“The Path to 9-11”
On September the 11th, 2006, I made a short journey from my house in Santa Fe over to the east side of town, to try and clear my head and maybe even gain new insight into the paths that we had taken since that fateful day five years prior.
The Labyrinth finds its historical roots in the Greek Labyrinth of King Minos, who ruled the Isle of Crete. According to Greek mythology, the original Labyrinth was built by famed Greek artificer Daedalus to hold the Minotaur, a half-man half-bull creature who was fed each year with fourteen sacrificial youths and maidens from Athens, as tribute from Athens to Minos for losing a war. The Minotaur was eventually killed by Theseus in the course of his six trials to become the King of Athens. A high-walled structure fashioned with hedges, Theseus was able to find his way into and out of the structure with help from the ball of thread he received from Ariadne, and he killed the Minotaur and rescued the sacrificial offerings.
While the Labyrinth of King Minos is the most famous, Pliny’s Natural History mentions a total of four labyrinths known to the ancient world. Differing from mazes, all labyrinth forms – classical, medieval and modern – are examples of Eulerian paths. Each form is designed to have one clear route to the center and one clear route back to the entrance and none is meant to be difficult to navigate. Thus the idea of a labyrinth as a place in which it is easy to lose one’s way is just the opposite of the truth – while the path might be somewhat confusing and may require following the threads, it leads one back, despite twists and turns, to the point where one began. But as its origin myth is symbolic of both death and symbolic return, those who deliberately set out to walk the Labyrinth may not returned unchanged from their experience.
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This is one of the assumptions I tend to make when I head off to Walk the Labyrinth. The Labyrinth is a twisting turn road, but one that may provide some insight at mid-point, where once the Minotaur lived. At the Labyrinth where I go to walk in Santa Fe, the path is marked by red bricks and the “walls” are marked by green bricks.
“Pathways to the Divine”
According to the International Labyrinth Society, there are 36 Labyrinths in the city of Santa Fe.
Labyrinth symbolism is complex, and just as attuned to the expectations of the participant as many other ritual entertainments. Entering the Labyrinth is all on its own a kind of leap of faith, for the very nature of a labyrinth is to decide to walk a path that has been deliberately laid so as to create the greatest possible distance between Point A & Point.
Cut-back: Man at the beginning of the path. “So, for example, if the point of walking the Labyrinth was merely to get to the center and back, you’d ignore the tile mosaic pathway and just head straight to the center.” He walks to the center. “And back again. But there’s a little more to it than that.”
Different schools of thought have different ideas about the Labyrinth. Some believe that, in the case of the Chartes especially, that there is an intersection between the symbolic nature of the Cross combined with the organic perfection of the circle to create a kind of map of the brain, with each of the four main section representing a different aspect of human existence – body, mind, emotion, and soul – and that these areas of the Self are triggered as one wanders in quiet meditation along the path. Some believe that the unicursal nature of the labyrinthine form reminds one that while Western time is shown and measured as a linear process, older cultures believe that time had a circular, almost spiral nature of the beginning, journey, and return.
Cut-back to man: I myself tend to think of the Labyrinth as a combination of classical and newer ideas, with the threads of Ariadne there to guide me on the path, a path that leads me through the thickets of my mind to a clear understanding of a situation by the time I reach the center, and some kind of solution – or at least a place to begin – by the time I reach the end. Some problems by their very nature, however, are so intractable that it takes the following of many threads before clarity can be found.
Just think back to the time following the day itself, the year moved at dizzying speeds unimaginable in the early days of the Bush 2 Presidency, vacation time was over, Crawford was but a dim memory…
Remember how it went? The towers fell and a name floated up out of the debris – Osama bin Laden. It would later be revealed that on the morning of the day, at the time at which the planes hit, the President’s father, George Bush the First, was in a New York City hotel room with Osama bin Laden’s brother, as part of his duties as a consultant for the Carlyle Group, so it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that even after all commercial air was suspended and all planes were grounded in the United States and Canada, that the Saudi government was still permitted to charter jets to fly from Los Angeles to Denver to Chicago to Orlando to Boston to pick up twenty-four members of the bin Laden family and whisk them out of the country.
For safety’s sake, but what about the safety of the 3,000 that died while Bush One collected a check, blood money and oil money are all the same in his world, oil magnate, head of the CIA, father of the President, murderer.
