to move toward the centre, and it takes me to the edge. I follow it anyway, and it circles back, and just when the centre seems close it carries me to the far side of the whole thing, and I begin to wonder if I have misunderstood something.

I have not misunderstood. This is exactly what it does.

The Sufi poets understood this. Rumi’s reed cries from separation before it can sing of union. The path to the Beloved is never direct — it winds through the self, through loss, through the dissolution of everything the ego thought it needed. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. The labyrinth knows that field. It is what waits at the centre.

The labyrinth has no dead ends. I cannot get lost in it. Every step, however circuitous, is part of the route. There is only one path, and it goes all the way in and all the way out, and the same path does both.

What if that is also true of my life?

What if the detour is not a mistake — but the path itself?

What if the things I am most longing for cannot be reached by trying harder — only by walking faithfully?

The labyrinth teaches this in the body. I cannot think my way to the centre. I cannot will my way there. I simply walk, faithfully, and at some point the thinking mind grows quiet, and what remains is the awareness that was always already there — open, unhurried, home. Not a self that has arrived somewhere. Just awareness, recognising itself. The mystics call this the ground of the soul. The labyrinth calls it the centre. They are the same place. I have always lived there.

What if I am closer to the centre than the path currently makes it appear?

The labyrinth doesn’t reward the urgent. It rewards the willing. I learned that slowly. I am still learning it.