Grass labyrinth in Centennial Park

To find the site: Head straight down Parkes Drive, past the Cafe Pavilion, through the centre of the park and turn left into Dickens Drive.  Go past Loch Ave, on the left and you’ll find the labyrinth 100m further along Dickens Drive, in the field on the right, just past Lachlan Swamp. Here’s a park map to help you find your way.

We were honoured to be joined by the following Wisdom Keepers at our Interfaith Walk in December. To read their speeches, click on the box on the right.

Back Row: Rev Ben Gilmour, Paddington Uniting Church; Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins, Emanuel Synagogue; Fr Martin Davies, St James Church, King St; Venerable Boan Sunim, Korean Pori Temple, Gordon; Monsignor Tony Doherty, Church of Mary Magdalene, Rose Bay; Emily Simpson, Centennial Park Labyrinth Project

Front Row: Subhana Barzaghi Roshi, Zen BUddhist Centre; Aunty Ali Golding, Aboriginal Elder; Imam Amid Hady, Zetland Mosque

Here’s the speech:

Welcome to this beautiful, peaceful field in this beloved park of ours. For those who haven’t seen one before, this is a labyrinth.  Its looking a bit tatty now, compared to when we first painted it in September, when the grass was thick and thirsty. Now the paths are worn down with use, which is a lovely problem to have.

The first time I walked a labyrinth was only 3 years ago at the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Before I actually saw it, I assumed, as many people do, that it was going to be like a maze.  But a maze and a labyrinth are actually two very different things. A maze has several pathways, lots of dead ends and hedges, all of which are deliberately designed to get you lost – to frustrate and confuse and quite literally amaze you (which is where we get the word). A labyrinth, on the other hand has only one path – there are no walls, or dead ends, so you can’t get lost. You simply follow the same path in and out again. If a maze is a complex intellectual exercise, a labyrinth is a simple spiritual one.

I walked the labyrinth at the Grace Cathedral again and again and came back the next day and walked it some and I fell in love with it. When I got back to Sydney I went looking for one to walk and soon realised there weren’t any. So I submitted a proposal to CP Trust, which they accepted under the proviso that I go and raise all the money and so our fundraising began this time last year.

For those of you who find traditional sitting meditation challenging, monkey mind wont settle down, then walking meditation is a really easy way into that same peaceful place – an easy way to quiet the mind and open the heart. We’ve all had moments when we wanted the world to just stop for a minute, so we could gather ourselves and begin again. The labyrinth is a watering hole for the spirit. A place to bring anxiety, confusion or sorrow and walk your way into the relative clarity and calm of the bigger picture. It offers a literal threshold for us to cross, which can help us to leave behind what no longer serves and step into the new. This labyrinth will become a sanctuary for so many.

Labyrinth walking itself is nothing new. It’s certainly not New Age. It’s an ancient practice, which is being reborn in a growing movement worldwide. The labyrinth has been used as a path of insight and self-reflection for over 4000 years by many different cultures all over the world.  There are ancient examples from Rome and Greece, Scandinavia, India, China and North and South America. It’s a truly universal archetype, a non-denominational symbol whose long winding path acts as a metaphor for our journey through life.  An old fashioned slow-cooking form of contemplation.

In the last two decades in the United States, there have been more than 200 labyrinths built in hospitals alone. In Washington, doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital use their labyrinth to help war veterans with PTSD. There have been hundreds of others built across Europe and the US in universities, parks and schools. There are even desktop labyrinths being used for children with ADD to help them focus and they’re finding that they’re able to concentrate for longer. But it’s not always therapeutic; the labyrinth is also used for all sorts of joyful threshold celebrations like weddings and birthdays. And thousands of people all over the world are installing labyrinths in their gardens.  So, this long forgotten mystical tradition is truly being reborn.

The labyrinth we’re going to build here in this field will be a sandstone replica of the labyrinth from the Chartres Cathedral in France, which was built in 13^th C.  At that time there were more than 20 cathedrals across Europe, which all had labyrinths in them.  They were used as an alternate form of pilgrimage, instead of making the hazardous journey to Jerusalem during the crusades. The labyrinth in Chartres is the most celebrated of it’s kind.   The Centennial Park Labyrinth will be the definitive example in this country – made from heritage grade white sandstone, with black sandstone markings and a 6 ft border to frame it.  The Centennial Parklands Trust have already begun planting a circle of Morton Bay & Port Jackson Fig Trees which will create in time a sense of wonder and discovery about the field, tucked into the heart of the park, away from the activity of the grand drive. It will really feel like a mini-pilgrimage to come here.

