Home Page
Check us out on Facebook!
Special Program Notes
Down the Labyrinthine Way: Seasons of the Heart
by Arlen Clarke
Unlike a maze, a true labyrinth has no dead ends, no mistakes, and no tricks. Its single, spiraling path brings those who walk it closer and closer to the center.
A labyrinth is, of course, a metaphor for the spiritual journey, a way to find the heart. There is no need to strategize about how to do this; one simply puts one foot in front of the other, trusting that the path itself takes the walker to the center. This same path can also take the walker out into the world again.
The journey can take some time. As the path winds round the center, it echoes the turning of the seasons, that ebb and flow of time that grows into a life. To be sure, the process can sometimes be like peeling an onion: there are many layers, and sometimes the person doing the peeling cries.
But in the end, with a labyrinth, there are really only two questions to ask: First, will you go in?
And, once you find your center, your heart, what will you carry back out to the world?
I. High Summer
We begin with the peak of perfection, the season of the heart when all is well, all expectations have been fulfilled, and a great, swelling feeling of contentment fills us.
This is music for a grand armada of cumulus clouds sailing across a sky of cobalt blue, the comforting warmth of sun on our backs, the sweetness of a perfect strawberry on the tongue.
We know, especially if we’ve lived through many seasons, that the clouds may contain rain, the sun will set, and the strawberry sweetness comes just before its decay.
But in high summer, we celebrate the chance to live that perfection for just a moment. And knowing it’s a moment, makes it all that more precious.
II. Shoulder Season: September
This is the playful season!
It’s a time of high spirits, a blithe jig, a last dance with summer.
A bubbling time of ideas and possibilities.
A hint of discord at the end? Perhaps it foreshadows the coming winter and the eventual necessity to choose among all those possibilities.
III. Fall (Cantabile)
This is the season of change and transformation, whether or not we want it.
In nature, birds begin migration, a process that completely changes their world for a good part of the year. Trees transform from monochrome to a fiery, jeweled brilliance, the hallmark of autumn.
In Zen, we are told sometimes it is wise to “not push the river.” It’s a gentle nudge to become one with the process, to enjoy the journey, to flow with the river.
Even in the flow, however, we can still….through serendipity or fate….come alongside others on the same journey.
You can hear this harmony here, as the gentle ripples carry us in river’s flow.
IV. Winter (December-February)
This is the time for comfort and warmth against the shorter days and deepening chill.
It’s the season to hold and support each other, the same way the melodic lines intertwine and interweave.
Here is gentleness, rest and restoration.
Here is the place where the heart finds its warm home, wrapped in fullness and peace.
V. Shoulder Season: Shadowlands
No one chooses discomfort, let alone suffering or pain. No one wants the burden of a broken heart. But in each life, the shadowlands will and do appear, those times when we have to walk with and sometimes stagger under loss. The challenge is to keep it from crushing us, or consuming us. The challenge is to keep going.
You find that here: the quiet, initial note, the effort of the melody to rise above it with a swirling curlicue and finally a change of key.
C.S. Lewis asks: “Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore. Only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I’ve been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”
As this piece ends, you hear that: if not quite joy, at least hope, in the midst of measuring the loss.
I believe one comfort in getting older is that although we realize every moment of happiness contains the memory of sorrow, we know the opposite is true, too.
Sorrow contains the memory of hope, even of joy…..because, as we need to remind ourselves, there is always a source of light behind every shadow.
VI. Springtime
Winters can be long, snow-filled and bitterly cold, all of which make spring’s arrival all the more miraculous.
This sounds like the energetic effort of breaking through the ice and hard earth, of growing, running, dancing.
This is the tumbling of snow-melt streams, the warm blue of a robin’s egg
and crocuses breaking through to bloom.
Here is the playful, overlapping, gentle riot of rebirth. It’s exuberant! It’s joy.
VII. The Last Shall Be First (June- New Hope)
So much of life is an act of faith. We plant seeds, stepping out in trust that what we plant we will be able to raise and then harvest.
There is that sense of resolute hope here, and ultimate triumph.
As we walk the labyrinthine way that is life, we live the hope and claim the triumph because we hear as well those words in Ecclesiastes: For everything there is a season. For everything there is a time for every matter under heaven.
The title of this section refers to the parable in Matthew where laborers who had only worked an hour were paid the same as those who’d worked all day. The meaning is clear: God’s gifts are freely given, no matter where we pick up the journey. But at some point it IS up to us to choose to take that first step…into the labyrinth.
Notes ©2011 Carol Goldsmith, used by permission