labyrinthine thoughts

Rain. Much colder, getting colder. I came to campus to swim, but the open swim is closed (that's what I'm told, in those words!) so that volley ball players can use all the locker rooms. (Thanks a bunch, Claire and Zoe!) So, to the labyrinth, with the intention of going deeper. Slower, deeper. Stepping into deep dreaming space, circling towards union. Greet the beech tree first: the "three ladies" are hugely bigger than I remember them: my photographs, which I've been looking at all week, have no reference for scale, and make them look small, graceful, like normal size tree trunks. In fact they are huge and graceful. The trunk of this tree is enormous, much thicker than one would expect from the overall profile of the tree. In my paper I compared these three trunks to my grandmother, my mother, and me. Does their surprising size tell me something about us, our deceptive, unobvious size and power? I sneak a wilderness pee under the shelter of the tree's hanging branches. No one around, no one watching, but I feel illicit, get away with it.

Going deeper already, I sense/imagine down into the earth, the curve of the hill, picturing/feeling grass over earth over rock.

Read the photos from top to bottom, or from bottom to top. I meant the one on the bottom to be the first, but I do not know how to control where they are inserted, and the Serendip fairy put each one above the one before. So, ok.

Nor do I know how to write in between or below-- so here is the story. Maybe it is a puzzle for you, to match each caption to the right picture.

Back in the "real" world.

Still ghostly.

The house my mother grew up in: 210 Roberts Road. Ghostly-- the camera decided to make it ghostly. Camera gremlin, or something I touched by "mistake".

View back toward campus from Cambrian Row. With poppies. (They are not poppies, but they look like poppies in the picture.)

Roots.

Three ladies = one beech tree.

Labyrinth from below.

Labyrinth map, from memory.

No, I must admit, the labyrinth does not have the magical feel I was expecting from it. But maybe I have not found its spirit. Maybe this picturing is part of penetrating. Walking to the center does not equal discovering the mystery.

Go deeper. Where one enters, it's the third circle. That was the key to drawing the map.