Apart from anything else, this labyrinth will be a thing of great beauty – a significant public artwork and the jewel in the crown of the labyrinth revival that is bound to unfold in this country once its built.  The ABC’s Compass program were here last week, filming me painting it. They are going to document the construction of the labyrinth over the year. You may have seen the cover of Wentworth Courier, just before Christmas, with an article about the Interfaith Walk we held with leaders from many different religious traditions all walking the labyrinth together – weaving the threads of their faith into the path. It was incredibly inspiring to witness their compassion in action. One of the wisdom keepers that day was an Aboriginal Elder, Aunty Ali Golding, who told me that the labyrinth felt a bit like a Songline, with everybody finding their way ‘home to country’ together. The labyrinth is a powerful tool for reconciling differences, reminding us that ultimately, we all walk the same path.

So please feel free to walk it before you leave.  There’s no wrong way to walk a labyrinth but the general rule of thumb is that it’s a threefold journey – releasing on the way in, receiving a sense of calm in the stillness of the centre and returning with a new resolve on the way back out.  But there’s truly no wrong way to do it – just find your natural pace and see what’s there for you.  The thing to be aware of is that if someone is going too slow for you, you don’t have to stay politely stuck behind – you can over take and the easiest place to do that is at the turns.  The Trust has given us permission to maintain this temporary painted labyrinth until construction of the sandstone one begins in a few months, so please come back and really take your time with it.

So far, we’ve raised $465K towards the $500K needed to build it.  The funding has come from all walks of life – from the two inspired philanthropists who gave $50K each to the group of Vietnamese women refugees who insisted on contributing an envelope of silver coins.  We’ve had so much support from so many people donating services over the last year – primarily of course from William Zuccon, who is the architect overseeing the project, also from surveyors and geotechnical companies all wanting to help out, and of course all of the wonderful friends who have helped at events over the year

I’d especially like to thank Fiona Playfair for arranging the food and wine tonight and our wonderful guitarist, Richard Charlton who is the Head of Music at Ascham, and who graciously agreed to play for us tonight. Its was always a really important part of the vision of this project to have this labyrinth created by the whole community, so that everyone has a sense of ownership and belonging once its complete.  I see many people here who have already donated, for which I am deeply grateful. For those of you who may have been considering it, now is the time.  Donations of $5000 or more will put your name on the official donor board here.  Its all fully tax-deductible via the Centennial Parklands Foundation.   This labyrinth is going to be a really good thing, which will help many people for many years to come and you have the chance tonight to become part of it.  Thank you and enjoy!

Read the full story and see the pictures here…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1Baxvc8_4k

Location of Sydney Labyrinth in Centennial Park

]]> http://www.sydneylabyrinth.org/labyrinth-location-in-centennial-park/feed/ 0 http://www.sydneylabyrinth.org/walking-a-sacred-path/ http://www.sydneylabyrinth.org/walking-a-sacred-path/#comments Wed, 07 Sep 2011 23:15:45 +0000 Ed http://www.sydneylabyrinth.org/?p=5 Continue reading →]]> I first walked a labyrinth in May 2009 at the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Like many who have never experienced one before, I had assumed it would be like a maze, so I was pleasantly surprised when I saw its simple beauty and actually walked it…and walked it…again and again and came back the next day to walk it some more, slower and slower. I felt reeled in by its mystery, held by the structure of its winding path and liberated by the stillness at its heart. I fell in love with the labyrinth and the whole idea of walking meditation.

I’d been in a sort of emotional cocoon for sometime after a series of sudden leavings and endings and many of my definitions of self had simply fallen away. It wasn’t until I walked the labyrinth that I felt the possibility of a light at the end of the tunnel. Somehow the rhythm of its path gave me back a spiritual pulse. I felt held by the structure of its winding path and received by the mystery at its heart.

I hadn’t felt this lit up about anything for years and read every book I could find on the subject. Realising that there were no public labyrinths in Sydney, I created a proposal for the Board of Trustees of Centennial Park to inspire them to build one. Providing public spaces for contemplation is more important now than ever before. We need a new paradigm for non-denominational sacred space and opportunities to centre, calm and remember ourselves.

