Labyrinth

A baby is born. She is the center. And she is the infinite circumference around that center. She is the everything, the everywhere. And she is always just herself.

Then she feels hunger or cold or fright, though she does not know their names. She cries, though she does not know that it is she that cries. And her mother comes and holds her to her breast, if she is one of the lucky ones. But whether she is or not, whether she is held or not, whether she is loved or not, she takes this hunger, this crying, this holding, this loving, or the absence of it, into herself. And this taking in leaves a dent, a bump, a divot in the expanse of herself

And so it goes. She cries. She laughs. She explores with her hands and mouth, then on hands and knees, later still on feet. She looks and listens. She feels and senses. And every encounter with all the things within and without herself — whether “good” or “bad” — leaves its trace in her expanse.  

On this goes. In all the places and all times she finds herself. 

Over time, these dents and bumps and divots, these blades of green grass and broken glass, these metal scraps and shiny stones, that lodge in her being, slowly form, somehow, into a kind of maze, and soon — bewildered and sad for she does not know how or why it happened — she finds that she is lost, lost before ever having known that she is always found.

So, with the maze’s dead ends and false starts, she can no longer find her way to herself, her infinite circumference now cluttered with a thick and broken web. In this web, she wanders, looking for herself everywhere, but all that she can find are things made of nothing but the past.

For some, the maze is beautiful and lush, replete with gilded lamps and spectacular blooms, lovely benches, on which to rest, exquisitely placed in its nooks that go nowhere. While for others, the maze is harsh and small, all barbed wire and jagged rock, nowhere, ever, to rest from their search.

No matter. For each is its own trap, and our world is full of souls who wander lost in the maze of themselves, until, and only then, they take their last breath, and both the maze and time dissolve.

But what if — by the grace of God — if while this baby still breathes, instead of wandering perpetually lost, what if she is moved to stop, and find herself just where she is. Just that.

And what if, by being just where she is, the wall before which she stands, changes, dissolves, shifts. And where there was nowhere to go but where she had already been, now there is an opening.

And what if she is moved, again and again, to step and stop, step and stop, and she finds herself, again and again, just where she is, here and here and now and now.

Behold, as this maze, with its dead ends and false starts, transforms into a labyrinth, with but one sparkling-clear path that weaves through the dents and bumps and divots of her life, leading back to where she began, back to where she has only ever been (though forgotten). Behold her infinite circumference, now intricately laced with the weave of her life, which leads always and only, again and again, to the center of her self through the expanse of her infinite circumference.