The labyrinth
Feb 14 26
Blog by Lynne Pearl
A few weeks ago, I wrote:
The land is asleep and so are the trees, branches against a still sky. It’s the cold at the end of the year and before the beginning. Like a never- ending story.
But this day I found a labyrinth on a cliff top overlooking the sea. Most labyrinths seem to be half hidden dark things but this one was out in the open blown by storms and wind, rain too and the clouds overhead were running.
This labyrinth is set into the ground and is delineated with pebbles, maybe from the beach far blow where the tide moves restlessly, always there. This is interspersed with grass but this time of year it hasn’t been cut for a long time so the pattern is nearly obliterated. It’s not this, not that. A labyrinth is illogical. That is its very existence.
It twists and turns this way and that almost like alive thing, a creature, perhaps from the sea, like the night sea that I wrote about when I was staying down the coast at an old, forgotten hotel:
THE DEVONCOURT HOTEL SEA SONG
March 22
The sea is up in the sky
For me tonight,
The rooks caw flying home
And Aretha sings her prayer
For ever, for all of us,
…
The day slides off, mauve and grey,
Sinking sideways
…And the singing stops suddenly
As if an invisible hand has flung silence upward.
…
Sometimes the path turns back on itself. Today of all days we have sun. Every so often in the ground there are carvings of giant fossils.
It teaches us here to not mind our setbacks
Keep on till you get to the centre. The centre, your centre.
From the centre point you can look straight out to sea, what is out there, depending where you look on landfall for thousands of miles.
It teaches you how to live, to keep on keeping on, to not mind.
Setbacks are for the best.
There is a bigger picture.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7796332.Lynne_Pearl
Art by Cath Whitehead