Labyrinth Swerve

 Everything seemed to go awry as soon as I changed my ticket to Jan 21:  I lost my specially made walking stick; not only did the retreat end up not working out (and the Mandalay school unexpectedly close for the week just when I was to go there), Thuzar and Aung were no longer around, and I was not in the right place at the right time to go with Aung when he made an unexpected trip to Bagan; the under the trees class becoming touch and go, what with sports week and pre-school study sessions; the school area at times deserted, no one about; and skies turned overcast.   And the feeling of rightness being here, and the peace and meditativeness in the hills, suddenly like an abrupt wind change turned the opposite.  It felt like I had created chaos in my date change, with everything having aligned with me leaving so everything was off now, and I still there, out of place now like a ghost.  Things will right themselves in time though, no doubt, like the GPS's long-suffering words in its very put-upon tone, "Re-cal-culating." 

What helped, those mornings that I woke assailed by the thoughts I'd made a mistake, and so ready to be home, was the compass of some passages I’d copied prior to last year’s trip from a book on pilgrimage, about times when “inevitable darkness and dismay descend on your journey” and that “we know all too well that few journeys are linear and predictable. Instead they swerve and turn, twist and double back, until we don’t know if we’re coming or going. The image of the labyrinth image is an ancient symbol for the meandering path ….. that goes from light into darkness and emerges once again into light…our backs against the wall of the labyrinth and the shouts of the beast sending shivers to our souls….."  

 

 
Not to mention the author's going on to say  “the bittersweet truth about travel is embedded in the older work travail…rooted in the Latin tripalium [the medieval l rack]…   As many far-ranging roamers have suspected, there are moments of travel that are like being “on the rack.… We can look at the trying times along the road … as a chance to “stretch” ourselves….  Centuries of travel lore suggest that when we no longer know where to turn, our real journey has just begun….”

 
The perspective that this too was part of the journey, not a mistake, was the Ariadne’s thread that helped me thru this time.   I would go up into the hills in the morning and evening, which became its own intense time of mindfulness practice, and of working through whatever thoughts would keep me from being present with the Inquiry of Byron Katie, as well as reading Julian of Norwich which happened to be on my Kindle from a year ago.  So that in these ending days of December and beginning days of the new year I have been having my own Sagaing Hills retreat and my own Byron Katie intensive, here where I am.