On the first day of Spring last year, my proposal to build a sandstone labyrinth in Centennial Park was approved by the Centennial Parkland Trustees. We now begin the journey of gathering the $500,000 required to build it. Based on the design of the 800 year old labyrinth in the Chartres Cathedral in France, the Sydney labyrinth will be a thing of great beauty – a significant public artwork in an iconic Sydney park.

Thank you for visiting this site and if you choose to contribute by making a tax-deductible donation, you will be investing in community well-being for generations to come.

May your path be peaceful

Emily Simpson

January 2012

Maze: multiple pathways

A labyrinth, on the other hand has a single pathway and there are no dead ends so you can’t get lost. A maze is an intellectual exercise and a labyrinth is a spiritual one –  a simple, contemplative pathway which quiets the mind and opens the heart.

Classical Labyrinth: single path

Medieval Labyrinth: single path

The most famous labyrinth is in the Chartres Cathedral in France.  It was built in the early 13th Century and was seen as an alternate form of pilgrimage.  During the crusades, the journey to Jerusalem was too dangerous, so people would make their way to one of six Cathedrals in France, which at that time had labyrinths in them.

                         Chartres Cathedral Labyrinth                               Photo ©: Jeff Saward/Labyrinthos

But the labyrinth doesn’t belong to Christianity alone. There are Neolithic petroglyphs of the Classical design labyrinth in Spain.  The Romans had labyrinth mosaic floors and there are examples of pottery from 7^th century BC with labyrinth design. The Greeks used the labyrinth in their currency.

      Coin from Knossos. 3rd Century BC       Photo ©: Jeff Saward/Labyrinthos

                        Roman Mosaic Floor                                  Photo ©: Jeff Saward/Labyrinthos

There are turf labyrinths in the UK and Germany, usually found on village greens, some of which are documented to have been walked for over 500 years. There are hundreds of examples of stone labyrinths in Scandinavia built on coastal headlands.  There are also ancient examples in India and in North and South America.

Turf Labyrinth, Comberton, UK       Photo ©: Jeff Saward/Labyrinthos

Stone Labyrinth, Nyhamn, Sweden   Photo ©: Jeff Saward/Labyrinthos

Use of the Labyrinth in Europe fell out of favour sometime around the end of the 17^th century, coinciding with the cultural shift in emphasis to rational, linear thinking.  It was also around this time that mazes began to be introduced into garden design.

In the last few decades there’s been a revival of interest in the labyrinth and a return to this form of ‘slow cooking’ contemplation. In the last 15 years in the United States, there have been more than 200 labyrinths built in hospitals alone, including Bethesda Naval Hospital near Washington DC, where the labyrinth is being used to help veterans with PTSD. They’re also being built in universities, public parks, schools and thousands of people are building them in their backyards.

  Granite Labyrinth, Indiana, USA      Photo ©: Jeff Saward/Labyrinthos

Washington, USA        Photo ©: Robert Ferre

 All images are the property of Jeff Saward / Labyrinthos 

www.labyrinthos.net

Dr Lauren Artress, who is the leading force in the use of the labyrinth as a spiritual practice, spoke to us recently about what it means and how we might approach it.

“Lauren Artress, an Episcopal priest and  psychotherapist largely considered responsible for sparking the labyrinth movement…” ~ O Magazine

“The modern-day bloom of labyrinths in this country can be traced to a restless Episcopal priest in California, the Reverend Dr. Lauren Artress, a psychotherapist with a divinity degree, who had already been pushing the envelope of traditional practice as a canon at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.”  New York Times

Shopping is hard work; sometimes fun but always knackering. Christmas shopping in particular leaves you wrung out, not because of its physical demands but because of the constant decision-state required.

Will great uncle Zanzibar like those particular sock stripes, or that particular snuff (movie)? What is there to which cousin Grace will give houseroom that won’t cost more to airmail than the entire relationship is worth? And in any case will it arrive in time?

Yet this – this yearning for control, this relentless decision-greed – is what leaves modern humanity so stressed out.

For with every decision comes responsibility. Even if it’s only responsibility to yourself (to ensure you’re not imbibing long-chain polymers in your water or giving yourself nano-cancer with your sunscreen), the constant need to make potentially life-death decisions with inadequate information is ceaseless. This can leave you – or at least me – feeling weirdly cirrus up there in the stratosphere; thin, wispy and dangerously blurred. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that the inverse also holds; that deprivation of choice can be a meditation.

