The gravity of a labyrinth

Walking composition

I’ve got a new interview about the physical and social importance of walking on philosopher and former professional baseball player Greg Hickey’s site KineSophy: The Ethics of Human Movement. It gets back into some of the fundamentals of why I think walking and walkability matter more than most people think they do, how walking makes us human, and why I wrote A Walking Life: “Show me a world where we truly have the choice to walk or drive—and by walk I mean walk safely and pleasantly, not having to cross dangerous highways or busy intersections or constantly breathe in automobile exhaust—and you’ll show me a world where we have some freedom of choice about our mobility.”

Audio version, recorded at a public beach on the lake my town is built around, along with ambient noise and my random commentary.

Until a few days ago, I’d only walked a labyrinth once in my life, in 2017, while working on A Walking Life. I’d been on the Norfolk coast in England to visit a sea-pounded shore where fossilized hominin footprints between 800,000 and 900,000 years old had been found. The last chapter of the book is about those footprints and that journey, including the long, absurd saga of trying to reach the coast by train and bus; it’s also about my unintended stumbling across a labyrinth laid out in the courtyard of Norwich Cathedral, and what happened after I decided to walk it. That was the first, and until recently the last, time I’ve met myself in a labyrinth.

On a recent afternoon, “people-d out,” as I put it to someone, I bailed on the final hours of a conference to venture out to a distant labyrinth someone told me about last year. It’s open to the public but built on private property. Driving toward the house from the highway reminded me of coming in toward the Rocky Mountain Front from central Montana: bending along rural roads up into the hills, snow-dusted mountains in the distance; passing, strangely, a yard full of bright blue peacocks pecking away in the grass.

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There’s a reason the shape of a labyrinth is ancient beyond imagination, and a reason they’re found all over the world. I don’t really want to give the reason a name, mostly because I don’t have one, but I felt it that first time, walking one outside the nearly 1000-year-old cathedral in Norwich, the town where the farmer Robert Kett was executed in 1549 for leading the Norfolk Rebellion, one of England’s most violent, desperate mass revolts against enclosures of the commons. The sign erected in Kett’s honor 400 years later has inspired much of my writing about the commons and private property, but at the time I was still immersed completely in walking, and writing about walking.

I’d spent a while in the cathedral, thinking about the generations of footsteps that had worn the stones now smooth under my own, before wandering outside and coming across the labyrinth. Encountering it was a lesson to me in the limits of learning via books rather than experience:

“Although I’d read as much as I could about labyrinths, including Reverend Lauren Artress’s Walking a Sacred Path, I had never actually seen one. And I hadn’t, to be honest, been all that interested. As a person who is less spiritual even than she is religious, if that’s possible, I tend to be skeptical of any spiritual or religious practice that claims to put us in touch with the divine, much less with ourselves. Walking a labyrinth, I thought, might contribute to my research but wouldn’t actually do anything.

I believed that, that is, until I walked one.

There weren’t many people at Norwich Cathedral that day. I joined four or five milling about the labyrinth, but instead of walking straight into it, I felt compelled, and I still have no idea why, to circumambulate the outside first. While walking, I began to form a question, one drawn from a personal existential struggle I’d been caught up in over the previous year or two.

I wasn’t prepared for what happened when I entered the labyrinth. I carried my question in with me, and as I began walking responses came—not direct answers, just thoughts—pulled from somewhere deep inside, a psychological place that I have only looked into at certain points in my life when all other answers have failed. A place of the heart but also of the soul. And as these responses rose up to meet my conscious mind, my feet slowed down of their own accord. I didn’t choose to slow down, not in the way we usually understand choosing—my feet dragged, as if being drawn down by the ground, as if responding directly to the gravitational pull involved in each footfall. I became acutely aware of how each lift of the foot and step forward related to the grass and dirt and rocky crust and molten core beneath.

I tried walking faster, as an experiment, but each time was pulled back, so I let my feet take the lead and examined the responses of darkness and light that came up to meet me.”

