Subliminal pun absolutely intended.
By Sally Quinn, Special to CNN
When I tell people I have a labyrinth and that I walk it regularly, most have no idea what I’m talking about.
They think a labyrinth is a maze, a place you walk into and then have trouble finding your way out.
In fact it is just the opposite. A labyrinth is a place you go to get found.
For many, walking the labyrinth is a religious experience. There are many famous labyrinths in churches, the most famous being the one on the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France, which dates to the 13th century.
Others see it as more spiritual. Some find it a meditation tool or walk it simply for the peace and serenity that come from being alone and contemplating a problem or issue.
For me it is all of those things. It is a sacred space.
I first encountered a labyrinth at a California spa about 15 years ago. I’d never heard of a labyrinth before and, though some at the spa said it had changed people’s lives, I was skeptical.
But I agreed to give it a try. There was a ceremony in the evening, with torches and drums, and about 30 of us there to do the walk.
I loved the ritual but didn’t really get much out of it. Too many people.
Still, there was something that appealed to me. So the next day, I went up to the grove of live oaks on the hill where the labyrinth was situated. There was nobody there.
I paused at the entrance and took in the surroundings. There was a slight breeze whispering though the leaves and the late afternoon sun had warmed the circle.
I began concentrating on my son Quinn, who had severe learning disabilities at the time and was in a special school. What would become of him? We had had a particularly difficult year and I was in despair.
I entered the labyrinth and began to make my way slowly toward the center. Once I got there I sat down and looked straight ahead. My eyes fell on a huge pine tree in front of me that I hadn’t noticed before.
It had beautiful spreading boughs, as though it was embracing the circle of the labyrinth. It was one of the prettiest trees I had ever seen and it was the only pine amid the live oaks.
I suddenly experienced a shocking stroke of clarity. That tree was Quinn.
He was different from all the other trees but he was more beautiful than they were. I began to cry. How could I not have realized this all along?
That moment transformed my whole view of my son and of me, along with my attitude toward his problems. Not only was he beautiful but he could use his differences to his advantage, helping others at the same time.
The following year I had a reservation to go back to the same spa. Quinn was scheduled to have cognitive testing the week before I left. At the last minute, they had to change the date for when I was to be away.
My husband convinced me to go anyway.
The hour of his testing I went up to the labyrinth, found my way to the circle and concentrated on Quinn for the whole time I knew he would be doing tests.
Later, when we went back to the hospital for the results, we were not optimistic. Quinn had performed poorly on most of the earlier tests. But the doctors said he had the highest score of anyone they had ever seen on one of the tests.
“What was that?” I asked. “The maze,” said the doctor.
Since then, Quinn has written a book, “A Different Life,” about growing up with learning disabilities (we now refer to them as learning differences) and has launched a website called friendsofquinn.com for young adults with learning differences and their friends and families.
He is happily married and has a full and successful life.
I’m not sure I can totally attest to the fact that this is because of walking the labyrinth that first day. But I can say this: Because I told him about my experience with the pine and the oaks, he decided to make a life using his problems to help others.
He has completely accepted who he is and his limitations and has a sense of humor about himself and his issues. His motto for the site is “own it.” And he has.
Does all this add up to a religious experience? Call it what you will. All I know is that my life has become much richer by walking the labyrinth.
Mine is modeled after the one at Chartres Cathedral. It is a 50-foot concrete circle on a slope overlooking a river in the country southern Maryland, surrounded by woods.
It has a path carved into it leading to the center, which is where I meditate.
I always begin my labyrinth walk by concentrating on something I need to find an answer to. I walk slowly at first, really trying to lose myself in my thoughts. The slowness is important because it gives me time to focus on whatever the issue is.
Once I get to the center of the circle, I start meditating. Sometimes I just stand and look out at the river. I might stay there for 10 or 15 minutes.
Other times I sit cross-legged for an hour or so. There are times, too, where I lie down in a spread eagle position or in a corpse pose, or chaturanga, and close my eyes.
I’ve stayed in those positions for hours at a time, completely losing myself to the experience
For me, achieving clarity is the most important benefit of walking the labyrinth. It has happened so many times that I now expect it.
I can walk in the woods or on the beach for hours, thinking about a problem and not be able to come up with a solution. Yet I can spend 15 or 20 minutes on the labyrinth and solve everything.
Supposedly the folded path pattern on the labyrinth mimics the pattern of our brains. Whatever it is, it works for me.
Ms. Quinn's sharing impacted me on several levels, among them the fact that I had, sometime back, a similar experience.
Went like this...
It was a Tuesday, as I recall, autumn, the air filled with that crispness that only the first teasing winds of winter can provide.
After mercifully reaching the just past five phase of yet another underpaid, overtaxed nine to five, I found myself standing in a long line of people. A virtual melting pot of faces, races, creeds, colors and genders (well, actually just two genders that I could be sure of, but, who's to say there wasn't a Chaz Bono type or two quietly in the queue?).
The line moved forward, but at a turtle's pace, not unlike, come to think of it, another day at the DMV or the express lane at the Winn Dixie, you know that feeling, the feeling that you're going to grow old and die there, missing out on the wedding of your child, the birth of your grandchildren, your own fiftieth anniversary surprise party because no one on this mortal coil seems to know how to either fill out a license renewal application correctly or grasp the numerical complexity of having less than fifty items at the checkout clearly marked for ten items or less.
