Book of the Labyrinth

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I didn’t blog last week because I was in the mountains of North Carolina with my Lovely First Wife for a short break. And I didn’t blog yesterday because my brain wasn’t up to it.

Then last night I was in a Zoom meeting with two fellow Lichtenbergians, Mike and Turff. Mike, our host, is an international teacher of clown/theatre, and he’s working on a course based on the Trickster character. Turff is an old friend of both of us, both a Lichtenbergian and an Old Man.

This was our second meeting to discuss the concepts around which Mike will organize his course, using Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World as a source text. In the first, Mike shared a Venn diagram he had done, with four circles overlapping: DICTATOR vs ANARCHIST, CLOWN vs CHARLATAN, with TRICKSTER in the center. I had responded with a version that translated his characters into goals: CONTROL vs CHAOS, NEED TO GIVE vs NEED TO TAKE.

That in turn reminded him of a diagram from Angeles Arrien’s The Four-Fold Way:

Four Fold Way.jpg

And that reminded me of my own Book of the Labyrinth, which as you will recall forms the structural basis for the chapter on RITUAL:

  • INVOCATION

  • DRAWING THE CIRCLE

  • TAKING THE PATH

  • NUMEN/CONNECTION

  • BREAKING THE CIRCLE

  • BENEDICTION

IMG_0904D.jpeg

What had tickled my brain was five pages in TAKING THE PATH, attributes of the four cardinal directions + the Center, that I thought would provide further points of reference/exploration for participants in Mike’s class. (Mike’s goal is to produce developed theatre pieces, not necessarily Trickster shows.)

So I ran all the way downstairs to fetch it, bring it back upstairs, take photos of the five pages, and send those to Mike.

Here’s where I stop and explain to newcomers that the Book of the Labyrinth is a beautiful blank book into which I have written bits of poetry and philosophy that fall into the six sections of RITUAL. It is an aide to meditation in the labyrinth, and I was abashed to realize I had not opened it in some time.

I think what I want to do is share some of these bits with you over the next week or so. Perhaps they will inspire you; I hope they will inspire me.

We’ll start with a couple from INVOCATION.

First, the purpose of RITUAL:

ORDER • COMMUNITY • TRANSFORMATION

INVOCATION

Open the ear of your soul.
Listen to the music
at the tavern of eternity.
Stop reciting the alphabet.
— Rumi

Let go, or be dragged.
— Zen saying

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
— Joseph Campbell

And so we begin.