This morning I walked a labyrinth. Walking into the middle I had the lines “Where is she? where is she, now?” from the song Doubt Comes In echoing in my head. I like to walk labyrinths by myself. Indeed, if others are around, I often don’t walk, just watch as they tread the path inwards. For me, the walk feels too intimate to be shared with others. Today, I started alone but when I was about halfway in a family of four came to check it out. It didn’t seem right to stop walking, but I was conscious of the intrusion.
The two children had a ‘race’ towards the middle. One, who started first, assiduously ran the track winding back and forth. The second neatly stepped over the stone lines to move directly into the middle. There were cries of ‘winning’ and ‘cheating’ and ‘rules.’ There were questions of whether there were options, and the observation that there is only one path, because this is a ‘mindfulness thing.’ I kept walking until I arrived just near the middle, where I waited until they had come and gone.
Once alone again, I moved into the very central spot.
I often stop in the middle and spend what feels like a long time there. I couldn’t tell you how many minutes according to the clock because my brain doesn’t work that way, and I have never bothered to time it. First, I face the direction I have walked in. Thinking about the ideas and feelings that have come to mind on the path inwards. Today, in this direction I could see the highway which I have traversed over the last week. Intermittently a car would pass, and I would recall different parts of this trip.
While driving these roads I passed a spot that Google marked as “middle of everywhere.” That is, the middle of this continent that we call Australia. I passed by this spot on my way to Alice Springs and then again on the way back. While I had seen it on the map the first time, I totally missed it while driving. So, on the way back I made a conscious effort to stop and take a photo.
Well, no wonder I missed it because there is nothing there. Not even a sign. As I stood in the middle of the labyrinth I wondered if this nothingness was a metaphor. Walking the labyrinth feels to me like walking into the middle of myself. Allowing myself to see and feel the things that I might miss in day-to-day life. Today as I stood in the middle of the labyrinth and contemplated the middles I wondered if there was a parallel. When I get to the middle of myself, will I find that there is nothing there? Is there a sign that marks the middle? Is the view the same if I have ‘cheated’ or run in order to get there? Is my middle enough?
Invariably as I stand in the middle, I shed some tears. Sometimes these are shed facing inwards, sometimes they appear as I turn to face the exit path. Once I have turned around, I continue to stand and wait in the middle until I know I am ready to walk out. This usually means intentionally releasing the burdens that I have cried over in the middle.
As I walked back out, I was reflecting on the fact that I only feel comfortable doing this labyrinth trek alone. On the bigger trip, I have been reflecting on my ongoing desire to be seen which stems from childhood hurts of feeling consistently overlooked. How does this desire to be seen in general fit with the refusal to be seen on the journey to the centre?
The psychology in me says that it probably has to do with shame. A deep-seated sense that if people could see the inner me, then they would not approve, they would not like me, they would walk away.* Much better to be seen via carefully crafted words that present the parts of the view that I am comfortable with. And yet……….
And yet, it is only when I know that people have seen the centre – the hurts, the frustrations, the fears, the shame – that I feel loved. And again, those words rang in my ears “Where is she? Where is she, now?”
I am in a season where I don’t know precisely where I am or where I am going to, and that is super scary. There was a time when I might have likened this to wandering through the wilderness, but I am less comfortable with that analogy these days. Perhaps it is more like the time post-exile, when the returnees make the trip back to Jerusalem but find it in ruins and inhabited by the ‘people of the land.’ If we trust the biblical account, this is a time of returning to a purer worship of YHWH in order to stave off another exile, while in reality the Yehudites** do not ever fully regain power over this land. It is also the time of shaping and redacting their history so that it tells the stories in a way that will serve them going into the future. Stories we continue to engage with today.
And here I am, shaping and redacting my story (albeit at a laptop, rather than writing it out by hand). I have pruned the parts of what I have written. Removed references that only I will understand and added in explanations to demonstrate the connections that have been going on in my head. Lately, I have been learning to see myself as a writer and thinking about what that means in my day-to-day life. Today, as I walk out of the labyrinth, I am leaning into my intuition, taking a deep breath, and holding my head high.
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*I am concious these days that this is probably linked in part to Christian theologies of original sin, and the teaching that we are all unworthy in our inherent natures.
**I have been reading a lot about Ezra-Nehemiah recently and the scholarship notes that pre-exilic the people are Israelites and further into the Second Temple Period they are Jews, but at this point the most accurate terms for them is Yudahites.
WIT 