I’ve never been a meditation person – which is odd, because I’m an obvious case for treatment.

But to my mind transcendental meditation, is the sole reason (apart from his beautiful hands) for Clint Eastwood’s screen-idol superiority over more worldly heroes like John Wayne or Gary Cooper. Indeed, I’d say it was transcendental meditation – and Ennio Morricone’s theme tune – that made The Good, the Bad and the Ugly one of the best films of all time.

But, envy it as I may, I cannot seem to stay still long enough to meditate. And if I do, I’m emitting zeds before I get close to nothing frame-of-mind. Vacuity remains an impossible, enviable grail. (I’m thinking cranial irrigation? Lobotomy?)

I make do. Swimming is good. Walking too offers a good mix of mental emetic and neuronal lullaby; a sense of stillness without the fact, which may be why I was intrigued enough recently to walk my first labyrinth.

Labyrinths, for the first time since the 13th century, are big. In California people build their own and walk them daily. The labyrinth is the new pool – although without the pool-man and attendant possibilities. (Perhaps the labyrinth comes with its own hedge-man? Drystone-waller? Topiarist? I do love a good peacock.)

But labyrinthing (needs a good verb – Ed) is serious women’s business. Sally Quinn, columnist for The Washington Post, has a labyrinth, a concrete ground-pattern in the woods. She walks it regularly and swears that doing so has changed not just her life but also that of her son, who had severe learning difficulties.

Here in Australia, Labyrinth Link Australia lists 82 labyrinths, 29 of them in Victoria. Most are private, though often rentable, with the rest mainly owned by churches and community groups. Many, like the one I walked in Mosman the other day, are replicas of the best-known labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral. All are used for therapy, focus, inspiration, relaxation and contemplation.

But a labyrinth is a maze, right? Somewhere between the minotaur’s prison and Harry Potter’s enchanted maze, designed to bewitch and befuddle. What’s so relaxing about that?

Well nothing. Wrong. A labyrinth is not a maze. The dictionary makes them synonyms but the terms as used are almost direct opposites. Where a labyrinth is unicursal (or single-pathed), a maze is multicursal. This small difference is a game-changer, because it’s about choice – and its absence.

A maze, being multi-pathed, is a series of decision-points, any one of which could result in terminal confusion. A maze is therefore a struggle, a puzzle, a test. A labyrinth, having only one path, requires no decisions, so its complications become instead a sort of dance, engendering a curious feeling of trust.

Emily Simpson is the proponent of Sydney’s first public labyrinth, recently approved near the Willow Pond in Centennial Park. As she puts it, the maze is an intellectual exercise while the labyrinth is a spiritual one.

This all sounds terribly new agey, not least because it’s actually old-age, bronze age to be precise. Appearing across ancient Peru, Crete, Troy and Jericho, the labyrinth is said to have been used by old Norse-folk to propitiate good harvest and by Hindu midwives to relax the birth canal.

But the labyrinth, converted up by the Romans into something that looks disturbingly like a brain diagram, flowered in the churches and cathedrals of 12th-14th century Europe. No-one is sure just how they were used. Some engravings look more like part of a social ritual, with people running the labyrinth even during services. One description from Auxerre tells of a game that involved pre-vespers dancing and ball-throwing among the clergy, through the 15th and 16th centuries (until the practice was outlawed in 1538).

More curious is whether, and how, labyrinths work as meditative tools. A walk has three stages; the walk in (purgation or release), the still centre (illumination or receiving) and the walk out (union or returning).

As a card-carrying sceptic, I’m hardly the ideal subject for this experiment. Yet despite this, and 30 or so other humans, I did experience a delicious, timeless trance and a lingering wellbeing.

And there’s this. As trances go, labyrinth-walking is significantly more fun, and significantly less expensive, than the retail-hypnosis induced by your local Westfield. New Year’s resolution: reduce over-choice. Shop less, meditate more.

Emily Simpson will run monthly labyrinth walks at Mosman Art Gallery from February 5.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/leave-behind-the-retail-maze-zen-is-just-a-single-path-away-20111228-1pcvl.html#ixzz1hqzPEVVD