It was in the early spring, when the promise of green aliveness could be felt but not yet seen. Fog rose from the meadows and hovered over the tender grass. On such a morning, having newly arrived in the area, I went for a walk on a wooded path.

The entrance to the woods seems magical to me. A long footpath wanders through the trees, down the hill and disappears around a bend. The first time I walked it, my eyes were drawn to the attractive wooden sign at the top carved with the word ‘Neversfelde.’

On the way, I encountered a large white snail making its way slowly across the forest floor. Bending to my knees for a closer look, it somehow heartened me to see and feel this creature in its world. The spiral swirl of its shell flashed an image in my mind’s eye of a spiral galaxy.

Next on the path was a black beetle, iridescent as a rare jewel. I bent down again and observed its scurried walking and beetle features. I asked in my consciousness its permission for a photo and heard “go ahead” and so I did.

Further along, a black slug slithered across the leaves. It was the first I’d ever seen and I was astonished by its appearance. The black skin was velvety-looking from the tail to near the head, where it had a textured pattern. “Omigosh!” I exclaimed. “Aren’t you beautiful!”

At the bottom of the hill the path bends to the left. On the right side of the bend the land sinks into a hollow which fills with water in the spring. Fog was swirling above the water as I approached. It gave me the feeling of a veil through which I could walk into another reality.

On the left of the bend, two unlike trees have grown into one. And just beyond that, through an opening in the bushes, I caught my first sight of the stone labyrinth in the sheep pasture. My heart leaped.

A wooden gate opened into the pasture, and the labyrinth came more fully into view. I walked all around it to see it from every viewpoint and sat on the stone at its entrance. The fog was thick in the pasture and in the surrounding woods. A deer went bounding into the trees. I absorbed the labyrinth and it absorbed me.

Taking off my shoes, the grass was wet and cold to my feet. I stepped into the first ring and walked meditatively. By the third ring, I was hearing words within about the circuits of the labyrinth corresponding to rings of awareness. Each ring was a “field” of one of the building blocks of life. I felt the outer ring as the organism, the end point of the structured pieces which form it.

The second ring showed me the organism as clusters of organs and body systems. The third ring revealed the organs as clusters of cells, and the fourth the cells as clusters of molecules. In the fifth and sixth rings I became aware of the atoms, their nuclei and the elementary particles. In the seventh ring I intuited the strings which sing matter-energy into existence. As I stood in the center of the labyrinth, a figure stepped out of the fog into the light in my inner vision. He spoke to me of the rings of awareness as a winding path which integrates the outer circle with the whole.

By now the fog was lifting and shafts of sunlight broke through the trees. I had been given the words of the poem, Winding Path.

Winding Path

A passage winds between the rings
and calls to me, it sweetly sings,

“Come, walk inside and rest your soul,
awareness makes you free and whole.

“Each ring will frame the way you see
and create reality.”

The first ring’s caught in time and space,
it has a name, it has a face.

This ring would seem a journey’s end
where it began, let’s find, my friend.

The second ring, be not afraid,
your body’s of its organs made.

The third ring is a living cell,
its stories egg and sperm can tell.

The fourth ring is of molecule,
emotion, air, a swimming pool.

The fifth ring is atomic land,
a cosmos in a grain of sand.

The sixth ring is a nucleus,
the cluster says, “not I but us.”

It swells within an endless sea
of quantum particles to be.

The seventh ring in pulses sings,
made of cosmic colored strings.

The center ring's creative source,
initial cause and primal force.

And on the path distinctions fall,
as rings merge to the one and all.

Copyright © 2008 Gary R. Smith

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