When I feel I need a little break and need to see a little craziness, I hop onto an express bus to Boulder to spend a day in a place just different enough to be interesting. Boulder reminds me of a mini-San Francisco. Good restaurants, intriguing food shops—like the well-scented spice shop—a really good bookstore, and street people who don’t seem so desperate as they do in Denver.
What really draws me to Boulder is the labyrinth in a downtown church. I love walking labyrinths. This one is a copy of the Chartres cathedral labyrinth in France dating from the middle ages when labyrinth walking was used as a substitute for making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This is an 11 circuit labyrinth, meaning you walk 11 circles in fragments, winding up eventually at a center.
A labyrinth is not a maze. You don’t have to find your way or figure out anything or make any decisions. You just follow the path as it winds its way around and through the quadrants to the center. It’s a walking meditation. In the Christian sense, the path, which is laid out for you, leads to God at the center. You only have to follow. I’ve never met God at the center and I don’t know what I would do if I did. Probably ask him to move so I could get on with my walk. Labyrinths pre-date Christianity, having been used in many forms by pagan religions for eons. The Christians just glommed onto a good thing when they saw it.
And as I’m slowly walking, I’m wondering why am I doing this, what can I get from it. Just one crumb of understanding, I say, give me just a little nugget of wisdom in this calm place where all I have to do is follow the path to the center and back out again. The slower the better. I’m not looking to understand everything, the whole enchilada, just a bit here and now. And the answer came: I’m doing this because walking the labyrinth is comforting. Its stillness, its calm, its reassurance give me a stillness, a calm, and a reassurance. Just follow the path, you don’t have to find it, it’s there at your feet. Keep your eyes open and follow. One step at a time.
So, I’m still learning. Still trying to figure it out though that’s something I don’t really expect ever to do. I suppose, maybe I even hope, my last words will be “What’s going on here?” It’s not the answer but the question that truly counts. Not the accomplishment but the wondering.
Yes, still learning. I just learned a whole lot about the writer William Faulkner, enough to realize that I knew nothing about an author I thought I did know something about. And I learn more yoga every week and sometimes everyday. And I’m always learning about loving and being loved. And I just got a new I-phone which offers me more to learn than I ever knew I needed to know. It’s not a phone or a device; it’s an extension of my brain. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. My brain could use an extension but I’m not sure I want it to be in an Apple computer.
I heard a saying recently that I think everybody in this room will like and feel free to adopt as your own. It goes: It’s not how old you’re getting; it’s how you’re getting old.
I hope I am getting old with wonder and openness and a desire to learn more because there is so much more out there to learn and experience. Like walking the labyrinth to discover that I need to walk the labyrinth. And maybe I’ll learn a little something, just a crumb, just a nugget. Not God.
Keep your eyes open and follow your path.
© 25 November 2013
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