While walking the labyrinth crossed barely any terrain geographically, it traversed the rugged landscape of my heart and soul in a spirit of embracing honesty and peace, writes Rita Glennon.
Beyond the grotto where a white statue of Mary stood, looking up to the heavens while a little Bernadette, perhaps, knelt with hands in prayer position, a path of rectangular pavers divided and led around to the labyrinth.
I’d read about these ancient constructions on my last retreat, and here a gorgeous version lay before me, its centrepiece of flowers and foliage shooting from a large, round pot, also white.
Years ago, I had framed my desire to live more mindfully as a camino to consciousness. I had heard, read and seen various stories about the Camino de Santiago – a bucket-list aspiration that will probably wait until I’m 60, or my youngest child has finished school, whichever comes second.
But here, in the relative wilderness of the grounds at the Mary MacKillop Spirituality Centre in Baulkham Hills, was an opportunity to walk a camino that led not across 750 kilometres of varied terrain, requiring nights’ rest and a backpack, but within the confines of a maze.
As I took my first steps on to the path, I no longer had to concern myself with where I was going – the labyrinth had mapped out the way; I knew it would lead towards the centre, then I would return.
The path, low between raised concrete borders, was laid with gravel and insouciant weeds and grasses. Flat and even, it was a touch wider than the width of my wide hips and inspired a cloistered sensibility that was not in the least bit uncomfortable. In fact, it was embracing.
I did not know how long it would take me to walk. Nor did I check the precise time of my start and finish. But I did think of the Buddhist concept of walking meditation, and deliberately slowed my gait to pace one gentle step at a time.
In Peace Is Every Step, the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote of walking “as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet”. “The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.”
So I set out at a meditative pace, and as I moved in silence along the path, strange happenings took place.
The winter solstice had fallen five weeks earlier, and here in the deep midwinter of late July, the day was pleasantly dappled with clouds, and a cool breeze blew across the Hills district, refreshing against my face.
Within a few moments of walking, perhaps around the second bend, I experienced a visceral expansion in my chest, as if the wind had entered and was rising and stretching through my upper body and outwards: it was a sense of spacious, inner freedom, like an upwelling of connection with the cosmos.
As I continued, the quiet air between my ears danced with a multitude of thoughts – snippets from church hymns sprang up, Bible verses, the reflections of a fellow retreatant in the session before our free time, and, in dribs and drabs, the errors of my ways, which broke upon my conscious mind then seemed to cascade like a waterfall down to the ground as how I imagined a woman’s waters might break.
Though I could see and hear cars driving past the estate – beyond the eucalypts and grassy fields that enveloped the labyrinth and shushed in the wind – I had indeed left the pavements grey of WB Yeats’ description behind, and found myself in Innisfree:
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
As I walked wherever the labyrinth led, occasionally I would come into close quarters with others who were also treading this path, then we’d be led away from one another, each at our own stage of the puzzle, proceeding at our own pace.
It was near the centre that I experienced something like a physical premonition: my body suddenly anticipated the feeling of cold hard concrete beneath my knees. It was an insistent sensibility that seemed to be asking me to kneel before the centrepiece, when I reached it, like little Bernadette before Our Lady.
As I turned the final corner to approach the middle, seldom has a pot of flowers and plants elicited such reverence from me. The grasses curved out, their pointy ends splayed to fill the inner circle so much that it seemed too dangerous to kneel, though maybe I should have tried. But my Spirit knelt, and bowed, and signed itself with the Cross.
My journey to the heart of the labyrinth was over, but the tranquillity did not end there. It accompanied me as I slowly continued back to the outer edge, where the rest of the world awaited.
About an hour after starting this journey, I would leave the timelessness of Kairos for the clock time of Chronos once more. Ostensibly, I had gone nowhere, yet I had found a new peace with my past, fresh direction for the future and had witnessed new physical, mental and spiritual horizons in the present moment.
While the pilgrimage crossed barely any terrain geographically, it traversed the rugged landscape of my heart and soul in a spirit of embracing honesty and peace, planting seeds for the journeys to come.
One seed seemed to spring from a personal value I had discerned a day earlier in my prayer back home. Like a Platonic form, Beauty seemed to have claimed me for its own. Surrounded by manufactured and natural beauty, both engineered and growing wild in the labyrinth, this value broke upon me once more; only now, for the first time, I noticed that the word Beautiful begins with the letters B and e: Be. And I pondered how the authenticity of Being is indeed a thing of great beauty.
The large, round, white pot at the centre was hardly the Grecian urn of Keats’ ode, yet here I was, taking his words afresh into the world:
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
