David's Inferno (32 page)

A
CENTURY BEFORE
Dante began writing
The Divine Comedy
, some French monks 750 miles away were laying out
their
vision of a spiritual journey.

For most religions and spiritual traditions, that journey leads to some ultimate goal. Whether it's Heaven, enlightenment, a blissful merging with God, or a better life next time around, the general direction of the journey is
up there
.

With all due respect to Jules Verne, the depths of the earth are fathomable. Every kid knows that … eventually you get to China. Or in Dante's case, somewhere off the east coast of New Zealand. But the sky … that's truly beyond any fathoming. If there's a great beyond, it's
up
there.

Dante provided as powerful an image of this as anybody ever has. Down, down, down into the depths of Hell. Until you burst through to the other side, behold the Mountain of Purgatory, and start working your way
up
toward Paradise.

In our ecumenical age, followers of just about any religion or spiritual path will graciously acknowledge that there are many paths that, ultimately, take you to the same place. The top of the same mountain. All that matters is that you keep going up and not in circles. In fact, most spiritual teachers would advise you
not
to follow
my
path—the Way of Dave—which involves crisscrossing all over the place ‘til you don't know whether you're coming or going.

So, what were those very Christian monks doing when they laid paving stones in the form of a
labyrinth
—a two-dimensional design that goes
nowhere
, on the floor of the nave at Chartres Cathedral in the early 1200s?

They weren't rejecting the idea that heaven is
up there
. One look at the Rose Window makes that awe-inspiringly clear. Yet, where the monks' mortal feet hit the floor—almost invisible to all those eyes gazing upward—they built a labyrinth. A labyrinth. You walk to the center. You walk out. Seemingly no further along or higher up than when you started. You can make it a kind of pilgrimage—some walk it on their knees—but you still end up back where you started.

As a living representation of a soul's journey, however, it's easily as powerful an image as Dante's. In fact, having now seen the limits of perfection, he'd probably prefer it.

The labyrinth at Chartres is the first one I ever saw. It was the summer of 1976 and I was with a group of people searching for enlightenment or some reasonable facsimile. We were there on the summer solstice because that's one of the few days the labyrinth isn't covered with chairs. It's also the day that a fairly perfect circle of sunlight falls in a certain way on a certain flagstone that's set somewhat askew.

The labyrinth didn't make much of an impression on me. Neither did the circle of light, around which my friends were crowded in the hopes of seeing the face of God. Thanks to too little sleep and too much cognac, I was in a fit of manic transcendence and saw God just about everywhere. In fact, I was beginning to wish he'd leave me alone so I could find some inconspicuous corner and take a nap.

In subsequent years, I walked my share of labyrinths. Although I respected the spiritual intentions of them, I was usually only going along for the ride. Either I was at some kind of meditation retreat where everybody was walking a labyrinth, so I walked it; or Wendy had heard about one that someone had constructed nearby and wanted to walk it, so I joined her.

By the way, labyrinths are different from mazes. This is important symbolically as well as practically. You can get lost in a maze—theoretically forever—without ever finding your way out. You
can't
get lost in a labyrinth. If you walk in one direction, you end up in the center. If you walk in the other direction, you find yourself back at the beginning.

The terms, unfortunately, are often used interchangeably. This is partly due to the famous legend about a brave Athenian prince named Theseus who decided to take on a ravenous monster named a Minotaur who had an unfortunate taste for young Athenian children and allegedly lived in the center of a labyrinth. But that was no labyrinth … that was a maze. We know this because Theseus tied a ball of string to the entry door and unrolled it behind him as he went in so he could always find his way out. If it had really been a labyrinth, he wouldn't have needed the ball of string. He could have just turned around and run like the bejeezus in the other direction.

Labyrinths have been built for thousands of years. From Rome to Scandinavia. Here in America, a major building boom began when the coming of the “Age of Aquarius” segued into the “New Age.” Now you can find them in all sorts of public places—from corporate retreat centers to hospitals.

They range from simple seven-circuit labyrinths, maybe 20 to 30 feet wide to eleven-circuit labyrinths of 100 feet wide or more. The one at Chartres is only about 40 feet, which makes it almost impossible for two people to pass each other while staying between the lines. Perhaps, it was designed specifically for solitary walking. So the only person you pass coming and going is yourself.

Walking a labyrinth guides you unerringly along a series of gentle switchbacks, sometimes drawing you towards the center and sometimes swinging you to the outer circle where you feel like the trailing end of a comet looping out and in around the earth. After a while you find yourself at the center—which, for some reason, always seems to come up on you suddenly. Then you walk back out. Most people go at a leisurely pace. It usually takes anywhere from
15 to 30 minutes. Although, depending on the size of the labyrinth, a serious Buddhist doing
kinhin
(Zen walking meditation) could easily stretch it out to 45 minutes. As far as I know, the unofficial world speed record is held by an 11-year-old boy who ran in and out of an eleven-circuit, 100+-foot-wide labyrinth in 2 minutes and 42 seconds.

There are all kinds of books about the occult wisdom buried in labyrinth design and the healing effect walking one can have on your body, mind, and spirit. While it's technically considered a meditative activity, the experts insist that there's no “right” way to do it. Walk fast. Walk slow. Still your mind. Let your mind chatter away. Doesn't matter. Just walk the labyrinth … all the way into the center and then all the way out. Let the labyrinth do the work. Bored? Not to worry, you won't go to Hell if you decide just to step over the lines and walk out. (Try not to bump into anybody.)

