For at least twenty years, I have enjoyed walking labyrinths. Labyrinths are maze-like structures that have been used as spiritual tools for centuries. For the past seven years, I’ve been walking labyrinths throughout the northeastern United States, and blogging about them. To learn more about labyrinths, check out this page at the Labyrinth Society. To find labyrinths near you, try the Worldwide Labyrinth Locator.

The labyrinth at Immanuel United Church of Christ is a classical seven-circuit. It’s made of inlaid brick, with different colors for the path and the walls.

This was the first labyrinth I’d walked in several months. I was having a very emotional summer. As I wrote about yesterday, the thought of “safe spaces” had been on my mind for the past several weeks, and that’s what brought me to this area.

I was in Shillington because I had just made a trip to see the house my grandmother had lived in when I was a child. She died over thirty years ago, and I don’t think I’d driven past or seen the house since helping to clean it out in the year following her death. It occurred to me as I drove there that her house was also a safe place for me when I was a child, a place filled with unconditional love.

So, the question I entered the labyrinth with was, What are my safe places now? (Whenever I walk a labyrinth, I carry a question with me. In the walk, I almost always receive an answer or a response to the question.)

As I entered the labyrinth, the first thoughts in my head were a list of the places that have been safe places for me in the past. Grandmom’s house, Bear Creek Camp, and several other places. Most of them are places I no longer have access to, such as my bedroom in the house I grew up in.

I then started to think about where I have safe places today. Where do I feel love? Where do I feel like I’m okay, like I’m welcome, filled with grace, able to be myself and be alive? I had a hard time thinking of any place. My home? I feel comfortable and welcome there. But it certainly doesn’t keep the wolves of depression at bay. I can be quite sad and despairing at home. How about my office at the church? There’s something to that. I tend to feel comfortable there, like I can make a difference there. Perhaps the camp can be a safe place to me again?

Then I thought, maybe you can’t know what your safe places are in the present, you can only know what they were in the past. I thought about mindfulness, the skill of being present right where you are, and how in those times in my life when I’m practicing it, things tend to go better. Perhaps if I am mindful throughout my days, I’ll be able to tell better what my safe places are. Maybe being mindful itself could make any place a safe place. I don’t know.

I wondered if maybe being mindful is a way of treating the present as if it were the past. After all, the past is something we look at from a distance, usually without the same level of emotional attachment as we have in the present. (I say “usually,” though of course the past can also be a very emotional place as well!) Perhaps mindfulness is a way of looking at the present with the same sort of detachment — detachment we find more natural when thinking about the past.

But one place I definitely feel safe, I realized, is when I walk labyrinths. I feel safe, I feel surrounded by love, I feel like I can be challenged without being attacked, I feel like I can grow. And you know what else? I think the place in my life where I find mindfulness the easiest to achieve is when I walk labyrinths. So maybe that’s it – keep working on mindfulness, and I’ll find my safe places. Interesting.