A Labyrinth Is An Ancient Device That Compresses A Journey Into A Small Space, Winds Up A Path Like Thread

“A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and actual moments are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground. In this it is the opposite of a maze, which has not one convoluted way but many ways and often no centre, so that wandering has no cease or at least no definitive conclusion. A maze is a conversation; a labyrinth an incantation or perhaps a prayer. In a labyrinth you’re lost in that you don’t know the twists and turns, but if you follow them you get there; and then you reverse your course. The end of the journey through the labyrinth is not at the centre, as is commonly supposed, but back at the threshold again: the beginning is also the real end. That is the home to which you return from the pilgrimage, the adventure. The unpraised edges and margins matter too, because it’s not ultimately a journey of immersion but emergence.”

— Rebecca Solnit in The Faraway Nearby

“One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”

— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Column at the mortuary temple of Ramesses III

In Arabic the word for logos (logic, nous, psyche) is aeql, which literally means “to bond”, forming connections between things.

Lalish village, Yezidi temple, iraq.

“In me burns the most Catholic of longings: to devour the divine.”

— a haiku for the holy eucharist (or: a haiku for a childhood on my knees)