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.

It was a chilly Thursday morning in October. I had just walked my first labyrinth of the day, and I was driving toward Rhinebeck, New York to my second. At that first labyrinth, I explored why autumn is both so holy and so dangerous to me each year. I wrote about how I tend to live in liminal spaces, the places in between. And autumn is a liminal space between life and death.

But as I drove, I started to get annoyed with myself. What’s the point of philosophical drivel like this? How does this help anybody? Am I just wasting time with sophomoric insights? Are my labyrinth walks just “walking in circles” after all?

I arrived at Linwood Spiritual Center in Rhinebeck. The labyrinth there is an 11-circuit Chartres replica, with a grass path and mown walls.

I quickly found that this labyrinth was nearly impossible for me to walk correctly. I have walked so many Chartres replicas in the past, I felt like I should have the path memorized by now, but I don’t. (Maybe that’s something to work on.)

You can think of the walls of Chartres labyrinths as twelve concentric circles, plus a large cross (or plus sign) that cuts through all the circles. That cross-line isn’t constant. Sometimes it is there, marking a turn; sometimes it is absent, allowing you to continue.

I found that I could see the circles just fine in Linwood’s labyrinth, but not the cross lines. So I ended up just walking in the circles and guessing where to turn, so I kind of walked the labyrinth. But either way, I was definitely moving, definitely walking, and definitely getting my feet quite wet in the tall dew-saturated grass.

And I wondered, as I invented a pattern to walk on this grass, if maybe all this labyrinth and liminal stuff is also just patterns I’m inventing as I go. What if all I’m doing is just going in circles, over and over?

Then keep going anyway. Keep going, through you’re not sure. Keep going, though your feet are wet. Of course they’re wet. Wade in the water and you get wet feet.

And if this isn’t real, if all the labyrinths I walk and ponder are just as intangible as this one, then walk them anyway. If this is isn’t real, then what is? Find meaning, and if you never know whether you’ve discovered it or invented it, it doesn’t matter. Find meaning. And I find meaning in the liminal.

By its fruits you will know it.