To me, the way it works is kind of like the car I once had that came with a digital compass near the visor. To calibrate it correctly, you had to go to an empty parking lot and drive around in several complete tight circles. I think that's one of the things walking a labyrinth does. It sort of recalibrates you. I've emerged feeling calmer. I've emerged feeling exactly the same. I've emerged with my mind more still. I've emerged bursting with new ideas.

Regardless, I've always walked out a different person than I walked in.

Every year, I cut a cord or so of wood to heat my cabin. Although not much wood, it still leaves behind a lot of slash which, like any guy with a chainsaw, I throw into halfhearted piles, hoping it will have the decency to decompose as quickly as possible.

In early 2005, however, a weird thing started happening: The brush began intertwining itself into orderly circles around trees. Soon—as if the elves or aliens were getting increasingly bold—the branches started wending their way around several trees and even around curves in the paths.

Wending
is right. As quickly as I was creating chaos out of order, Wendy was doing the opposite. Until then, I'd always considered the idea of building a labyrinth in the woods behind our house to be one of her artistic visions that might be inspired, but would never see the light of day.

The intertwining branches thing changed that. Not only could I finally see what had been in her mind's eye all along, but I realized that clearing the area, collecting branches, and laying out the circles would require a combination of light mental focus with a reasonable amount of physical activity—which was, at the time, definitely my kind of job.

More important, I superstitiously hoped that building one might reconfigure me in some way or, at the very least, buy me enough spiritual credits to make a persuasive argument to Dympha (the patron saint of the mentally ill) that she should perform a miracle on my behalf.

In late 2005, shortly after my breakdown, we began building our labyrinth
. As soon as we decided to build one, I knew the perfect place. While most of our land is a mixture of maple, beech, oak, aspen, and hemlock ranging from adolescence to old age (100+), there was a small plateau covered with baby beech saplings crying out to have a labyrinth built on it. (I hear these things.)

My first job was to cut enough of those saplings for us to layout the circles without continually having our eyes gouged out by twig-size branches. Remarkably—considering I usually went out equipped with nothing but a chainsaw and an abundance of nervous energy—I showed remarkable restraint. So much so, that even now I occasionally remove a few more saplings to make the paths a little easier to walk without losing the forest feel.

Most projects that Wendy and I work on together begin with a uniquely creative glimmer in Wendy's mind's eye. I translate this glimmer into a blast of activity that, while corresponding vaguely with her vision, does more to tell her what she
doesn't
have in mind than what she does.

Whenever a decision has to be made, I focus on how to make it as quickly as possible so I can get back to work as quickly as possible … figuring I can always double back to fix things later. Wendy's focus is to keep looking, waiting for the right solution to appear. Because, from her perspective, once you've committed to a specific course of action you may never be able to repair any unforeseen damage, thereby falling further from perfection with every step.

Still, contrary to all laws of our respective human natures, we've worked together successfully on many “projects,” our marriage being far and away the most impressive.

Back in the late fall of 2005, as both the days and I became progressively darker, we did the preliminary work. This involved a lot of stakes, strings, branches, and pauses, as we (she) evaluated the aesthetics of different path widths and overall dimensions.

By the time I got back from my road trip out west the following spring, Wendy had realized there was no reason the outer paths couldn't veer off a little, a few feet down a bank. So, over the next month I worked in fits and starts to shift the preliminary circles outward, extending the width eventually to more than 125 feet, about three times larger than the one at Chartres. We weren't trying to show off. In fact, we've almost never shown the labyrinth to anyone. And, with a few years of neglect, it will dissolve back into the earth, a whisper of its former self. Rather, even the most irreverent voices within me will admit that the labyrinth was already there … we just had to see where it was so we could lay branches on top of it.

On Mother's Day weekend 2006, the rains came
. And came. Ending that perfect spring and culminating in epic floods in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

We didn't have any floods in Vermont that time, but the rains kept coming. We had only four sunny days between Mother's and Father's Day in 2006—not the best weather for a depressive and the death knell for most lilac blooms, apple blossoms, as well as my work on the labyrinth. Walking around in damp woods, slowly
picking up and laying down sticks just wasn't my idea of fun—especially since that year's crop of black flies, mosquitoes, and deer flies all developed an uncommon fondness for the skin I was trying not to jump out of.

That November, however, after laying the stone pathway, building the bridge, uprooting the
Rosa multiflora
and, most importantly, having the septic tank pumped, I returned to the labyrinth.

Intuitively, you'd think you build a labyrinth by laying down paths. Actually, you make the circles and then figure out where the “cuts” are. Then, to make the turns, you just round the branches from one border onto the adjacent one. Trust me, it makes sense.

And so I dragged and collected branches, cut a tree here and there, and made circles of branches, with bigger logs on the outside; Wendy joined me occasionally, or more often, worked separately, adjusting my work.

One day in late December 2006, diagram and compass in hand, I hammered stakes at the north, south, east, and west nodes and began making the cuts and curves. When Wendy came out to look, she felt something was off. It took a little while for her to realize the problem: I was working based on magnetic north as opposed to true north.

And so, at high noon on one of the shortest days of the year, I marched with uncommon confidence out to the labyrinth with an old Boy Scout handbook, an old-fashioned watch with hands, and a 12d finish nail. (The Boy Scouts use a toothpick, but that's 'cause, unlike me, they usually aren't prepared with a 12d nail.) After I moved the stakes, Wendy came out to see if I'd earned my Merit Badge. She still looked at the north node rather suspiciously, but I held up my Boy Scout handbook and she yielded to superior wisdom.