At the end of last year, J told me about the labyrinth in the Portland church. “Oh my goodness gracious sakes alive!” she emailed when she found out I had never seen it. The design was a replica of one in France’s Chartres Cathedral. “You grew up approximately 1.3 miles from a stunning exact copy inlaid in a wood floor!” She told me it should be open to the public one day a month.
J, who is 90, has been my parents’ next-door neighbor since I was in first grade. There is so much to admire about her—decades of visual art and activism, an attunement to tending her community as much as her garden—so I will add only that in recent months, she has started writing poems. She has always been a reader (she calls her 3 a.m. visits to the kitchen for tea and a book “my little recess”), and she has always been a walker. I told her that in some sense this means she has been writing a long time. Short of putting pen to paper, these are the habits that make me a writer. The capacity to, via someone else’s words, tunnel inside their head, but also the ability to, by walking, exit my own.
Labyrinths have long provided a blueprint for the body to travel alongside the mind. Unlike the minotaur-ridden labyrinths of Greek mythology, the looping, colon-esque labyrinths most seen today feature only one path to the center. These were popularized in 12th century Europe as a representation of the pilgrim’s spiritual journey. You follow the lines as they curve in unexpected places, but you do so knowing that you are being shepherded. The lines will, eventually, guide you out.
The first labyrinth I walked was painted in a driveway. I was a 5th grader at a hippie summer empowerment camp for girls, and somewhere amidst the painted lines, I got choked up. The camp director had asked us to enter with a question. I know, from the journal my 11-year-old self assiduously kept, that I had asked how I would survive middle school. Will you believe me if I say that, somewhere in the gut of the maze, a voice in my head answered? It was distinct from any others, less wobbly than my own. Later, away from the other girls, I cried. I did not know how else to hold my newfound conviction that things were, maybe, going to be okay.
Whether due to nature or learned neurosis, I am a deeply indecisive person. It doesn’t matter if I’m trying to figure out whether to take on a new work project or to buy a new pair of white sneakers—I struggle to commit to the outcome. I pro, I con, I work to whittle my selfhood down to one correct answer. Because a right answer rarely exists, this is not a route to decision-making as much as an exercise in self-debate. I see now that I am drawn to labyrinths because they offer both respite and excitement. They require no choices. The path before you is both the right and the only one. At the same time, you cannot anticipate by looking where in the maze your body will be in one minute. You do not know how close you are to the end until you are walking toward it.
I told J that I had marked my calendar with the public-labyrinth date, so when the first Saturday of January came, rainy and dark, I asked Sam to meet me downtown “for a ritual.” I’m game, he said. I had just recovered from COVID and was giddy to be in public, tipsy on the strangeness of being, once more, perceived. Meeting on the street, I briefed him on the plan as we walked toward the cathedral together. You might hear a voice, I said. Or maybe it’ll just be a new year meditation. At the entrance, my heart thumped. I was waiting to be recognized for my agnosticism; instead, a barefoot, older woman complimented my unruly curls, while a soft-spoken man handed us a brochure and pointed us toward a set of double doors.
The inlay of the labyrinth was surrounded by electric candles, the wood-paneled room lit by high windows letting in the last of the gray day. There were probably eight other people there, all older than us, mostly women, some on chairs around the edge, some walking slowly through the maze. It was quiet except for choral music and the swoosh of socked feet across the floor. We took off our shoes and coats. Sam told me he’d give me a head start. I walked in.
It may be true that, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “There is no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one,” but the pleasure of walking a labyrinth is in all the ways it is not like walking the world. With nothing to do but follow the lines before me, my subconscious began to wander. It was a feeling I had not known would fade as I aged: the ability to get lost in my own head. As I walked, I thought about the new book I have been trying to coax into form. I thought about what I wanted more of in 2024. I thought about how many people had, over thousands of years, walked a route like this one, wondering where their life would go, trusting they would be able to meet whatever was on the path before them.
Once Sam was in the labyrinth, I could not help but map the shifting distance between us. I would see us walking toward each other, eyes on the inlays below us, and then someone’s path would, unexpectedly, curve. Glancing up, I would suddenly be facing his back, now in retreat. This, of course, is what it means to be in relationship—both proximal and independent. You learn where your paths will overlap, and where, at least for now, you walk alone. Because these labyrinth paths were not wide enough to hold a whole body, passing another person on a parallel route meant silently stepping aside. This happened seamlessly, without eye contact. We were all walking the same path, but we did it separately. We moved at our own pace.
