marine jasper (www.rocksonline.com)

The photo header on this page is a labyrinth. Kenton and I built it two summers ago in our back garden, which had languished under a cover of rank African grass that had sent its snaky roots far and wide. Kenton had been spading it out yard by yard until we got the idea to build a small labyrinth. Our back yard is not large, but we came up with a design for a simple three-turn Cretan labyrinth that would be walkable and fit gracefully in about a 10′ x 14′ space once the grass was extirpated (thanks, grass, and good bye!)

It helped that we have literally tons of rocks on our property. This was discovered when we started digging toward the foundations to clear the way for the fumigation tenting (a universal ritual here in termite country when houses change hands). Amid the black widow spiders scampering out of their comfortable hidey-holes (in the warm December weather, boots, gloves, long sleeves and jeans were worn) we found a treasure trove. Every spade thrust turned up rocks, beautiful rocks. Some had been sawn and polished on a face, others were rough. Some of our very favorites are the dramatic poppy jasper, and dark round stones, the largest almost two feet across, containing lacy white marine fossils like scallops shells and loopy spiraling snails. But even more exciting were whale vertebrae, dozens of them. We didn’t know then what they were, only that we could clearly see the bone texture and they were very big and very heavy.

Garden whale vertebra. Photo: Kenton Hyatt

We live only a couple of blocks from the ocean, but that didn’t explain where these came from. We meant to research but never had until we found out a few years later, by accident, when I made a telephone call to the local natural history museum to buy advance tickets to a film screening there. I wound up talking to the director, who gasped when I said our street address. “I used to live there!” She told us her daughter, now 18, was born in the house. (That may explain why the house has always felt so friendly and happy, nary a drafty corner or chilly corridor, no monsters in any closet). We asked her about the rocks too, and she told us where her husband, also a naturalist, had collected them from a stream mouth up the coast on private land. He took the finest specimens with him when they moved.

That rocks should literally turn up on our little piece of land surprised nobody, especially those friends who have helped us move over the years and carried boxes of rocks. We are both unabashed rock hounds and have moved with our favorites for decades (even when we moved, rock, stock and barrel, to Europe). Any animist worth her salt loves rocks, and Kenton charmed me with a courting gift of a small piece of Pacific sea jade rubbed on one side with gold. His father was a dentist and Kenton inherited a tiny horde of it that would have been used for casting dental work.

Shell fossil rocks. Photo: Kenton Hyatt

The idea for the labryinth came from a vision quest during which I was permitted to visit spirits of stone. They asked me to honor the rocks we had carried with us for so long, which had lately remained crammed in boxes and cartons, as well as the rocks we kept digging up and had simply piled. The labyrinth seemed a natural way to do this, and the rock spirits affirmed it.

The labyrinth is also a natural for Daedala. I’ve named myself after two deities, or in the case of Daedalus, an ancient culture-hero sometimes regarded as a quasi-god. My Second Life avatar name is Hephaistos, after the Greek blacksmith god. That I’m a female who has named herself after gods rather than goddesss may seem odd, but the maker gods in many mythologies, not just the Greek, have a unique affinity with Mother Earth and the processes of physical creation in both their masculine and feminine aspects. Collectively, they form what Jung called a ‘complex’ known to ancients as ‘the wise ones’ or ‘the clever ones’, the ones who know secret things about physical manifestation and the mysteries of our incarnation in bodies through which we exert almost divine power in the physical plane. Other examples are the Ugaritic god Kothar-wa-Khasis (ancient Palestine), Egyptian Ptah and West African Ogun, who is also actively revered in the diaspora orisa religions, like voudun and santería. (Go ahead and Google!) Daedalus, of course, was the builder of the mythic labyrinth in Crete. Although no structure has ever been identified there that verifies the story of the Minotaur’s mazy prison, the myth has lived for millennia and inspired creations we can see, like those in many of the Gothic cathedrals in Europe, like Chartres.

Bone-stone. Photo: Kenton Hyatt

A three-turn labyrinth is a very simple structure. It simply means that the walker’s path through the labyrinth turns three times. A Cretan labyrinth is a little different than a classic Chartres labryinth, lacking the formal circular symmetry. It feels more organic, and has more or less the shape of a brain. It is claimed that each turn in the Cretan labyrinth activates a brain hemisphere in turn, right-left-right, a natural movement. The right brain has been over-priviliged in the last few decades to make up for how under-privileged it was for so many centuries in the West. In balance we use both – even when making art. Think about it.

Labyrinth-Medicine Wheel, from my journal

This labyrinth has a medicine wheel at its center. It was easy to orient the medicine wheel with the labyrinth since our sweet house faces east and backs up to the west. I use the medicine wheel as a sort of prayer- or gratitude-machine. Each direction has a gift. For me, East is the place of creativity, new ideas, starting points, like spring. Its sound is a clear bell. South is the place of community and caring support, like the gourd that holds the creative idea, like fruition in summer or a campfire where people warm themselves together and talk story; the place where ideas are grown and nurtured, to the sound of a drum like a heartbeat. West, my old friend, is the place where the sun sets, and the part of the cycle where Demeter begins her lamentation, after the harvest when Earth has shed her bounty; it is the place of sacrifice, of rattling bones and sticks, the place of letting-go where I ask for courage to release what I no longer need, shed my illusions like a snake sloughing its skin. North is the place of winter rest, where nothing obstructs the clear view and the sky widens to the biggest picture, when in a place of reflection I can slow down enough to see it in its wholeness. East begins the cycle again. Then of course there are Father Sky above (whom I have asked to teach me how to love him, tired out as I am with the old, hardened, oppressive dogmas of father sky gods), and my favorite, Mother Earth, to whom I am always grateful.

Garden Labyrinth. Photo: Kenton Hyatt

Sometimes I walk the labyrinth in my imagination, and it gives me gifts as if I were walking it with my meat feet.

About two weeks after I returned from my vision quest in the early fall and the labyrinth was new, the earth in it fresh and raw, my mother called to say the Hospice people told her to let us know that Dad was going to die very soon. My sister and brothers and I gathered in those last few days to be with Dad and love him up. He was such a sweetheart: his pucker was the last thing to go. Even when he could barely open his eyes he could still kiss. After my sister and older brother left, Dad was worn out and became withdrawn and inert, only breathing. That Sunday night I was up during the night with his overnight care, giving him palliative medication every four hours.

 

During the vigil I lay down and decided to comfort myself by visualizing walking our labyrinth. It occurred to me to bring Dad along so I did. He was naked, looking as he did at the end, a big man very shrunken, his skin a very beautiful pale color and very soft, his arms and legs emaciated but not terribly bony. I was holding him, supporting him in walking the soft bare earth path and we were about halfway around it when very suddenly and unexpectedly he became a tall, strong, shining light body. The light body wasn’t wearing the features of the body I knew but was a beautiful, ageless, humanlike form that was the spirit that animated the body of my Dad. He walked with me the rest of the way to the center of the labyrinth and the medicine wheel. There, I released him and he rose and disappeared. As much as I loved my Dad I never imagined him in that form. For some reason, I had never before reflected on our karmic connection, but I have since then. He passed away the next night. I thank the spirits of the labyrinth and medicine wheel for a special gift of seeing the invisible with loving eyes.

 

With Dad in the labryinth, from my journal