labyrinth

no wrong turns / plus an assortment of recs

In my birth doula training, a labyrinth was a big focal point. This is what it looks like. I just learned how to draw them, so I’ve been doing it obsessively. I just drew this one on my ipad, the calm loops, the pathways.

There’s only one way in and one way out. This is a pretty simple labyrinth, you can trace the path through the labyrinth right now on your computer screen if you’d like, I’ll give you a moment. Once you reach the center, the only thing to do is to turn around and find your way out. You can’t get lost, it isn’t a maze. There are no wrong turns. There is only forward. There is only keep going. There is only through and through and through. Now we see why this metaphor could be captivating. Now we understand where we are.

I have always liked labyrinths. My first encounter was a “prayer labyrinth” — a religious retreat center I went to as a teen and have returned to as an adult has one made out of stone up on a big hill down a trail through the woods. It’s stunning, honestly, to arrive on the hill and find this invitation. Here, take a walk to nowhere. Here, just keep going. Walking that labyrinth at different points in my life, I have felt my mind settle. If not prayer, certainly meditation. Do nothing extra.

This is a bad picture of it that I took at some point, where you can’t see the view down the hill at all, and it looks kind of unkempt. It’s nicer in person. Or maybe it isn’t, maybe it’s only beautiful in my memory. No matter what, there’s a clear affinity. I love labyrinths, and labyrinths keep finding me. There’s one at a school near my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s house in Lancaster that surprised and delighted me one visit. And I remember feeling startled to find a cement labyrinth tucked in the side yard of a church near our old house in the city. It was overgrown and seemed seldom used, but I used it. Not that often, but I knew it was there for me if I needed it. There’s probably a labyrinth not too far from where you live too — they’re tucked away all over the world, some ancient, some new. Honestly now I am feeling like maybe I would like to build a labyrinth in my own backyard out of bricks dug down into the grass. (Crazier things have been done!!!) It moves me because it resonates. The only way out is through. You just keep moving.

My family has been going through an unfolding crisis for the past month (we’re all ok, but it is an intense time), and we can all feel the way the country is in crisis too. It’s exhausting, wading through stress and grief and uncertainty, your own or someone else’s. Sometimes I want to just sit down, stop moving. But what then? — you get nowhere, you learn nothing, you see only the walls on either side of you, the corridor behind, the path ahead. No trapdoors, no ladders out of here. Just forward. Just through.

Writing is always labyrinthine too, at least it feels that way to me. Staggering forward, stacking words on words as if I’m building the floor beneath me as I walk. The blind turns, the way you move further from the center before reaching the heart, retracing your steps to get out. Big projects especially feel this way, but poems too. Each poem is a little labyrinth. What is really in the middle? How do I get there? What strange loops, what gates to cross, what molten core? You are always different when you emerge when you were when you entered. That forward momentum. If you stop in a random hall, what’s when you’re bound to get turned around. So you don’t stop. Writing has always worked best for me if I don’t know where I am going, if I just keep moving, if I let the center surprise me, if I feel my way through.

In the doula training, the labyrinth is meant as a sort of “map” for birth — there is no straight line, only twists and turns. You will feel a little lost on your way to the center, just keep breathing keep walking keep moving until you meet your baby. I find this super helpful — but it goes beyond birth too. Once you reach the center (birth!), you have to make your way back out again, and you will be different once you do. What does it mean to emerge from the labyrinth? Do we ever really? Is life just a series of nested labyrinths, where you exit one only to enter another that is bigger and weirder soon after? Postpartum is a wilder and darker labyrinth than birth, and matrescence is even wider yet. It can all map onto this tool. And I have felt that in my life, vividly.

I remember carrying Tommy around his room in the dark to get him back to sleep when he was probably something like four months old. I did this every night for a year — but one night in particular, I felt myself walking as in a labyrinth. It was like I could suddenly see the path beneath my feet, the set pattern. My steps stretched into loops. I felt my breath change into a rhythm, my feet taking slightly different strides. I will never forget that feeling, the understanding that this was the labyrinth, my life in the nighttime carrying my child, awake when I didn’t want to be. All my questions in my mind — how long? why? what space for me? who will I be? — rushing out ahead of me and dissolving into echoes against brick walls. No way to find out except to keep walking. The night offered me the answers. When the child wakes, you wake, you go to him, you lay him back down, you lay back down too, again and again in every strange twist and turn until something changes and everything shifts again. Each hallway some new trial to endure, so you endure it. And that is life!

Now I see that all of parenthood will be a labyrinth. That childhood was one as well. Adolescence, coming of age. Marriage, vocation, growing older. That it’s the great joy of our life, the great truth, that it is impossible to get lost — and that maybe the only true error would be to give up. All of life is layers of labyrinths I feel my feet tracing — my own familiar stride. I can be with myself in the labyrinth. I can honor my exhaustion, my confusion, my confidence. I can walk with someone else for a while, I can come alongside (that feels like the goal of the doula practice I am moving towards, walking-with). I can stand still for a little while before setting off again. I can touch the walls. I can weep, I can shout, I can laugh. Little windows. Little gates. Little doors. We just move through. It is stunningly simple, and really deeply encouraging if I let it be. I don’t know what will happen. Life is long and strange. But I just have to keep moving, and see what I come upon next. The garden has grown taller, my kids are taller just around the next bend. I become more resilient the longer I walk. I spend time with myself, I enjoy my own company. No wrong turn to get here, no wrong turn ahead, just the endless corridor of now, the gentle bend toward what’s next. That’s where I am in this moment. Hearing my footsteps on stone. Forward, forward.

flowers from the garden / berries from the berry patch

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And now, just a few special things I’ve liked recently:

to listen: Ann Annie is one of my favorite music-without-words composers (which has been probably my most-listened to music category recently), and she’s coming out with a new album in October that I’m really looking forward to. I’ve been listening to the singles she’s released on repeat. (Bandcamp / Spotify)

to read:

I Who Have Never Known Men — This book kind of steamrolled me, but in a good way. It’s DARK, and HEAVY, but the narrator is so fascinatingly compelling, I would follow her to any dystopian existence. I’ll think about this book for a long time.

Ordinary Love — I don’t read a lot of romance, but this book HOOKED me. Felt refreshing to read a book that centers a bi character, the sex is very sexy, and it all felt real. This is a very literary-fiction-y romance, which is really my only way in, so this was a nice treat. The yearning!!!

to absorb:

Poetry is not a luxury shared this poem on Instagram yesterday just after Fanny Howe’s death and now I want to read ALL of her poetry. This is exactly it.

to pod:

What We Spend is my new favorite podcast. I love hearing how people think about and spend money (it really helps me break out of my own patterns and internal echo chamber) and I love the way thinking about money breaks through into such deeper things almost all of the time. The way we spend our money is the way we spend our lives?!? (Love to bastardize Annie Dillard, lol). Have found this pod to be very thoughtful and tender and good. Big recommend!

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no wrong turns, just forward!
xoxo,

Amy