16 Lost in the labyrinth...

... but not in a good way

When I lead my annual group on the Isle of Iona, one of the things some participants choose to do is to walk this labyrinth at the far south-western end of the island, barefoot no matter what the weather, and in a silent meditative way. It’s quite a good size, and takes longer than one would think to walk to the centre, and out again (the difference between a labyrinth and a maze is that you cannot get lost in the former – despite my title). It can be a profound, cathartic and often healing experience, as one walks symbolically to the centre of one’s being, one’s life, and the cosmos.

LABYRINTH

With your burden for its heart
you are walking the labyrinth
in an easterly March chill

and your feet are bare. The tails
of my coat snap like sails and I’m
embarrassed in this solemn moment

until I remember that noise and loss
are as much a part of life
as stasis and silence are of death.

I can see from here that your eyes
are wet as hers before you
and mine now too a little.

Behind us the bay is tarnished
with sea-fret. A gull keens.
First swallow’s back. Everything

knows its place in this world
even if that place is perpetual journey.
We seem to take so long to learn this.

See the way the gulls let the east wind
almost lazily lift them languid
into air, and simply leave them there.

Roselle Angwin, in A Trick of the Light – poems from Iona


Here, though, my meaning is altogether more mundane and less symbolic – I’ve been laid low for about ten days now, on and off (rather more on than off), with labyrinthitis. Partly causal and partly consequential is insomnia.

If I were a fish, I’d say that my eyes, my fins, and my swim bladder which should keep me upright are not lining up properly, so that occasionally I lurch in what looks like a drunken stagger to port or starboard, and am also in danger of throwing up indiscriminately on my shoes, someone else’s shoes, a passing dog, or the fishmonger’s mussels (for it’s market day, and living in seclusion as we do these days – actually we always have, but work often took us out – I’ve ventured into town for our peasants’ big day out. Oh and no shoes, canines or bivalves were besmirched in the walking, by the way.)

I cannot say that my progress at the moment is in any way that I’m aware of a mindful, silent or healing and contemplative stroll to the heart of myself or the universe. Mostly, I manage a short slow stumble with TM and the dogs around the field, groaning. The myriad tasks which should have been February’s are not getting done; or at least some are, but not by me. No, of course I’m not stressed by that; not at all… And today’s blog is coming to you free of soil theories, woodchip, saplings, rain and staggering* amounts of brushwood. (*I use that word advisedly.)

From a holistic perspective, physical illness has a correlate at the level of psyche; that is, a symptom is also a symbol. I’ve known this from forever. So yes, this is to do with balance – loss of. If I wanted to go all astrological I would say that I was born at the autumn equinox when day and night, light and dark, are the same length, both in poise and equilibrium before the earth moves on; yes, indeed, my natal sun is (just) in Libra, and (a striving for) balance and harmony is a motivating factor for me, achieved normally by zigzagging between extremes. But I know barely anything about that thing that people tell me is good for you, that 4-letter thing called ‘rest’. So mostly I live on the zig of that arc.

I have been reading Marc Hamer’s Spring Rain. It took me till partway through Chapter 2 to realise that he, like me, comes from a lifetime of Buddhist practice.

I am good at bringing my presence and attention to what I observe, to others, and to how I live (what is nowadays known as ‘mindfulness’; you can also see details of an online course I offer sometimes here). But he has the edge on me by a very long way in managing this doing/being spectrum. He can spend hours simply sitting on a bench. Hours. I admire. I aspire. And I resonate with the simplicity of his description here:

‘I feel the air flow in and out until there is no in or out; the birds pass by, the moving sun warms my skin – doing nothing, thinking nothing, being everything that is. You don’t become nothing when you meditate; we talk of emptiness but it isn’t really that.’

Read that phrase aloud: ‘…doing nothing, thinking nothing, being everything that is’. It’s become a mantra for me, in its simple and rhythmic poetic expression.

*

The day is one of those milk-gentle February days that will ease into warm soft sunshine in the afternoon. Each February I remember that often, often, I have sat outside, admittedly well wrapped, for a short while – well, maybe an hour (not quite a Marc Hamer achievement) – with family, friends and/or animals in February, even though we think of it as cold.

In such weather, flowers seem to double their size in an afternoon; our tightly-furled daffodils are cautiously unwrapping themselves. Catkins are splashing all the hedgerows with old gold. A cherry has taken me by surprise with its sprinkling of delicate pale pink blossom: we were here last spring, but I’d forgotten the cherry. In the field, a blackthorn has starred herself with white five-petalled blossom before her leaves. I’ve seen blackthorn in flower in January in Devon – always a treat. Her twin in the Celtic Tree Calendar, the hawthorn, or whitethorn, or may tree, won’t be in flower for a while yet.

Have I said there’s frogspawn in our newly-dug pond?

Birds everywhere are in full and jubilant voice; as, in fact, are the hounds of the orange-clad hunters spread out around the commune (it’s now de rigueur that they wear day-glo orange; not that that stops them shooting each other – 3 human deaths so far in 2024). My heart sinks: the deer, the hare.

In town, the lake is silvered over black, like an antique mirror whose reflective backing is peeling off. The hemisphere rim of the basin over which water races into the forest is swift but quiet, the water today smoother than any mirror. The river the other side of the bridge, by contrast, is full, wild, frothy.

The seven swans have disappeared. Over against the far bank is a whitish smudge that might spell swan – perhaps last year’s cygnet, given the push by its parents as they prepare for a new brood.

A starling whistles shrilly from the church belfry above the sprouting ferns. Somehow its whistle can only speak of spring.

And I HAVE done something. I’ve tackled a small dilemma. The peach tree by the back door with her pretty deep pink blossom already beginning to show is in summer a glory of scent and colour from the wisteria and honeysuckle that smother it. The dense foliage of these two also provides somewhere for the two robins, the chaffinches and bluetits, and the two gangs of 25-odd house sparrows to hang out while waiting for me to fill the feeders in the morning. But the two climbers are literally smothering the tree. Of course I was torn between preserving beauty and habitat, and freeing the tree up for its own sake, for fruit, for light in the kitchen and for the long views. But my friend T came and gave me a hand, and I think it was the right thing to do, though it looks naked and scrawny at the moment. We still have to saw the two topmost branches, broken from November’s storm, and the rest of the honeysuckle will come down with that. Let the peach blossom.

BEFORE

AFTER

Thank you, my friends, for reading. I’m wondering whether a post a week isn’t overkill? I might drop it down to fortnightly, especially as I bring in aspects of the two sub-sections. I’ll see. Till next time, go well, walk a little on the wild side, and carry on being kind with yourself and others…