Writing the labyrinth

Loving the Questions and writing as a dance, a path, a red thread.

Apr 09, 2024

∙ Paid

🗓 Dates to note:

TOMORROW! Wed 10 April 2024: Writing Together live Zoom session:
GETTING THE ACTUAL WRITING DONE @ 6.30pm (BST)

Restorative Writing Season 1 - Core Practices: Starts 6 May 2024
Full details at the bottom of this post.⤵

Each week, in Loving the Questions, we explore a question or challenge shared with me by members of the Restorative Writing community. Please send me your questions!

Here’s this week’s question and my response:

‘Sophie, Have you previously shared some thoughts around working with labyrinths in expressive writing settings? I’ve become quite fascinated recently by the concept of labyrinths and have tentatively started using them (ie a paper version) in my counselling work with clients. Any thoughts you have would, as always, be appreciated - and please do tell me if I’ve imagined that you’ve ever said a word about them!’ - N.

Dear N,
You are absolutely right in thinking that I’ve previously shared some thoughts and resources about working with labyrinths. I’m so glad that you remembered. Labyrinths and spirals fascinate me too, as metaphor, process and practice. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to write more about them here.

I get the sense from your message that you are just beginning to explore what this fascination holds for you. Perhaps this is not something you know consciously at the moment. Not yet. But you remembered something about the labyrinth. You feel drawn to its shape and structure. The labyrinth has invited you to enter it.

Or perhaps it has entered you. In my experience, this is how the labyrinth works on us, in loops and folds. Sometimes we sense the pull of its infinite paths, choices, possibilities, just beneath the surface of things. At other times, we might feel full of regrets. There are wrong turns and tangled threads. It’s difficult to see our way in the dark.

You also mention that you have tentatively started to use labyrinths in your counselling work with clients - in a paper version. I want to ask you more about this - because I know that I would learn something from you. Tentative is a good word for this work. The process that you describe leaves space for a mutual exploration with your client, a sensing in and gradual unfolding, a movement inwards-outwards.

Each of us moves through the labyrinth in our own way. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to do it. Perhaps we place our hand on the wall to guide us. Perhaps we look down at our feet or close our eyes.

Charlotte Higgins realises that she must make her own way through the process of writing her book of creative non-fiction, Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths:

‘I needed to make my own labyrinth – this book, this winding journey down my imagination’s shaded byways.’ 1

And so, N., I want to urge you to trust in your way. What will emerge as you feel your way forward? What rhythms will unspool as you write?

At the end of this post, I’ll share some suggestions for ways to write the labyrinth - but that is all they are. Suggestions, not instructions.

Also, N, please note that I haven’t addressed my response specifically to expressive writing (as defined by James Pennebaker’s paradigm) because I integrate a much wider range of approaches in my own restorative way of working; but, as you’ll see, the core message here is to embody these ideas, to use them in the ways that feel right for you.

A labyrinth is not only a structure and an archetype. It’s also a story. We don't know how the story ends. There may be fear and confusion as well as growth and potential in the many turns, choices, paths that we might take. In case it’s helpful, I'd like to share my own story of the labyrinth with you.

In 1988, I was a 16-year-old scholarship student at a residential school on the Adriatic coast in Italy. One day in February, I caught the train to Venice for the annual Carnevale with a group of my friends. We planned to spend the afternoon walking the streets, soaking up the atmosphere, and then return home on the last train that evening.

The city of Venice is a kind of labyrinth. As soon as you leave behind the wide, airy fondamente, the quaysides and main thoroughfares, you find yourself in a network of narrow calli (lanes) and campi (squares, once fields), intricate, difficult to navigate. There are apparently over 90 miles of alleyways in Venice, winding back and forth. When you try to make your way from one place to another, you will often find yourself arriving suddenly at a dead end, a locked door in a wall or a small square from which there seems no way out, so that you have to retrace your steps. You might come to an abrupt drop, the street falling away into thick, green water.

When we arrived that day in February, the streets were swirling with fog. People in masks and costumes – capes and crinolines, feathers and enormous hats – emerged from the alleyways, shimmering like ghosts, appearing and disappearing.

When night fell, we found ourselves in Castello, one of the oldest parts of the city, far off the tourist routes. The shops along the twisting streets, once useful way-markers, were now shuttered and blank. We turned and turned and realised that we were lost.