I was not overcome by a loud voice, not the way I had been as a tween. But there was a moment, before I left the labyrinth and re-entered my day, when I thought I would cry. It was a feeling familiar from the end of multi-day outdoor trips, when I get overcome by the loss of a clear goal—paddle this stream, bike to this campsite—and am daunted by the return to a much wider slate of responsibilities. You cannot walk a labyrinth without going on a journey. The maze eats you; the maze spits you back up.
A month later, on the first Saturday of February, I went back to the cathedral. This time, I brought my mother. The day was brighter, but 3:30 p.m. was also lighter than it had been in January. Again, I heard no clear voice of wisdom, but again, I felt so moved I wanted to weep. I still subconsciously traced where my mother was in relation to me on the path, but this time I was also charting the distance to someone else—my January self. I watched her closely. The weeks that separated us had been marked by both extreme beauty and extreme challenge. How unaware she was of what was coming her way. And yet, looking at my feet, still sturdy, still moving, I knew: she had walked the path, she had found her way out.
In my amorphous, secular, childfree, freelance life, I have zero monthly obligations. My life is rich with community but scant on rituals. I have few excuses to check in with myself at a regular interval, to say Here is where you once were, and here is where you are now. I have always mentally taken stock of where I was on certain dates in my history—an ex once referred to me as a walking Facebook Memory—but I never do it with any regularity. Until the labyrinth, I had not appreciated the value of returning to the same place at the same time, to think about what, both in myself and in the world, was new.
The first Saturday of March, Sam and I will be on Catalina Island. It’s a mini-holiday after a work trip, my first in too long. I won’t, as far as I know, have access to a labyrinth. But I’m planning to put aside an hour to walk, slowly, silently, without my phone. I want to mark the window—to consider my February self, as, together, we leave the month, and face the spring.
I have been thinking about cyclicity, because it’s been a year since Wolfish entered the world (!), and last week, the book had a re-entry of sorts, now in paperback (!!). It was a joy to launch the book at Powells alongside Portland writer-friends Sierra Crane Murdoch and Rebecca Clarren, both of whose books are so smart, and the original wolfy musical accompaniment of poet and clarinetist april joseph. Just a very special eve, in large part due to everyone who came out to share it with us. Thank you. If you want a paperback, you can get a signed, personalized copy shipped to you from my local indie.
A stranger in the front row told me that when he finished Wolfish, he felt like he knew me better than he knew himself. Beneath that statement, I think, was him admitting he was studying his life by reading mine. This is the beauty of personal narrative. It’s like peering into the window of a passing house. You can’t escape your reflection, even when you’re looking toward someone else.
Tremendous thanks to everyone who has read, purchased, recommended, or reviewed (on Amazon or Goodreads) this book. The biggest gift of publication is meeting wonderful people through its pages.
A few things I’ve published recently:
The New York Times: A things-are-not-all-doomed op-ed about how beneath all the wolves-are-polarizing headlines, collaborative conservation groups are helping people share the land—not only with the predator, but with each other.
Aeon: An essay about wanting to leave my human body, and what our tendency to imagine ourselves as (nonhuman) animals tells us about being people.
Literary Hub: An essay about the intimate relationship between an audiobook’s author, narrator, and listener, featuring the words of the wonderful Lessa, my Wolfish narrator.
Hazlitt: An essay about a winter I spent taking care of chickens after a life-altering breakup, which is to say about learning to love another while maintaining oneself.
Other things:
Applications are now open for a generative writing workshop, this June, at the Orion Environmental Writers Workshop in Rhinebeck, New York. Financial aid is available! I’m leading a workshop and there will also be panels, readings, individual conferences, relaxation time, etc. I can’t wait!
Next Wednesday evening, on March 6th, I’ll be talking in Long Beach, CA about misunderstandings around wolves. There are still a few additions coming, but here’s a glance at the coming months:
I want to shout-out the lauded new essay collection by my dear friend Nuzha Nuseibah, whom I met while studying abroad in Edinburgh, and who was a wonderful early reader of Wolfish. Nuzha is a Palestinian-English writer whose book Namesake explores inherited stories about myth, family, home, gender, and love. It’s vital and beautiful, and everyone should read it.
Thank you for reading, as always. Go find a labyrinth—let me know how it goes.
xxE