Unwind with Labyrinths

50 more things to do before you graduate: Let’s go fly a kite

Date: April 11, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Place: The field behind Watson Arena. Basking in the sun on a window seat in my Sculpture II class at Fort Andross, I sat mindlessly folding paper strips in a star-shaped pattern. It had been a tedious learning process, but I was finally able to complete the origami sequence with my eyes closed. Just as I was dozing off into a daydream, my enthusiastic Cuban-American professor, Nestor Gil, woke me with his booming voice projecting over the classroom as if it were a Broadway stage. He was announcing his latest project—a kite-flying event. With the help of the Brunswick community, Gil will fly 59 Cuban-pattern kites made of wood, paper, tape, wire and string with cloth tails in the skies above Bowdoin's athletic fields.

50 more things to do before you graduate: Drink in the dandelions

In April, dandelions sprout yellow splashes of color on fresh green carpets. I don't see them as pesky wild weeds that ruin a manicured lawn; instead, they are sunbursts on a rainy day. I can see how dandelions might rub some people the wrong way. Pick a dandelion and your hand gets covered in a milky white sap that taints everything you touch for the rest of the day with a bitter flavor. The yellow spots on your jeans? Dandelion stains from your last picnic. And, that flower garden that you labored over to plant will look more like a happenstance scattering of wild flowers when dandelions come to call. Some people suggest eliminating dandelions by hand-pulling them and yanking out the taproots (depending on the soil, taproots can extend up to 15-feet deep—so it might take more than a pluck). Rather than spending time fretting over the helpless weeds, however, we should be celebrating them. There are many uses for them including dandelion wine, dandelion coffee, and best of all, dandelion-crowns.

50 more things to do before you graduate

April 16, 2010

Cost: Free

Child's pose...downward dog...cobra! Lay on your back. Close your eyes. Focus on your breathing. My yoga instructor's words echoed in my ears as I wearily lifted my eyelids to check that I was in the correct position. Still shaking from coffee that I had consumed the night before, I found it exceedingly difficult to hold a pose. What was I doing standing on one leg rocking back and forth like a sapling on a windy day?

Soothing meditation music began playing softly in the background. My thoughts shifted from overwhelming future obligations to immediate present. I forgot about papers, tests, exams, practice, meetings, everything. By the end of the hour, I had blissfully forgotten about my heavy workload and heavy eyelids.

Yoga is just one way to reach a meditative state, to escape from daily stresses; everyone has a different way of achieving inner peace. Some play piano. Some might sit beside the café and drool over the smell of freshly baked cookies.

Finding your "special place" is not always easy, however. I did a little bit of research and came across something new: the practice of labyrinth meditation.

I used to think that labyrinths were the same as mazes—not so. A labyrinth is a single path that winds in a circle to the center and out again. It represents a journey to our own center and back again out into the world. Labyrinths have been used for meditation for ages. Illustrations of the labyrinth in art, pottery and stone etchings have been found in nearly all religious traditions, cultures and places, including in Peru, Iceland, Egypt, India, Mexico, Brazil, Europe, northern Africa and the United States. The earliest known evidence of a labyrinth is an inscribed clay tablet from 1200 B.C. in a palace in southern Greece. The Vikings walked labyrinths to bring about good wind and plentiful catches.

While we do not need to pray for good wind for reliable transportation, labyrinths are not relics of the past. In the United States in the 1980s, there was a resurgence of interest in building labyrinths for self-discovery and healing. Here in Maine, there are dozens of labyrinths to explore. The Meadow of Angels in Topsham, Hidden Springs Labyrinth in Saco, and the Meditation Labyrinth at Cliff House Resort Hotel in Ogunquit are just a few of the nearby labyrinths open to the public. Even the First Parish Church (right next door) has an indoor labyrinth for meditational walking and though the labyrinth season is currently over, it will resume in the fall.

I found in my labyrinth research that World Labyrinth Day is coming up on May 1. The Labyrinth Society's Web site announced the event as "a day that brings people from all over the planet together in celebration of the labyrinth as a symbol, a tool, a passion or a practice. A day to inform and educate the public, host walks, build permanent and/or temporary labyrinths, create labyrinth art and more".

I encourage you, Bowdoin students, to take the time find your own special place. See if a walk through a labyrinth can offer you spiritual revival. And if it doesn't, a walk around the Quad might do the trick.

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