My heart fluttered under my ribs. When I tried to tell myself that it was OK, that my feelings were childish and silly, I couldn't catch my breath.

We followed the sound of voices, a drumming and singing that grew louder and then fell away as we turned and turned in the dark.

And then, from behind us, a rush of wind, a clatter of feet on stone as a group of carnival-goers ran past. As their bodies brushed against us, one of them paused and turned towards me, a girl holding a flaming torch high above her head.

‘Vieni! Come, come…’ she called.

I didn’t hesitate. I seized her free hand, allowing myself to be pulled along, my other hand pulling my friend, Cristina, after me, and another friend after that, and so on, in a panting, shouting human chain, the flames of our companions’ torches flickering over the walls.

I was out of breath, but I couldn’t stop, my arms pulled taut by the hands that held my hands, my feet jolted over the stones. I threw back my head and saw stars wheeling far above me. The dark and the flames and the shouting and the drumming entered my body. The stars slipped down my throat. I felt myself lifted, high above the city, as if I were soaring through the night sky, looking down on the labyrinth of streets far below.

And then we came tumbling into a little campo. There was a brazier at the centre, where people huddled around the smoking flames.

An old man, his face in the firelight all creases and wrinkles, came forward smiling, pressing glasses of dark wine into our hands.

I don’t remember exactly what happened next. I think we finally arrived at the train station as dawn filled the lagoon with light. I only remember feeling, as the train pulled away from the station, that something in me had shifted.

Before that evening, I’d been full of doubt about my decision to come to study at this strange school, where I stumbled over the language and struggled to define myself. Afterwards, there was a softening, a gradual letting go. I found it easier to accept the uncertainty of my situation.

After that night, the labyrinthine alleyways of Venice entered my dreams. Very often, when I was feeling anxious or fearful, I would dream that I was lost in the press of those streets. I would hear the water lapping at my ankles in the dark, feel that fluttering in my chest and a cold dread creeping down my arms. But someone I didn’t know, someone whose face I couldn’t see, would appear and take my hand and lead me dancing through the twisting calli, in and out and round and round and then, just when I felt I couldn’t go any further, just when I’d run out of breath, we’d emerge from the blackness into a glitter of sea and sky.

All of this is a long way of saying that the shape of the labyrinth will find its form in you – and you will find your form in the labyrinth – if you trust in the power of not knowing, of staying with the uncertainty.

Lisa Olivera

writes about her experiences of walking the labyrinth here:

‘I am taking a different approach, one I will need to live into for a while before fully understanding. But I trust the discomfort will eventually turn into something else — that it is taking me somewhere important. I trust the gentle path. I trust each impossibly slow step. Discomfort can be a doorway.’

The Cretan myth of the labyrinth is, in fact, a story layered upon a story. Beneath the story of Daedulus, inventor of the labyrinth as puzzle and prison, is the ancient story of the maze-womb of the earth, a place of birth and rebirth, for the people as a whole and for our individual souls. Beneath the story of the mind – of thinking and searching and reaching – is a story of the body, of feeling and experiencing. This visual story can be found in many different cultures and traditions throughout the world. Monica Sjöö and Barbara More have written about it in their extraordinary book, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth:

‘A labyrinth both creates and protects the still centre (the heart), allowing entry only to the initiated. Before larger knowledge is revealed, old preconceptions must be dissolved by the psychic and ecstatic reentry into the original cosmic womb/cave of the Mother. The pathways between the two worlds were trodden by humans in magic dances and rituals…’

’Extremely complex ideas were expressed through the symbol of the labyrinth. First, the initiate had to find a way through the underworld – the womb of the Mother – going through symbolic death to be reborn again through her on a larger psychic level. Simultaneously, by dancing the winding and unwinding spiral, the initiate reached back to the still heart of cosmos, and so immortality, in her.’ 2

The path through the labyrinth can be a gentle unspooling or a wild singing. Bring your drums, your dancing shoes, your voice, your pen. Take my hand. We’ll feel our way forward together, following the red threads of our words.

Pulling on the end of this sentence, this one here, might open a door, or it may lead us to the edge of the black water, where we’ll stand for a moment, hearing the rhythm of the waves, the breathing of the stars.