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 nine 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.

A quick glance at this blog will tell you that I’ve been in a creative rut this year. I haven’t posted anything in over four months. And it’s not that I’ve been getting my creative energy out in another way. I haven’t been journaling, I haven’t been writing anything. I haven’t even written half of the sermons I preached over the summer. (Let me clarify – yes, I wrote them all, but too many of them were sermons I pulled out of my files from three, six, nine years ago. It can be both a blessing and a crutch that we follow a three-year lectionary in the church.) 

So when I had a week of vacation in October, I knew I wanted to get out and walk some labyrinths, and I knew that I wanted to try to use these walks to explore where my creativity has gone, and how I can get it back. I miss writing. So much of who I am is wrapped up in sharing myself through words.

So I left early on a Wednesday morning, and set course for the Tappan Zee Bridge. I crossed into Westchester County, New York, and headed to the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry.

The labyrinth is a seven-circuit classical design, with a stone path and rock walls. The walls are “made up of stones gathered from around the world,” according to their entry on the Labyrinth Locator!

The question I entered with was, I thought, a good way to begin this trip: Where do I begin to get my creativity back?

I entered, and as I began to make the usual turns and curves, I noticed something interesting about this labyrinth: the path is not equally wide at all points. There are very narrow sections, and very broad ones.

Perhaps, I thought, that’s how my creativity also works through time – there are narrow and broad moments. Perhaps I can begin to find it again by accepting that. By accepting that I’ve been in a narrow part of the path, and that it won’t last forever. By accepting that I haven’t lost my creativity or broken it, but have simply been through a narrow part of its rhythm. (Or would a slow creative time be a “broad” part of the rhythm instead? Hard to say. Interesting question, but it really doesn’t matter.)

And I can accept this with openness and curiosity, because after all, that’s where my creativity comes from. It comes from openness and curiosity, not from rigidness or judgment.

I thought about rigidness and judgment, and realized I felt that this very trip was a bit too rigid, and I was feeling judgy about that. In the past, when I took long labyrinth trips like this, I usually prepared myself with a whole bunch of labyrinths in different directions, and just headed out. After each one, I’d figure out where to go next, and then I would find a hotel room wherever I was when it got late. But after some frustrating no-vacancy situations, I had decided to schedule this trip a bit more firmly. I had a daily itinerary, and I already had two hotel reservations along the way. It felt overscheduled.

I continued walking, and reminded myself that I didn’t need to feel that way. Yes, I knew where I would be sleeping tonight, but I don’t know when I will get there. And that’s okay. I can enjoy being in the middle, and I can be curious about it. I can even be curious about how this trip might feel a little different because of that.