But Is It Lit? // The Lancaster Labyrinth 2014-2015 Pamphlet
So, I’m off work for a few weeks. Like any writer, this means I’m damn determined to write more, use this time wisely, and finish projects once and for all.
But of course I’m doing things like taking more walks. Definitely walking more than writing. It’s a little cold for the bike, and I’m feeling chubby these days, what with all the Christmas cookies, so I’m trying to move more. It’s a distraction from writing, a diversion of my valuable time. But hey, they say walks are excellent for creativity anyway. So, I walk. I’m walking.
Although, a lot of my walks tend to end a few blocks down the street at Chestnut Hill Cafe. It’s here, each time I walk in the door and survey the shop, where I always come across this simple, pink, mysterious tri-fold pamphlet, not unlike the one I made for a project in 4th grade (I was, I think, assigned to convince my classmates to travel to Costa Rica). There’s a symbol on the front that, although intricate and geometrical, always brings a religious connotation to my mind. Until this week, I’d never actually picked the thing up.
As the pamphlet states, “It is a safe, healing place for quieting a restless mind.” The Lancaster Labyrinth is a walk you take to heal. It’s also a walk you can only take once a month, as the front page informs that it’s only open on First Sundays, for three hours. Apparently, behind the doors of the Unitarian Universalist Church, right across Pine Street from the Cafe, is a twisting, symmetrical maze that leads the walker to a center shaped like a 6 leaf clover.
“You can’t get lost in the Lancaster Labyrinth. It is a pathway leading to a sacred center and back out again,” the pamphlet assures. I took this to be some mystical mumbo-jumbo. You can’t get lost when you have yourself and know your mind and the stars and blah blah blah. I was excited; My mind started racing through the schema I have for Labyrinths, all of them from movies and literature…
I pictured Pan’s Labyrinth, hoped that this clover-center held none other than a saggy-skinned monster who holds his eyes in the palms of his hands. Next, I was reminded of the terror of House Of Leaves, the chapter I felt lost in as I was reading it, the Minotaur, the darkness somehow hiding in that geometrically impossible house. Last of course, The Shining, and Jack frozen to dumb death in the snow. If this place was anything like these literary horrors, I was in. Sign me up. Coffee can wait. Of course, so can my writing. I picked up my bookbag and was ready to head across the street to get lost.
Alas, it wasn’t Sunday, so I decided to satisfy—but instead I extinguished—my curiosity by googling the Lancaster Labyrinth. Was it deep in the basement? Was it lit by fires? Was it made of ancient sandstone and bone?
If I’d have read the pamphlet a bit closer (specifically the part where it says the Labyrinth is “inlaid in [the] floor” of the church) the pictures I found on google images wouldn’t have been so disappointing. There are no walls, just a pattern on the floor. The free entrance to the maze should have also sent a sign: this is not like the thing you have in mind.
Like most things, too good to be true. Like my fantasy of getting stories finished. Like all fantasies, really.
You cannot get lost in the Lancaster Labyrinth. Ah, so literal now. Of course you can’t. What is even the point? No disorienting directions, no dead-ends, nothing chasing you? Not even walls? Just a pattern on the floor, like those rugs made to look like towns, on which I’d drive my race cars up and down, pretending I was the omniscient god of some great Grand Prix.
After I sat in the cafe, ate a blueberry scone, tried to write a mere 200 words to feel justified, I walked home. During this walk, I had some ideas. A story about a kid playing swords with the broken pieces of a curbside big-screen. A poem made by using only the text found on my block’s road signs. Words jumped out at me. I left my head. I walked past my house.
Later, as I was jotting down notes on these ideas, I took another look at the plain, poorly designed pamphlet. Maybe this was more than a pamphlet? (Probably going to write a story told in the form of a pamphlet now…) I could see it being so much more. If I walked myself down to the UUC to tread this allegedly powerful course, maybe I could use my imagination. Maybe there I could put my head in the right place, free of expectations, open to a muse. Maybe I could kick myself in the creative ass. After all, what were these Labyrinths of my memories, the ones I read about? I have to imagine them to make them real. I imagine them anew every time I remember. If a walk can make you better in any way (healthier, more creative), I think it takes some effort on the part of the recipient.
Is this pamphlet lit? I don’t know, probably not, but it could be. If I try.
The epilogue to this story is that I added a note to my Google calendar: “Sunday, Feb. 1st, 2015: 1-4pm: LABYRINTH”.
“Seek not from without, but from WITHIN” says the pamphlet, caps not mine.
I’ll let you know what I see when I look.