Nearly overcome with a sense of defeat and despair, I felt an urgent temptation to give up, to just walk away, to get out off that excruciatingly slow conveyor, leave that line and try to wander my way back to some sense of reality.
Something made me stand there, though. Maybe it was that innate sense we all possess that tells us that, regardless of the darkness, there is a light to be found if we just remain steadfast in our faith, if we just believe that we can achieve.
Then again, maybe it was that feeling we all have that we've made it this far with the ice cream starting to drip in our little plastic grocery basket and we're bound, damned and determined to have our moment at the scanner.
Whatever the motivation, I knew I had to see this thing through.
Soon, well, not soon, but eventually, I came to a clearing of the masses, the line more behind me than ahead, the herd thinned, enough for me to see what I had not been able to see before.
A curtain, open just enough for me to see there was something of interest behind, still closed just enough to entice and intrigue me. A glimmer of light here, a flash of illumination there and the every now and then sound of a ding, not unlike that ding you hear when the elevator door opens or when that department store ding thing goes off and you find yourself pondering, for a fleeting moment, what the hell is dinging in the housewares/mens's fragrance department of Macy's?
Instinctively, I walked slowly to the curtain, tentative, unsure, yet guided by an inner voice, a voice that was telling me that if I simply stepped behind the curtain, took a leap of faith, ran head long toward the roar, I would find the answers I so longingly longed for and searchingly searched for.
And then...and I can't say exactly when (not so much because of the mysticism of the moment as much as the fact that my watch was running fast and there was no clock on the walls around me), I found myself behind that curtain, a curtain that closed quickly behind me, my heart skippingly skipping a beat, my pulse racingly racing, my head swimmingly swimming, my blood sugar obviously low from crashing after nothing more than a couple of Reese's Cups scarfed down while standing in that damn line for what seemed like a complete television season.
In front of me, simple in its simpleness, complex in its complexity, staggering in its staggeringish-ness-ity...the maze.
Buttons and levers and flippers (oh, my) and labels, oh the labels, names and titles and parenthesis and punctuations and each placed in a mathematically pristine order and alignment, like some kind of mechanical Rubik's Cube, beckoning me to find a solution, but silently mocking me, me, a mere human, standing on the doorstep of the horizon of the threshold of a plane of existence I could only begin to comprehend with merely a mortal's grasp of infinity and a wheelbarrow full of moxy to get me finishingly across the finish line.
Closing my eyes, breathing deeply and exhaling slowly, I summoned up whatever energy I could find in the deepest, most essential deep essential part of me and with no more than the belief that I could do what needed to be done and faith that it wasn't unbelievable to believe that I could do what needed to be done, I reached out and, as if guided by some inner nagging wife, let my fingers do their fingering, buttons pushingly pushed, flippers flippingly flipped, levers leveringly, well, levers leveled, a blinding, blurry frenzy of flying fingers, dancing digits, awesome appendages, I was man possessed, letting myself focus only on being totally unfocused, zeroing in only on being unzeroed, it was a precious few, positively pristine moments of pure human energy harnessed and yet not, effort spent and yet not, a watercolor painting gone all awry and askew, a steamy, foggy, hazy, lazy, crazy days of summer burp in the space time continuum, a really, really bad scene from one of those artsy fartsy movies that makes you feel like taking the director out and beating him bout the head and shoulders...and then......and then........and then.....
...as quickly as it had begun, and happened, it was over....my return to the awareness of my physical existence facilitated by the pushing of one last, final, aint no more buttons to push button...and that damn housewares/men's fragrance department ding thing.
The curtain behind me opened, I turned and I stepped into the harsh, and yet blinding, light of what felt in my heart of hearts place in my heart like a brand new day, a clean slate, a fresh beginning, a new chapter, another piece of pie, a fresh shirt, a new handi wipe not all grungy from that black shit that refused to come off the counter top...
...and the feeling I felt felt like no other feeling I had ever felt....a feeling that I had made it through the maze, that I had conquered the unconquerable, that I had defeated the undefeatable...
...I was amazed that I had mastered the maze...that I had labored the labyrinth, surmounted the solution, porked the puzzle....
And I knew, I just knew in that place where we know what we know and we eventually knew what we knew we would know that my efforts would not be in vain, that I had successfully navigated the sea of uncertainty and that my willingness to stick it out, to have faith, to believe, would result in a upheaval of evil unlike any in the history of mankind, a cry of freedom so loud that it didn't even come close to that cry of freedom Mel Gibson did in Braveheart, at the end there, when they put that really sharp and pointy thing, like, totally into his crotch.
The maze mastered, I knew the clouds would clear and the fog would fade and the mist would, well...not be misty.
Turns out, later that night, when all the returns were counted, those who won gave the same tired victory speeches, those who lost gave the same tired concession speeches and by the start of business the next day, they were all back to recognizing the gentleman/woman from the great state of whatever and hosing us with just about every move they made.
Sally Quinn seems like a nice lady.
And she seems to have found some kind of peace at the end of her labyrinth.
Maybe she should take a crack at using that ability for the good of all.
And run for Congress.
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