vocare

Thursday, August 9. It had rained earlier, bringing a cool relief. Around 7:30pm. Sun glinting off of wet leaves made everything golden. It beamed across the garden and the labyrinth. Everything golden. Yet the rain was so far gone that the grass was not that clinging wet that sticks to bare feet, that obnoxious feeling I hate. It felt like what a crazy old acquaintance used to call fairy time. 

Earlier that day, we’d written anonymous affirmations, encouragement, drawings, or prayers for each other on white squares, which D and JH and N had folded into cranes. They perched in the center of the labyrinth, twenty of them, waiting for us.

Only one of us was not there, I think. We gathered in a circle a few steps from the labyrinth. M rang the singing bowl and asked us to voice affirmations to each other that we meant for one person in the group but left undesignated. After awhile, we moved to the labyrinth. I went first because D was coming next, and I knew he was afraid.

Even though the labyrinth is only a short walk from my house, I had never walked it before. I too was afraid, as I am suspicious of all spiritual things. Never fully comfortable, always tentative, highly aware of the mysterium tremendum.

I worried for a moment about how fast to walk, but M had told us to go how it felt natural. I could hear my newly-made friends padding behind me. I could not see them. I brought my hands to an open, cupped position at the bottom of my ribs. In, two three four; out, two three four. 

During some moments in the labyrinth, I could not see anyone. Though I could hear them behind me, and though nothing was tangibly scary about the labyrinth, I grew frightened and deeply lonely. I kept walking. Soon enough, I would come to a turn and see everyone else in the group. Sometimes people drew up alongside me, but on a different circuit. At those moments, I felt like I had a bird’s eye view of things, though I was right there next to them. I felt warm, welcomed. This was how the life of a scholar would be: sometimes surrounded by colleagues in warm intellectual community, other times cloistered alone with my own thoughts, devastatingly lonely.

It took longer than I thought, which was good - every time I got near the center, I prayed for it not to be over, and off I would twist again on another circuit. But finally, there was the center.

I approached, walked to the margin of the center. Picked a crane. Knelt. Put my head to the grass. Held the crane gingerly. Waited. Stood up. Walked out.

I sat on the grass with my eyes closed, crane cradled in the palm of my hand. I opened them. Watched my friends encounter their divine. D was crying. So was K, who sat next to me. I reached for his hand, looked him in the eyes. Held it for a few moments. “Thank you,” he said, drawing away.

We did other meditations after that. I don’t remember them.

Later that night, at the tavern, I sat between my mentor and L. As they chatted, I opened the crane. I recognized the handwriting immediately - strident, sharp. Y had told me earlier it was good for doing graffiti. It was my own. 

“Your voice is a gift to our craft. Thank you.”

I’d written it, trying to put all I had learned into few words for the person who received my crane. Little did I know that I was writing for myself. “Your voice” - each person’s own unique individualism, without which we’re bereft. “A gift” - something that we all benefit from. “Our craft” - an acknowledgement that we do hard work, and we may be talented, but it is always at the end grunt work, always in need of refinement, always improving, always capricious, an art. Of all the cranes, I’d chosen my own, though I had the first pick.