Local labyrinth
Outdoor labyrinth in Vancouver: Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church, 12513 S.E. Mill Plain Blvd., Vancouver.
Some people walk the labyrinth with their palms turned out, looking ahead. Others walk with hands clasped in front of them, gazing at their toes. Elaine Williamson kept a hand over her heart as she put one foot in front of the other, planting her feet — and her intentions — for 2015.
“It’s a good way to start the new year, ’cause you can’t do it wrong,” she said.
Williamson walked relatively quickly through the canvas labyrinth Thursday morning at Vancouver’s First Presbyterian Church. People have different rituals to ring in the new year, whether it’s resolutions or, perhaps, a new look. The annual New Year’s Day labyrinth walk, put on by Sacred Journey Ministries, is another ritual for some.
It’s not necessarily a religious experience, but it can be a spiritual one, said organizer Eunice Schroeder. At the close of a busy holiday season that highlights giving and togetherness, time spent walking the winding path can be used to focus inward.
“I tend to come out feeling refreshed and calmer,” Williamson said.
The first time she walked a labyrinth years ago, she was in the midst of chemotherapy for breast cancer.
“It was something I had always been intrigued by but never done,” she said. “I like the contemplative nature of it.”
She still wears a labyrinth necklace she bought around that time for herself and a friend. Now, she’s on a new journey — caring for her mother, who has dementia.
“To me, it’s just representative of this life path we’re all on,” she said. “All I have is right now. I can’t see ahead. There’s one more twist, one more turn. All I have is that moment, right now.”
The canvas labyrinth is a copy of one embedded in the stone floor of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Chartres, France, built around 1200. Although there are many labyrinth patterns, this one remains arguably the most well-known and well-liked.
Unlike in a maze, you can’t get lost in a labyrinth, which has only one path in and out. That doesn’t mean everyone will walk it the same way.
As Dan Gassoway left the center of the labyrinth and began walking back, he stepped aside to let someone pass him. He accidentally stepped onto a different part of the labyrinth that took him back to the center.
“It was powerful when I went back the second time. I needed to go back. It was part two,” he said.
“It’s different each time, isn’t it?” Schroeder said. “I tell people that everything that happens in a labyrinth has to do with your life.”
“Today, it showed me things to work on,” Gassoway said. “Nobody knows why it works. It just does … some see it as a spiritual thing.”
He took Schroeder’s labyrinth class at Marylhurst University in Portland, where she teaches in the department of religious studies. She has an office at First Presbyterian and occasionally loans her 36-foot canvas labyrinth.
Many people, she said, record their feelings and experiences in a journal after they walk the labyrinth.
“There’s no right or wrong way to do it,” Schroeder said. “It’s just this pattern from ancient times that didn’t come with instructions.”
The symbol has to do with beginnings and endings. How someone walks along it depends on their natural rhythm, and what they get out of it as they enter the new year is something wholly their own.
