Sunday, October 28, 2007

78 Walking the labyrinth

Many people go to Chartres Cathedral to walk the labyrinth and thereby calm their soul. It’s quite strange that some travel half way around the world at great cost just to walk around in circles on a marked out Cathedral floor. We all walk around in circles but generally that’s free and a necessary part of life. At Chartres you enter the path and just follow it left and right and back and forth until you get to the middle. There you rest and take stock and then walk out reversing your way in. There are some rules like in every game. You aren’t allowed to talk while en route. Laughing is frowned on but frowning is allowed. You can smile at other travellers as long as the smile is not lascivious intimating that you will meet at the coffee shop just around the corner or in the cathedral gifts area when you get out. You must take off your shoes and if your socks are smelly or likely to leave wet imprints on the floor as you stride, they must be left behind too. You are in effect on a pilgrimage to your holy land wherever that may be.

I know this stuff because I heard an ABC radio program about it with a noisy background of wooden floorboards creaking and groaning under the weight of many feet walking the twists and turns. Some people in Adelaide had marked out a copy of the Chartres labyrinth on a big piece of canvas that they laid out in a big hall. After the walkers finished walking the canvas, somebody rolled it up and stored it in their garage until next week when it was rolled out again.

This seemed to me pretty funny until she told me she had walked the labyrinth, which made it pretty serious, but she did it in a tennis court which made it funny again. The tennis court was marked out using pebbles. What was it like, I asked? She thought for a while. ‘It was really surprising that it made me feel really calm though I had to focus to keep on the path, and more surprising was the sense of achievement when I walked out about 20 minutes after starting. It was like getting to the end of a long trip’. This was more or less what the ABC people had said; the slow walk focussed the mind on the inner self, putting external sometimes difficult issues into a diminished and manageable context. Everyone interviewed said the walk was relaxing mentally and physically. How weird.

We had to do some analysis here. She said ‘Yoga has the same sort of effect (she does yoga). You focus your mind on something simple and repetitive like your breathing in and out. This sort of shuts out the world and its complexities become less relevant. Maybe the slow rhythmical walk of the labyrinth works the same’. I added that perhaps walking with other people saves you from feeling like an idiot.

This all made me think a bit about Creewah; not that we should mark out a labyrinth at Creewah on the tennis court because that would be stepping backwards, as we would have to make the tennis court first, but about my daily bush walks in Creewah. I wondered if perhaps my walks were the original labyrinth, predating those like at Chartres Cathedral designed for city folk with people-crowded minds who had foolishly cleared their bush and planted something boring like wheat. Certainly the main effects of relaxation and mind washing as described for the Chartres walk were the same for me in my Creewah walks. Some said I had a vacuous mind to start with.

I have walked in many places around the world without getting the Chartres results. In Old Delhi we walked in the narrow twisting maze of streets near the JamaMasjid, sardined against other sweating bodies buying their food and wares. I thought about people and how claustrophobic it all was, and didn’t feel relaxed and better. In Rome, also walking a circuitous route in the early morning chill, I checked out the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, walked by the tiny Smart cars parking sideways between bigger vehicles, bought a banana at a pavement stall for lunch and thought about people and the city. I enjoyed it but didn’t feel mentally uplifted.



In New York I looked up at the Chrysler Building, tramped through the suburbs, was gobsmacked by the amazing museums, Central Park with its children and youths doing clever things on wheeled skates and people playing games with bats and balls. I was walking in a park amongst trees but I still thought about people and didn’t feel calm.

In Tunisia, we walked through the narrow ancient streets of the extensive Roman ruins at Dougga. The town was perched on a small hill in peaceful farmland with not a soul in sight. It was a breadbasket for the then world almost 2000 years ago. I thought about people and their achievements and abilities to dramatically change the world in very little time. Remarkably, it did have a sense of calm, maybe because the bustling throngs had long since been spirited away.



In Canberra I walked around the suburbs and saw the big and small houses and their various gardens and wondered how many used a Hill’s Hoist and how many electric tumbling clothes driers. I thought about people and was comfortable with the thoughts but felt no sense of uplift.
There are few places where we can walk that aren’t in some way dominated by the vibes of human activities, human worries, human struggles, human achievements. At least, as humans, that’s the way we perceive the world. Rosellas maybe see it differently, that is, as a landscape full of competing rosellas with humans as a subordinate species created by the Great Rosella for the benefit of rosellas.

In the bush humans don’t dominate and control and don’t even feature in the really wild parts; there the bush is preeminent. It’s messy. It drops sticks and debris of all shapes and sizes all over the ground and doesn’t clear them neatly aside, it makes holes that may be ankle breaking shape or simply large pits that must be climbed through, it locates its trees and shrubs entirely randomly to our eyes but always in the way and insists on putting large rocks up to obscure the view. It makes everything slippery, thorny and generally uncomfortable. It’s awkward and antisocial. Bush is a nuisance to humans. But maybe it’s because it is so foreign to most of us, it enables us to reassess our existence as we struggle through it, where we are in the scheme of things, what might be important and what might be trivial in the bigger picture. It puts us in a different perspective, and sometimes we seem very small.

Maybe it’s the same with the Labyrinth, and with yoga and religions we don’t know anything about. They separate us from our natural comfort zone. They make us step outside ourselves and look back at the construction we have made and are making. They help us to assess ourselves a little impartially.

I enjoy being lost in my Creewah labyrinth trying to get to the breathing space in the middle. It costs nothing in airfares to get there. I don’t have to pay to get in. It is overflowing with interest that’s entirely free and it even smells OK. Best of all, there are lots of floating ideas eager to be caught and they are free too.

One day I will step out.

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