It was eerie to be walking through a labyrinth more recently and find that similar responses pulled on my spine, feet, and thoughts, as if I were stepping back onto a path I’d been on only moments before, though it was almost exactly six years to the day since my feet last wandered a labyrinth. 

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This time, too, I first walked around the outside of the labyrinth before entering, once clockwise and once counterclockwise, forming an existential struggle into the shape of a question, or as close to a question as I could get. 

Maybe we all have the same questions in different shapes and words: How do I untangle this knotty mess of a human, knotty mess of humanity? What good can I do, can my work do, amidst the violence and pain inflicted by those with the most power? My question wasn’t exactly that, but it intersected with those, wrapped also amidst some personal problems—it all feels connected. I suppose it always is.

I was the only person there for a while until a trio of much younger people showed up to run across the circle and take selfies. “You’re messing it up,” one of them said to another as they crossed through the pattern. “You’re doing it wrong.” There probably is no wrong way to walk a labyrinth, I thought, trying to keep my attention instead on that same energy I’d felt once before, slowing my footsteps so much that for one long stretch I was barely walking forward at all. 

My feet pulled back and were eventually moving so slowly I could barely comprehend it, much less want to control it. I stopped and took off my shoes and socks, letting the snow-chilled mulch and fallen leaves bind my feet to whatever it is that comes to life in these winding paths. I tried to ignore the awareness of how weird I must look to the trio of twenty-somethings, moving with aching slowness and barefoot. If you think about it for a moment, which I wasn’t able to do until drafting this essay, the whole concept of taking selfies to post online is weirder than walking barefoot.

That first time in the Norwich labyrinth, I hadn’t gone barefoot, but the experience was still similar.

“This part of who I am as a person, a human, knows that this connection to the ground is real. It feels the thin places of the world, the shiver of being closer to some kind of otherness. . . .

I took a long time to walk into and out of the labyrinth. People passed me going each direction. I stepped around a woman crouched on the ground taking photos, and two kids leapt from stone to stone around me, and still I walked, stuck with my questions and responses and the pace my feet insisted on. When I finally exited, it was with an eerie feeling of having been knitted back together, not just within myself, but with far more than I could fathom.”

I’d entered this recent labyrinth a little late in the day, leaving me not much more than an hour to walk it. I used up most of that time winding my way in and reached the center about fifteen minutes before the place’s posted closing time. As I put my shoes back on over cold-numbed feet, I felt saddened at the thought of rushing out, resenting the idea of having to be efficient with time dedicated to existential quandaries and presence.

The unraveling of problems, selves, the world, and humanity need more time than this. All of our time. As I walked out, I tried to maintain the connection I’d found on the way in, the aliveness that came from the ground through the feet and up the spine, and unnameable «whatever it is» that gave me some kind of guidance as I walked more and more slowly through the turns and curves of a space shaped to unwind the self.

“Hi there!” called a voice, startling me as the sun disappeared behind the mountains.

“Hi.” 

“We close in five minutes,” the woman said, sounding a little impatient. I tried, only partly successfully, to ditch disappointment and hang on instead to what I’d found. To the small reassurances that showed a way forward, an opening, some kind of way to be in this human-ravaged world. To see if the walk outward could help shape a way for the raveling I know we all need. 

A few days later I was listening to an interview with the Sakha singer Suor, or Snow Raven, and was reminded of the labyrinth and that craving for more time, for all the time in the world, as she described her childhood in Arctic Siberia and the quality of silence that allowed her to learn how to mimic the animals of her home. We all need that, I thought again. The time, the silence, the simplest, most denied freedom to be our most present in the world, for the world.

It’s really what that last chapter of A Walking Life is about, the ways in which we carry the world and ourselves, and especially griefs larger than anyone should ever have to bear, one slow step at a time.

I had to accept the uncertainty and answer the property owner, hoping she would leave me alone for those last few minutes. Leave me to gather together whatever wholeness I’d been given, long enough for me to keep in touch with it a little longer, to have something articulate or tangible to bring out into the world that exists beyond the thin places.

“Thank you,” I said, waving at her. “I’m on my way out.”