Y'all gotta check this funky jam out. Not something I made, but something I love:
http://www.youtube.com/user/randomcarbon#p/a/u/1/PUICTiCNweA
Friday, January 14, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
It is solved by walking
Around the block from my apartment there is a labyrinth, built from lines of grey stones that are now mostly covered over with grass. A labyrinth is a physical tool for spiritual meditation. Found on the floors of cathedrals or backyards of small parish churches, it is a circular maze in which there is just one way in and out. Taking a roundabout path, back and forth along the edges of the circle and gradually weaving towards the center, the labyrinth-walker eventually finds herself in a small, circular space, from which she then eventually returns through the maze to where she started.
The labyrinth is a simple design. There are usually no walls; one could step easily across the path and into the center in a second. None that I’ve seen have been particularly large. At the one in my neighborhood, it takes five minutes to walk to the center at an easy pace. There is no locked gate, no voice guiding the practice, no instruction. Although it is sometimes walked in groups, at its core it is an individual practice. You can go as fast or as slow as you like, and stay in the center as long as you like. It is nothing more than a suggested route, twisted back and forth on itself in a small space; and what one does in the labyrinth is nothing more than walking. When I walk it alone, there is no one there to enforce what limited rules there are.
There is, however, a box full of pamphlets, which are sometimes partially soaked with rain that has dripped through the lid. On the cover of the pamphlet there is a quote in Latin: Solvitur ambulato (“It is solved by walking”). Inside, the pamphlet states that the labyrinth has been a Christian tool of meditation for many years. It also says that the first labyrinth long pre-dates Christianity, and that the Kabbala of Jewish mysticism, the Hopi medicine wheel, Tibetan sand paintings, and Hindu mandalas are all variations on this form.
I am new to this neighborhood, and when I moved in I was licking the wounds of a living situation gone painfully awry. I was both desperate and terrified to live alone; and once I moved in, it seemed that the solitude was always more intense than the gentle, indulgent privacy I had been hoping for. I spent many evenings pacing the middle-class neighborhood in failing light, wistfully watching fathers tossing a ball with their daughters, idly picking up brochures on houses for sale with re-fabricated interiors. One evening, I found the labyrinth, in the yard of the First Cumberland Presbyterian Church. It was so simple, so straightforward a ritual, that initially it seemed aimless. To walk nowhere, in a circle, and then back again the same way I came.
When I entered, though, my feet slowed. I stayed within the lines, finishing the path, and some surprising sense of the sacred kept me from crossing or moving through it too quickly. The feeling of reverence formed walls as real as stone or wood to guide me to the center and back again. In the center, I sat on a gray marble bench. I was in the same small yard that I had been in before, and yet I was also in a new space. I looked around me and something was different. I got up and moved back through and out the single doorway, feeling as if I had been somewhere. I was not being guided, taught, instructed, or regulated. I was completely alone. But still I followed carefully the lines of stone partly hidden in grass.
Perhaps the most frightening part of solitude for me is that there is no one to please but myself. I cannot bandage anyone else’s wounds, make anyone else laugh, or get instant gratification for acting the way someone else expects me too. I think the same goes for the labyrinth. It seems aimless at first because there is no right way to move through it, just like there is no right way to take a walk. There is no one to please or to follow but myself. The experience is open—open in length, open to the air, open for utilization by multiple religious traditions. It is an unsettling freedom; with only myself to follow, will I be strong enough to lead? What, in the end, will drive me if not the carrots or the sticks of other human beings?
--with appreciation to Christy Brasleton, Joe Gordon Gill, and Dave Harmon
The labyrinth is a simple design. There are usually no walls; one could step easily across the path and into the center in a second. None that I’ve seen have been particularly large. At the one in my neighborhood, it takes five minutes to walk to the center at an easy pace. There is no locked gate, no voice guiding the practice, no instruction. Although it is sometimes walked in groups, at its core it is an individual practice. You can go as fast or as slow as you like, and stay in the center as long as you like. It is nothing more than a suggested route, twisted back and forth on itself in a small space; and what one does in the labyrinth is nothing more than walking. When I walk it alone, there is no one there to enforce what limited rules there are.
There is, however, a box full of pamphlets, which are sometimes partially soaked with rain that has dripped through the lid. On the cover of the pamphlet there is a quote in Latin: Solvitur ambulato (“It is solved by walking”). Inside, the pamphlet states that the labyrinth has been a Christian tool of meditation for many years. It also says that the first labyrinth long pre-dates Christianity, and that the Kabbala of Jewish mysticism, the Hopi medicine wheel, Tibetan sand paintings, and Hindu mandalas are all variations on this form.
I am new to this neighborhood, and when I moved in I was licking the wounds of a living situation gone painfully awry. I was both desperate and terrified to live alone; and once I moved in, it seemed that the solitude was always more intense than the gentle, indulgent privacy I had been hoping for. I spent many evenings pacing the middle-class neighborhood in failing light, wistfully watching fathers tossing a ball with their daughters, idly picking up brochures on houses for sale with re-fabricated interiors. One evening, I found the labyrinth, in the yard of the First Cumberland Presbyterian Church. It was so simple, so straightforward a ritual, that initially it seemed aimless. To walk nowhere, in a circle, and then back again the same way I came.
When I entered, though, my feet slowed. I stayed within the lines, finishing the path, and some surprising sense of the sacred kept me from crossing or moving through it too quickly. The feeling of reverence formed walls as real as stone or wood to guide me to the center and back again. In the center, I sat on a gray marble bench. I was in the same small yard that I had been in before, and yet I was also in a new space. I looked around me and something was different. I got up and moved back through and out the single doorway, feeling as if I had been somewhere. I was not being guided, taught, instructed, or regulated. I was completely alone. But still I followed carefully the lines of stone partly hidden in grass.
Perhaps the most frightening part of solitude for me is that there is no one to please but myself. I cannot bandage anyone else’s wounds, make anyone else laugh, or get instant gratification for acting the way someone else expects me too. I think the same goes for the labyrinth. It seems aimless at first because there is no right way to move through it, just like there is no right way to take a walk. There is no one to please or to follow but myself. The experience is open—open in length, open to the air, open for utilization by multiple religious traditions. It is an unsettling freedom; with only myself to follow, will I be strong enough to lead? What, in the end, will drive me if not the carrots or the sticks of other human beings?
--with appreciation to Christy Brasleton, Joe Gordon Gill, and Dave Harmon
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